CNN apologized for a producer who made a distasteful joke about Donald Trump's plane crashing. No one should expect The Washington Post will apologize for their Sunday magazine "humorist" Gene Weingarten writing poetry about the delight of dropping Trump out of an airplane to his death.
Weingarten reported that since The Washington Post Magazine has a three-week lead time, this was the first column he wrote after Trump won the election. "First I tried to imagine what a Trump administration would look like. Would there be a 'Department of Taunting Hispanics'? Would the White House press corps be renamed the White House press corpse? As you can see, mirth has been difficult to muster, because there’s a thing in my head that is screaming, 'This is not a joke!'”
Then he decided to write jokey poetry instead -- about a dead president-elect. In the last poem of several lame ones, Weingarten was joking about how Donald and Melania Trump were debating how they would drop $1,000 bills to the people below, in $100 bills or $50 bills, and then Hillary offered a well, Final Solution:
On Air Force One traveled the president-elect
And his wife, and the woman he had just decked
At the polls. Mr. Trump gave a winning smile,
And said, “I should throw out of the window a pile
Of cash, say 10 Benjamins, so as to bring joy
To 10 people, be they man, woman, girl or boy.”
The first lady-elect smiled as well. “Lover-pants,”
She said, “Why don’t you throw out 20 Grants
Which would bring joy not to 10 folks but to 20!
We have $50 bills! Why, we have plenty!”
Then Hillary Clinton stood up, and she smiled, too.
“You know, I’ve a far, far better idea for you!
Throw no cash. Throw out just one Donald Trump
And bring joy to a hundred million people, chump.”
At this transition point eight years ago, the Post was instead penning Obama romance-novel sentences like this: "The sun glinted off his chiseled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week..."
But the Post promoted these "pokes" on Twitter as simply "the cheesier the better," not the deadlier the better.
Here are two other Weingarten -- let's not call them "gems," but rather "Weingarten Twitter avatars."
What does Melania see in her dude
To make her put up with all of that rude?
Well, there’s billions and billions — and, best of all,
He’s a fatty with sky-high cholesterol.
Yes, dead or soon-to-die Trump definitely amuses Gene. And the atheist feels the pain of Muslims. They are apparently the cream of the deluded crop:
When an earthquake ravaged a Muslim land,
A thousand died. ’Twas a horror hard to bear.
And so President Trump, to lend them a hand,
Sent a thousand replacement Muslims there. [Italics his.]
The artist cartooning Gene rightly imagined him as an Edgar Allen Poe (or he would say Edgar Allan Poo.) His post-election oeuvre has a ghastly pallor.
