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Monday, March 18, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service
Op-Ed

Supp’d Full With Horrors

June 9, 2017

A priest, a rabbi, an imam and a horse walk into a bar. So the bartender says to the horse, “Hey, pal, why the long face?” In my yellow-bound Baby Book my Mom wrote when I was 3: “Will do practically anything for a laugh.” Still will — but it’s getting harder every day.

Robert Kahn

By Robert Kahn

Deputy editor emeritus, Courthouse News

A priest, a rabbi, an imam and a horse walk into a bar. So the bartender says to the horse, “Hey, pal, why the long face?” In my yellow-bound Baby Book my Mom wrote when I was 3: “Will do practically anything for a laugh.” Still will — but it’s getting harder every day.

Pasted into three pages in this fascinating book are date-stamped bills from Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, where I was born by Caesarean section on June 25, 1951.

For giving birth to me, and for nine days in hospital, my darling mother, who turns 90 on Saturday (Hi, Mom!), was billed $214.30.

Wait! Don’t go away!

This is not about medical bills! Or my Mom.

There’s more jokes coming!

Aside from Julius Caesar himself, the most famous person who gained notice by being from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d was MacDuff, who put an end to MacBeth’s shenanigans.

“Each new morn new widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows strike Heaven on the face,” if you can believe MacDuff.

And who are you going to believe, the lying elite media him or MacBeth?

“Bleed, bleed, poor country! Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure, for goodness dare not check thee!”

Just another day covering the White House.

MacDuff — that showboat — continued: “Wear thou thy wrongs.”

Interesting words, those: Wear thou thy wrongs.

MacDuff said tyranny should wear its wrongs, as we wear clothes, so that the world might see them.

And that, in essence, is the charade being carried out in Congress today, which captivated the country on Thursday, as fired FBI Director James Comey testified to the Senate about Our Lord “Small Hands” SchlumpBeth.

Shakespeare’s MacBeth, of course, is a tragedy — one of the greatest tragedies in the history of the world. It’s a tale of a good man gone wrong.

What the world saw Thursday was not a tragedy — it was a clown show, an allegory, in which all of the actors pretended to be something they are not.

Comey was great. He tap danced around the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Marco Rubio was predictably pathetic. John McCain was sad. Eighty years old, he tried to confuse things, but appeared to be the most confused man at that hearing. He should resign from Congress, go home to Arizona and put his feet up and enjoy the rest of his life. I hope he does.

After Comey testified in public, the committee retired into closed session.

Mark Twain called humor mankind’s greatest blessing. “Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.”

There is no humor in the catastrophe we are suffering in the United States.

Congress, which Mark Twain called our only native criminal class, bears a great deal of the blame for it.

Why is there a nationwide epidemic of overdose deaths from synthetic opium prescription drugs? Because Congress bent over and let the drug companies insert their multimillion-dollar enemas into the congressmen’s butts. I mean, campaign committees. And PACs.

Why is medical care so expensive? One reason is that Congress bent over, golden enemas in hand, or already being dissolved, and promised not to bargain with Big Pharma about the price of prescription drugs — for millions of Medicare patients who need them — though any other bulk buyer can do it.

Our democracy has become a charade. We don’t live in a democracy. We live in a Monopoly game.

So. Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, Scott Pruitt and a coal miner dying of black lung disease walk into a bar in West Virginia. And the bartender says, “What is this, a joke?”

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