Further

Variously dubbed Darth Vader, the Prince of Darkness and "one of the most evil people to exist in modern history," Dick Cheney, the lying, blood-stained architect of America's calamitous War on Terror, brutal torture program and an Imperial Presidency that today still afflicts us has died "after a lifetime of people wishing he had died sooner" - and in a prison cell. The consensus on a war criminal who faced no punishment and expressed no remorse: "No hell is hot enough or eternal enough."

The long-awaited death of Cheney, at 84, resists all but the most groveling and dissonant of the hagiographies that often greet the demise of contentious figures; in Cheney's case, much like Kissinger's, schadenfreude rules the day. After years of harsh mock headlines - "Cheney Is Still Undead" - and a website that daily asked, and answered, "Is Cheney Dead Yet?", the actual death of an American supervillain instrumental in creating an iniquitous, ineffective, indefensible, deeply sadistic torture and rendition regime that "destroyed any shred of humanity the U.S. could ever lay claim to" was met with caustic dispatches like, "Dick Cheney No Longer Still Undead" and, from The Nation, "His Works Completed, Dick Cheney, Mass Murderer of Iraqis and American Democracy, Dies."

Hours after exultantly posting 24 photos about his gaudy new marble bathroom and hours before he defiantly refused to fund food stamps and health care subsidies for 42 million Americans, King Donald held a glitzy Great-Gatsby-themed party for his robber baron cronies and their plastic molls, thus adding to his myriad crimes by defiling a luminous, pivotal book that assails the moral depredations of the rich. Tell us without telling us you don't know how it and its toxic Gilded Age ends.

So much winning. As government employees work unpaid, soaring health care costs loom, DOGE cuts slow air traffic and social services, the U.S. debt rockets to a record 38-plus trillion dollars, and health experts say the country wastes nearly $400 billion in food each year, MAGA Republicans are playing a vile real-live version of The Hunger Games, threatening to make over 40 million Americans, about half of them kids, go hungry in order to...umm... wait....stick it to the Marxist libs? Perversely, unwittingly highlight the damage wrought by their fucking Big Beautiful Bill that mindlessly cut $187 billion from food stamps in the august name of making fat cats fatter? Drive home the righteous insistence of these princes among men that if we don't let them take doctors away from sick people they're gonna take food away from poor people?

As our decrepit despot traipsed across Asia, he was fêted by leaders anxious to dodge his peevish trade wars by assiduously plying him, as one would for any dangerous, demented child, with adoration and treats: burgers, golf clubs, trinkets, ketchup and, in South Korea, even a crown for the wounded boy who would be king. Still, he couldn't keep up. In Japan, he wandered off mid-glitzy-ceremony like a nursing-home gramps looking for pudding, to be steered back in place. Nothing to see here.

The decline, of course, is ongoing. Monday, Trump told reporters he'd gone to Walter Reed Medical Center and gotten an MRI as part of a "routine yearly checkup,” except he'd just had one six months ago and an MRI is decisively not part of a routine test, but not to worry: He said it was "perfect," except that doesn't exist. For those inexplicably wondering about his cognitive state, he said he also aced a "very hard" sort of "aptitude test," except it's a very basic dementia screening that requires the patient to solve elementary-school level problems like remembering five words, identifying a giraffe or lion, and drawing a clock; he added that the test "took a while" and "was difficult,” two key factors doctors consider when assessing cognitive skills

We know the awful, the stupid, the cruel goes on, but we're heartened by the birth of "a new unified theory of American reality" to help explain the darkness. It's called, "Everyone is twelve now." Suddenly, we get it: the right's puerile idiocy, pointless vengeful assaults on law and decency, poop-bombing and racism, staggeringly simplistic solutions to issues like, "Let's arrest everyone" and "Why don't we just blow them up?" At 12, they learned to slap nasty names on anything they didn't like; now, they still do.

What one grateful patriot calls "the most important political thread of our time" came from one Patrick Cosmos, a musician and frequent Bluesky user who goes by @veryimportant.lawyer. All we know about him is that his moment of snarky political clarity swiftly spread across much of social media - an irony unto itself given that many attribute the current Infantilization of right-wing discourse, at least in part, to a scattershot Internet that gives an instant platform to the most vicious and pea-brained among us. Still, many argue the notion those in power never got past being 12-year-old, emotionally stunted losers deeply resonates in a grim cultural moment of conservative ascendance that feeds on ignorance, bullying, fear and lack of critical thinking.