Originally published via Armageddon Prose:

Watch Antony Blinken experience a hot flash on national television as Brandon calls Xi Jinping a “dictator.”

Let’s have short-storytime:

Imagine you spend months and months scheming and, more recently, days and days kissing endless Chinese communist ass to secure whatever diplomatic deliverables your sponsors require, only to have your (nominal) boss crash the party with a single sentence.

You’re sitting there, white-knuckling it, praying to Daddy Satan or whatever State God you believe in that Brandon gets through his five-minute presser without stirring up a diplomatic shitstorm, as he has dozens of times by now, by veering off-script into a quintessential Brandon rambling about whom Corn Pop would have liked to nuke — “no joke, Jack” — and whatever nonsense pops into his head.

You know for sure Brandon’s been given the proper cocktail of pharmaceuticals to get him presentable. You watched the needle go in and the pupils dilate.

You know the press has been screened and their questions pre-approved.

You know he was prepped, repeatedly, on how to answer if the “dictator” question came up from an uppity reporter as he walked off of the stage: “Say nothing and keep shuffling, Big Guy. It’s nap time and you’ve earned it.”

There’s literally nothing more you could have done to control the situation short of literal ventriloquism.

And then he does the thing anyway.

And you know you’re not going to sleep for three days as you scramble to mop up the mess he just made of himself.

And you wonder what you’ve done with your life, and to whom you’ve traded your soul to do it, and all of the choices you’ve made on the road to hell, but it’s too late to turn back now because, like the mob, once you’re in it, you’re in for life.

You’re Satan’s bitch, now, and it is what it is.

So let’s be thankful we’re not Antony Blinken this holiday season.

On an unrelated note, here’s the best Thanksgiving meme you’ll ever see.

Happy Thanksgiving from Senator Elizabeth Warren. pic.twitter.com/6CeWqPot6S

— Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives (@dom_lucre) November 23, 2023

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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