The good news is that Elon Musk's heart looks like it's ready to hit the eject button

It's been a rough week.

To repeat myself, one of the things I'm not going to turn Uncharted Blue into is a clickbait stream of all the worst and most depressing news of the day so that we can all spend every moment of our lives in constant anxiety. Clickbait and doomscrolling are both exactly what we don't need right now. If anything, it only encourages people to tune out rather than risk their remaining sanity, and we're going to need our sanity. Probably. Hopefully.

That said, that policy proves a difficult proposition when we've gone through a full month now in which "good" news just doesn't exist. Every day brings a new illegal act from The Criminal's handpicked team of sub-criminals; every day sees Senate Republicans, in particular, cower and bleat and insist that no, no, there's no problem with the delusional madman's moves to ally the United States with murderous dictator Vladimir Putin while sabotaging international alliances in every part of the world.

But by God, I'm going to bring you some good news too. And the best news out there is that there's at least one vibrating ball of maliciousness that's probably not going to be with us much longer, and it's going to be nobody's fault but his own. Well, and of whatever concierge doctor is prescribing him heart-exploding amounts of pharmaceuticals. I mean, come on now:

Holy yikes. That was just a fragment of Elon Musk's bizarre CPAC appearance on Thursday, an appearance that featured Musk waving around a ceremonial chainsaw (not kidding) while hiding behind sunglasses and, ahem, behaving quite similarly to someone who is "zooted out of their damn mind."

I think a great many of us have at least a passing familiarity with what out-of-control recreational drug abuse looks like, and showing up both in the Oval Office and the nation's most prominent pro-Nazi convention with saucer-sized pupils and/or in a state of near-incoherence, obsessively picking online fights at all hours of the day and night with no apparent breaks for more than a few hours sleep, and blurting out ever more insane-sounding conspiracy theories with no apparent ability to moderate one's tone according to situation is typically the behavior of someone who's about to appear in a coroner's report after someone discovers them dead on a toilet, in a bathtub, or on the pavement outside a 10-story building immediately after witnesses reported hearing somebody shout "I am Icarus! Behold!" at 3:30 in the morning.

So there you go. You want some good news? It doesn't matter what any of us think of this particular guy, he appears well on his way to Michael Jacksoning himself out of the national narrative sooner or later but probably sooner. If we all survive this we should celebrate this event by Taking All His Damn Money and spending it on something nice, like free school lunches forever, just to make sure his corpse stays good and mad at us forever.

If you want another bit of good news, the man who has turned his own brain into a plonking pinball machine has just been placed in charge of speeding up the delivery of Donald Trump's new plane.

I cannot think of a better person to "speed up" delivery of Trump's much-desired new Air Force Freaking One than Elon Musk, the man known far and wide for "move fast and break things." This is a fantastic idea. This is the best idea anyone's ever had in the history of ideas. Musk himself has tremendous experience with the intricacies of air travel: just days before Trump's inauguration the FAA had to scramble to divert dozens of commercial flights away from the debris path of his latest SpaceX rocket explosion. Musk's reward for causing this unprecedented air emergency is that he's now in charge of FAA staffing, air safety regulations, all the government lawsuits against SpaceX stemming from SpaceX's illegal acts, and now Donald Trump's government plane.

What could go wrong, America. What could go wrong. Perhaps the design of the plane will be sped up by plugging it into a commercial chatbot, which will inform the engineers that Actually planes of this size should have six fingers on each wing. Perhaps the security clearance process will be done away with entirely.

If it's the security clearance thing, Trump can count on being both the first and last U.S. president to fly on the newly delivered plane. Remember the tales of the United States embassy in Moscow, which turned out to have had so many Soviet bugs installed during construction that the whole structure had to be razed to the ground? Yeah. There's not a chance in hell a new plane will be usable for its last-ditch intended purpose, an airborne military command post to be used during some unknown international crisis that might cause the president to flee the White House—not if part of the construction of that plane was supervised by an unvetted Musk hacker known as "BigBalls."

If you want even more not-entirely-bad news: Steve Bannon threw up a Nazi salute at the same CPAC event that Musk showed up blasted for, and was cheered for it.

Wait, why is that not bad news? Simple. It may be a nasty image, but it is a clarifying one.

The CPAC crowd has pussyfooted around it for the last decade or so, but no longer. CPAC is a fascist event; the people who go to CPAC events are, as of 2025, all fascists who cheer on even Nazi salutes. Ain't no more ambiguity there: If you show up at CPAC, you're a Nazi. If you speak at CPAC, you're an important Nazi.

So finally, at long last, we can drop all the pretenses that this crowd is not anti-American, pro-fascist, pro-Nazi, pro-sedition, and pro-violent criminal. If you violently attack police officers in an attempt to overthrow the government this crowd of mostly overdressed Young Republicans craving to be conservatism's next wonderlads will shake your hand and declare their admiration; throw up a spiffy little Hitler salute and the silver-haired conservative women in the audience will think you're just swell.

Glad we got that cleared up. It's likely to become useful information, going forward.

Here's some more good news. You have probably heard of Trump lawyer turned acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin; he's one of the pro-sedition flat-out crooks who's swiftly turned the Department of Justice into a mob operation. That's the bad news. The good news is that with every passing day we learn that the man is not just a flat-out crook, he's a stone-cold idiot as well. Incompetent, inexperienced, and now surrounded by a staff that already hates his everloving guts.

Because of Martin’s inexperience, he will need to persuade someone in his office to carry out his projects. Thus far, he seems to have done a terrible job of ingratiating himself to others: Most recently, the office’s top criminal prosecutor resigned rather than follow his allegedly improper orders. One former prosecutor in the office said, “He’s a fantastically bad manager—a tone deaf bully who inspires ridicule rather than trust.” Perhaps as a result, Martin’s officewide emails are often leaked, including a message complaining about leaks.

I don't know what the Justice Department's analog to "fragged" might be, but I have a feeling we might find out. And yes, we probably should have guessed the "incompetent," "belligerent," and "idiot" parts merely from his association with Trump; nobody in Trump's extended orbit is there unless they approve of sedition, and approve of crimes against the United States, and anyone who fits that description is going to be a hateful nasty hairball of a person by definition.

Trump's own attempts to consolidate power are also running afoul of his own personality. He's just such a—what's the word I'm looking for?

Ha ha ha, he's such a tool. This dementia-addled buffoon is the guy every Republican in the country is terrified of? The man's entire personality screams "soggy diaper."

"See you in court," responded Gov. Mills. It's not quite spitting in the man's eye but he'll be fuming about it for weeks.

All right, let's close out with some incontrovertible good news: Republican voters are not happy with how things have been going down, this past month. They are pissed, and they're letting their Republican representatives know it. And that's exactly what we need to start seeing if there is any chance, any chance at all, of the United States surviving the Trump-Musk-Vought treason.

McCormick is a new representative in a gerrymandered seat, which is probably evident from his sneering answers. He won office by saying near-brainwashed-sounding things like this, but suddenly it's not working on his audience anymore? That's going to be a problem, since it's not likely McCormick and others of his mental ilk have a plan B if "sound like a Newsmax conspiracy host" no longer does the job.

McCormack's crowd of mostly elderly Republicans is not, unfortunately, heaping abuse on him for allowing Donald Trump to free seditionists, ally the United States with Putin, conduct illegal mass firings, or putting all domestic and international security in the hands of teenage fascists.

No, they're pissed at the Republican plan to decimate Medicare and Social Security. They're fine with the fascism, they're furious that some of it's being directed at them.

That's still something, and it's a good demonstration of how lucky we are that The Criminal, his dipshit minions, and Republicans in general are far stupider than any previous fascist movement that's come to power—even though fascist movements are, by definition, premised on stupidity to begin with. Trump's fascists could likely consolidate power quite thoroughly, arresting political enemies and putting tanks in the streets with barely a peep from the vast Republican base of party-first, country-second racists and conspiracy cranks ... if they only had the skill to not piss off, for example, every last Social Security recipient in the nation.

Instead, they've targeted veterans, and national parks, and the FAA, and a great number of other things that infuriate Regular Americans who vote for Republicans because to them, politics is nothing but a sporting event and that's the team they were told to root for. The combination of tariffs, immigrant round-ups, and mass government firings is certain to cause a significant recession if not depression; no matter how much smoke Fox News blows, it's going to be impossible to hide the scale of the collapse.

And when that happens, the game changes. I actually take heart from the performance of one gutless, spineless weasel in particular: Marco Rubio, who left the Senate to take the miserable job of helping Trump betray international allies, pledge alliance with Putin, and sabotage Ukraine.

Rubio is a fine example of a politician who, we now see, stands for nothing at all. Not a damn thing. There is no position he would not reverse; no ideal he will not sell out. The man once ran for president, but has since proven himself to be not so much a person as a bag of wet sand.

Why is that encouraging? Because if Republicanism truly stands for nothing but its own power, which is abundantly clear at this point, then even ambitious twits like Rich McCormick, slavishly obsequious toadies like Sen. Lindsey Graham, and human-shaped soulless paperweights like Marco Rubio will turn on Trump if it becomes both safe and profitable to do so. There is no honor among thieves, and the loyalty they show now will evaporate—poof—if a time comes when saving their own skins requires tossing The Criminal aside.

Thank God all of these people are so very horrible, and so forever focused on their own personal thirst for fame. If they actually believed in things we'd be in twice as much trouble.