"Mommy, tell me about what it was like in 2017"

"Well, honey, people were upset the year before because an important woman made sure her emails were more secure and couldn't be read, so we let Nazis and grifters take over."

This week we've continued our accelerating and unimpeded descent down the rabbit hole of our New Reality. After seven years of voting to repeal Obamacare over 60 times, Congressional Republicans (and certain Presidents) have discovered that Health Care is complicated. Ask Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois, who pondered why men should have to pay into pre-natal care? (answer: because Insurance).

Or when the Foreign Minister of Mexico arrives in DC, has a meeting with First Son-In-Law Jared Kushner and Co., but the State Department "didn't know" he's in town?

Or when the Office of Government Ethics issues a "warning" to Kellyanne Conway for telling America to buy Ivanka Trump's clothing merchandise (which America has now done, according to new sales data, yay emoluments!).

Or when the FBI says "Shut Up" to Trump about his Obama wire tapp accusations. In his careful response, Trump explains "No, You Shut Up" to the FBI.

Or when the White House provides press credentials to conspiracy theory peddlers Alex Jones of InfoWars and The Gateway Pundit (fresh from publishing another debunked story about Obama's fake birth certificate). Fox News Radio's John Decker loudly exclaims to the press briefing room, "they hate blacks, Jews and Hispanics".

Alt-Right, Extreme Right and Not Right In The Head.

We could go on (and on) about the week's large and small outrages and inanities that have piled up like debris from floodwaters pouring forth relentlessly from a burst dam of nightmares. What continues to amaze is the more-or-less constancy of support for this inept craziness from 40% of the nation's electorate.  Why, oh why, has so much of America gone so dumb?

It is true, of course, that a wide swath of citizens has always been this way, yesterday and throughout our nation's history. The American Political Tradition is filled with zany and ridiculous sideshows of twisted political rhetoric, ignorance and paranoia. It seems that there is much more today because, well, there are so many more of us... and we have Social Media and TV Cable News to amplify and compound egregious transgressions of ordinary common sense.

Back in the day, we called these people "cranks". Now we have an entire psycho-sociological movement that can be almost identified as a burgeoning pseudo-medical condition: "Crank Magnetism". Please take a moment to scan the following hilarious depiction, it's well worth two minutes:

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Crank_magnetism

"Crank magnetism is an important stepping stone on the path towards being wrong all of the time." In that sense, we see an important corollary to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which holds that "where people fail to adequately assess their level of competence - or specifically, their incompetence - at a task and thus consider themselves much more competent than everyone else. This lack of awareness is attributed to their lower level of competence robbing them of the ability to critically analyze their performance, leading to a significant overestimate of themselves."

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

To help us from sliding into a morass of cracked and unjustified self-confidence, we have tools such as the terrific Washington Post Fact Checker. Here is its take on President Tweet's First 50 Days. 219 false claims sent by Twitter are noted, by category, along with contextual explanations.  It's really a great read:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims/

Why, all of this is enough to send a sane person around the bend! Maybe that is what happened today with Press Secretary Sean Spicer. Please note his flag emblem denoting a universal distress sign. I believe he's trying to tell us something!

"HELP!!"

Finally, for a golden minute of high-level hilarity, here is the fantastic video of a home-based foreign affairs expert, being interviewed on the BBC. There is so much Funny happening throughout that it's difficult to identify a favorite part. It is sublime and is already being hailed as an All Time Classic:

That one is for you, Tom...