No Wiretaps Necessary: Mouth Always Open

Comedy, Steve Allen once said (and more famously, Alan Alda's character in a Woody Allen movie) is Tragedy plus time.

But that was before the blizzard of all news all the time. Now the comedy is coterminous with the tragedy, and embedded in it.  (Could that be a definition of what used to be called "black humor" but isn't anymore because it's possibly a micro-aggression?)

Friday's news included two "bombshells" (in mediaese): A Washington Post story said that the FBI (now Special Counsel) investigation on Russia connections includes as a person of interest someone who is currently a highly placed White House advisor and close to Homemade Hitler.  I haven't seen speculation yet on who it might be, but Jared Kushner fills that description best, although Steve Bannon is another possibility. Kushner is already known to have met with Russians close to Putin.  Both are on the foreign trip now underway, which suggests they might run out of liquor on Air Force One.

The other big noise is summarized in the New York Times headline:Trump Told Russians That Firing ‘Nut Job’ Comey Eased Pressure From Investigation.
By Friday evening the other shoe dropped on that story: Nut Job Comey accepted a Senate committee invitation to testify in public session, something I thought was unlikely otherwise due to the ongoing federal investigation.

There's plenty more about our dictator apprentice, most of it self-inflicted, leading to this observation: the Daily Beast quotes a former FBI investigator: “On a big case like this, the ideal thing would be a wiretap on your number one subject,” Gomez added. “But in this case, you don’t need a wiretap. He just comes right out and says it.”

This article is also notable for extensive quotes from a current White House official who went off the record to go off on his boss.  He's one of the people left behind to answer the phones while our dictator apprentice and his likely co-conspirator are flying around on Air Force One, where his foreign hosts are telling reporters that their attitude is basically that the circus is coming to town.

A trip which inspired another gallows humor headline: Trump to Speak on Islam: What Could Go Wrong?

Maybe a better definition now would be: comedy is tragedy plus caffeine.