The Joker

Trey Parker hit the nail on the head when he said, "we have a president who thinks his job is to be the joker." For the past year, he and Matt Stone have been skewering Trump on South Park but Trump does a better job on his own, especially with all the AI-generated images he has posted recently. This has made some speculate if Donnie might be a closet homosexual. You be the judge,

He recently lavished a lot of attention on Jaxson Dart, the quarterback of the New York Giants who came out as a MAGA guy and highly supportive of the president. Donnie needs all the support he can get with his plummeting poll numbers.  For the record Jaxson is 6 feet 2 inches, and yet somehow manages to tower over the president. How can that be?

After a third physical and a fourth cognitive test, Trump was described as healthy as ever, although he needed to drop 14 pounds to get back to a svelte 224. He looked rather chunky in his meeting with Xi last month. No explanation for the darkened hands and cankles, but various online medical journals have surmised he is suffering from Chronic Venous Insufficiency or CVI. Donald claims it is because he takes more aspirin than he should to help thin his blood. There actually might be some truth in that, but otherwise another bogus health update.

I've never really understood why it is so important to project Donald as being this tall vigorous man when his favorite pastimes are golf and wolfing down Big Macs. He's a sedentary man for the most part, probably because it pains him to stand up for any long stretches. Maybe if he made more of an effort to relate himself to the common man, it wouldn't result in comics taking aim at his highly questionable virility.

Trey and Matt have been the most vicious in their assault, portraying him as a tiny man with an even tinier penis, which allowed him to impregnate the hermaphroditic Satan, who for the greater part of Season 27 was carrying Donald's lovechild. Despite Peter Thiel's and JD Vance's attempts to rid the devil of this spawn, the child was stillborn, getting Trump off the hook. The entire storyline was derived from the phrase, "Trump is fucking Satan." Read it as you will.

Oddly enough Paramount/Warner Brothers/Skydance, aka the Ellisons, haven't shut down South Park. They now own Comedy Central along with a host of other cable channels thanks to their recent mergers making them one of the largest entertainment syndicates in the world. At this point, I think they only trail Comcast and Disney. The consolidation of the entertainment industry is a deeply troubling trend as it is making billionaires into megabillionaires with Papa Ellison now worth an estimated 280 billion dollars. That's second only to Elon Musk, who seems content with Twitter or rather X at this point.

The Ellisons made a huge grab over the last two years that left critics aghast. Stephen Colbert signed off after 11 years with a star-studded finale. You might say he got the last laugh on the Ellisons, who pulled the plug on The Late Show when they acquired CBS last year with the Paramount merger. They chose to replace Colbert with Byron Allen. It's like they stole a page from Donald's Celebrity Apprentice. Does anyone even remember this guy?

The changes go beyond entertainment. Scott Pelley lashed out at the management of CBS news that has drastically compromised 60 Minutes in recent months largely to satisfy the TVaholic in the White House. If you recall, Trump felt 60 Minutes treated him unfairly by casting Kamala Harris in a good light back at the height of the presidential campaign in October, 2024. He sued for billions but ended up settling for 16 million thanks to the new leadership at CBS.

This is part of a disturbing trend throughout American news, which has become increasingly compromised due to conservative ownership. CNN has long been run by conservative management that gave Trump a decisive leg up early in 2024 campaign when they chose to broadcast a town hall in May at the peak of the trials taking place. Now CNN is owned by the Ellisons, who picked it up with their massive buyout of Warner Brothers earlier this year. That means they control two major news networks and looks like they plan to use the Fox model from here on out.

This leaves Americans with fewer reliable network news programs. They can't really turn to social media as Zuckerberg and Musk control the two largest platforms in facebook and X. YouTube has also opted for the "free expression" model with little or no fact checking. What's worse is that these platforms use algorithms that effectively screen out alternative programming so that it makes it difficult for the average viewer to get a balanced view on any subject matter. You wonder why so many people end up believing Bobby Jr. in his MAHA movement. The only thing stopping him at this point are the federal courts.

Basically, you end up in a bubble of your own making based on your likes and searches. All the social media platforms do this, even recent start ups like Bluesky and Mastodon that try to appeal to a more liberal audience, but these platforms have only a tiny fraction of the active users found on X and facebook.

I remember a few of my friends on facebook saying they were switching to Bluesky but I see more of them on fb than I do Bluesky, which I use more often. It has all the same news outlets. My current favorite is The Guardian, which has only a partial paywall, but I get hit with endless requests for donations. It's a tough business as there aren't enough sponsors to keep these long-running news journals going. You can't really call them newspapers anymore although they still produce hard copies. 

As far as writing goes, I continue to post on Blogger but am enjoying Medium more as it is easier to connect with others on the platform. It remains a mystery to me how my blog gets so many hits each month but so few comments or followers. Blogger is a rather faceless platform, whereas Medium is much more personable. I pay 50 dollars per year for full access but it is worth it.

I would prefer to steer away from Trump but the guy has come to insinuate himself into virtually every aspect of society making it very hard to do so. This is what Trey Parker observed. You can try to fight it or just have fun with it. He and Matt chose the latter.