ONE LODESTAR WILL SHINE TONIGHT

Birdbrain.

Even if Donald Trump doesn't know the meaning of the word "karma", he's certainly been experiencing it in the last month or so, climaxing yesterday with the scathing op-ed in the New York Times written by "a senior White House official".

The most remarkable part of the piece isn't that the current President is essentially described by one of his own people as a mentally deficient amoral dictator with the emotional behavior of a two year-old. I mean, we knew that already.

No, what's  impressive is that there's someone working in the Trump administration who actually sounds like they have an IQ above the Fahrenheit freezing point. So that leaves out Ben Carson and Rick Perry, a/k/a The Men That Time Forgot. (Quick quiz: do you remember what cabinet posts they hold?)

If Pamela Anderson and Tom Poston had a baby.

No wonder why Kellyanne Conway says that the op-ed could have been written by someone who doesn't work at the White House -- she's not used to this kind of intelligence emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Unless, of course, Conway herself is the self-described "steady state" insider responsible for the piece. Why else be the first out of the gate to say, "Ain't nobody here but us baggy-eyed chickens"? 

And he's been constipated since the 14th-century, too.

Some posit that Mike Pence is responsible, simply due to the use of the word "lodestar", a 14th-century word that the V.P. enjoys dropping in speeches to prove how out of touch he is. But there is no way a dullard like him could have written such a thoughtful piece. Besides, if he really wanted to get his boss' attention, Pence would have submitted it to the National Enquirer.

Whoever it was -- I'm looking at you John Kelly! -- must be pretty confident that their writing style is such that it couldn't be traced back to the source. I learned that lesson the hard way, in high school. 

WANTED: FOR AIDING AND
ABETTING FORGERY.

In the middle of one term, our English teacher assigned us to write a paper that would be due in the late spring. As the deadline approached, one of my classmates had come up short, and asked if I had an old paper lying around from our previous year that he could pass off as his own.

Being friendly with him, I was quick to oblige. And why not? I had done something similar a year or two earlier, when I copied a term paper written by one of my brothers when he was in high school, with nobody any the wiser.

We, however, had no such luck. The teacher took us aside separately to let us know he recognized the deception. "I'm surprised at you," he told me -- the words an otherwise well-behaved student always hears when he steps out of line just once in his goddamn life. He added that he knew I was the author because he was familiar with my writing style -- the first time I was aware that while most people had 10 fingerprints, I possessed 11.

"Listen to me, sweetheart. You
betray me, and it's a piano wire
around your pretty little neck."

So a tip of my fedora to the unnamed author of the op-ed/confession. He or she -- please let it be Ivanka! -- took a real risk simply by typing words on a laptop, rather than giving a phone interview "on deep background". The style is just good enough to show more than a little intelligence -- maybe it's not Ivanka -- while, by and large, sounding somewhat flat and generic. 

And dropping "lodestar" to throw people off the trail -- brilliant! Not only did you beam the spotlight on someone else, you've probably made the V.P. the next target of Trump's madcap tweets. I look forward to many threats aimed at "Putzy Pence".

A warning, however, to the fatboy in the Oval Office. One passage in the op-ed caught my eye: 

Meetings with [Trump] veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

That sounds like me at my previous job. The one where I was laid off. Uh oh.

And if you're wondering about my brother's term paper I copied? He received an A. Under my name, with punctuation corrected, it got a B+. That's karma, baby, karma.

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