Buzzkill chief of staff fires the Mooch

And I’ll need you out of the condo by the end of the month. Your mother and I have decided to rent it.

When Reince Priebus got fired last week for his role in the Bannon autofellatio scandal, he narrowly escaped becoming the shortest-serving White House chief of staff in history. That honor goes to James Baker, who left his position as Secretary of State to become George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff in August 1992. But Baker is a legend. He was Reagan’s boy in the eighties and came out of retirement because he was the best to ever do it. Priebus had the shortest tenure of any chief of staff who started at the beginning of a president’s term, when it could have gone so well. If only, he thought, screwing his magic monocle into his eye, we lived in a world where someone got fired even faster than me. And before you can say “spice rebus,” Anthony Scaramucci gets cut from his role as White House communications director.

That mischievous imp! The workings of fifth-dimensional magic are the only force I can think of powerful enough to dislodge the Mooch from his position as communications director. The only other possibility—the one thing I can think of, besides the machinations of an imp, that would account for all this—is that he directly communicated with the New Yorker about what stupid pussies his colleagues were. But that’s it. Those are the only two reasons I can think of.

Regardless, Scaramucci made it just 10 days in the West Wing before he started telling people to, if not literally go fuck themselves, at least listen to his descriptions of others doing that. The job makes people crazy. Either that or the multimillionaire founder of Skybridge Capital and personal friend of the president relished this opportunity to get up there for a week and tell it like it is, and he never thought of himself as other than temporary. History will have to wonder. In related news, the new White House communications director will be the first person to shout “Howard Stern’s penis” into the briefing room microphone.

Friday links! Catbeard edition

It's a cat. It appears to be a beard. Catbeard!

It’s a cat. It appears to be a beard. Catbeard!

Seen from one angle in a two-dimensional image, a cat looking upward to smell its owner’s face looks like a beard. Seen from another angle, it looks like a person at risk of catching ear mites. If you told Francis Bacon or whomever that images of housecats blocking the lower parts of their owners faces would one day delight millions of people, he would say, “Zounds! Accost me not, gypsy! Forsooth!” He just doesn’t have the interpretive framework. Today is Friday, and so much depends on point of view. Won’t you cherish and/or shatter your illusions with me?

Continue reading