There was a time when Freedom Fries was thought to be the most humiliating thing America could ever do to itself. Physicists ran the calculations, the chemists did tests in little beakers, and the consensus was that the United States Congress (or at least, the One Guy who was in charge of the committee on cafeteria placards, which—who knew?—turned out to be a real hub of congressional power because of course it was) stooping to rebrand french fries as "freedom fries" because the French government wasn't being deferential enough to Donald Rumsfeld's bucket list war: that was surely the low point, said science.
But there's a lot that scientists don't know. We don't know what dark matter really is, or how many dimensions there really are, and all it takes to upend our understanding of national humiliation is for the good folks poking buttons at the Large Hadron Collider to announce that smashing together a boson and a banananon results turns out to produce a whole new state of embarrassment we'd never even considered before.
Look, look at the graph. It looks like a roll of toilet paper with a little man caught on its shoe.
Anyway, the man did it. No, you need to understand the full, mega-humiliating scale of it: Donald [Name Withheld] announced and held an entire Oval Office press event ...
to sign an Executive Order ...
to direct the Secretary of the Interior, who if I remember correctly is named Bippy McClownshoes ...
to rename Lake Ontario "Lake America" because Donnie picked a fight with Canada and Canada didn't immediately cave to his demands, whatever they happened to be during that specific day and hour. Something about speaking less French (again, with the French) because our tech companies don't want to spend money dealing with two languages; it makes the robots sad.
It's an Oval Office Press Event, y'all. It's in the Oval Office. Which currently looks like the hold of a pirate galleon for some reason, but that's that and this is this.
Aaron Rupar
No, no, that definitely beats Freedom Fries. Never thought I'd look back on the Freedom Fries days as a high point, but I suppose it's like climate change. If you think one summer's embarrassing, just remember it's still going to be one of the least embarrassing summers you'll ever again see. Buy an umbrella, or a bag to put over your head.
Scientists warned us we were playing with fire. We didn't listen.
So anyway: This is the White House's newest plan for reining in gas prices, and making it safe to eat lettuce again, and making it safe to eat peppers again, and making it safe to eat beef again, and for halting the spread of viruses we thought we'd beaten for good, and it's the plan for what all of us who can't afford health insurance should do if we've got a bone sticking out of our leg and would really like for that sucker to get medically shoved back in there.
The answer to all those questions is: We're gonna rename Lake Ontario. And if you still have complaints even after that, well then maybe there's just no helping you.
Have you ever said thank you, even once? Have you ever seen JD Vance ordering pastries and told him please, please JD Vance, tell your boss that we're all so damn thankful that he's gonna rename Lake Ontario? Not once has anyone gone up to JD Vance and genuflected properly for all of the great things President Clownlump has donetofor us, which is why the National Guard is patrolling our streets and we can't have a Kennedy Center anymore.
You might ask why Trump waited until now, until the exact moment a Canadian politician on the other side of the lake held a press conference to invite Donald Squarebutt to "kiss my ass," to rename Lake Ontario.
Reader, I promise you it's because until either Natalie or Stephen Miller pointed it out to him, Donald had no idea there was a Lake Ontario. No clue whatsoever. That's not one of the things they teach you in Rich Prick Preparatory Academy, between hat-wearing practice and beating the poorer children with your floppy ceremonial swords.
This week has been so, so hard. All the weeks have been hard, and the flags are at half staff for reasons our national lake names decider will never, ever begin to grasp. And I don't like the contrast, not one bit. I don't like the stories about the dirt-poor kid who grew up to be richer than anyone else paired up so hard-edged and metallic against the hundred more stories about the little rich kid who grew up to be poorer than anyone ever thought a person could be.
Aaron Rupar
It feels like we are all pigs stuck in somebody else's mud, doesn't it? It feels like there's a spider up there, up on the barn door, weaving a message about us that we probably wouldn't like if we could read it.
I know prices are high and the food is poison now, but all of that's not even half as bad as having to be embarrassed, all the damn time, from sunrise to the wee hours.
There's a lunar eclipse coming, you know. The papers are a little excited about it, because they say the moon will turn "blood red" as our shadow passes over it.
That ain't blood. That's the moon blushing. That's the whole damn moon turning beet red on our behalf, glowing the pinkest shade it can glow as it looks down on the Eastern Seaboard and thinks yikes, I did not know it could get that bad.
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