Everything Is Broken

 I talked to a friend the other day about our shared disgust with Breaking News. 

Please understand that a great portion of my life is spent looking outward, trying to anticipate how "things will go down." This helps me maintain my solid series of ruts and habits that keep my life from becoming a reactionary circus. 

Breaking news does not allow for this. 

Each day my phone chirps at me to let me know that something has broken, news-wise. I steel myself to some degree for the occasional passing of a celebrity. Like Ruth Buzzi. Ms. Buzzi was a comedic presence in my life during the early seventies on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. At this point I might launch into an elegy for Ruth that would wind up with me paying tribute to her and all the players on Dan and Dick's show that stomped on the comedy Terra. 

But I'm feeling that the real joke continues to be delivered from the tangerine terror currently taking up space in the Oval Office. While he insists that there is no mainstream media in that can possibly deliver his message about making America "Great," he continues to show up to interviews with these same supposedly nefarious individuals. 

And proceeding to break the news. 

Like this past Sunday when he sat down to Meet The Press, and proceeded to break minds, hearts and the United States Constitution all in the span of less than fifteen minutes. Specifically when the Oligarch of Orange was asked in the interview whether U.S. citizens and noncitizens both deserve due process as laid out in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, the former game show host was noncommittal. “I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know," he burbled after being pressed by The Press in the form of NBC's Kristen Welker. 

This, by the way, is coming from a guy who pleaded the Fifth more than four hundred times during a deposition about his family business in New York. 

What doesn't he know? 

I know. I know that on a cold day in January, America watched the first convicted felon sworn into the highest office in the land. Somewhere in there he "swore" to preserve, protect and defend The Constituton of the United States. A couple of things stand out to me there: First of all, this guy has put his hand on bibles before and promised to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth "So Help Me God." It hasn't amounted to much. This is a guy who doesn't know which way is up when it comes to bibles. For him, The Bible is just another book, which is just another chance to make a buck. And he'll even throw in the Delcaration of Indiependence and the Constitution as part of that package.Secondly, the oath contains the loophole phrase "to the best of my ability." 

Maybe this is the best a seventy-eight year old trust fund crybaby can do. 

Nevertheless, he keeps breaking the news and his oath, and I'm tired of it. 

My apologies to Ruth Buzzi. You deserved better.