Dingus of the Week: Scott Walker

Plus, a dingus mad libs for you

It seems dramatic, but I would like to breathe. I can’t. The smothering air from the forest fires in Canada has blown over much of the Midwest. Which means when I step outside it smells like someone left a hot glue gun on too long and my face feels like a Royal Canadian Mountie personally rode a horse down to Iowa and punched me in the face.

Even the epithelial cells in my body are rising up in revolt and I somehow have a rash.

I’ve spent the last three days Googling “is wanting to punch elected officials a wildfire smoke symptom?” And “does wildfire smoke make you so depressed you want to offer yourself up on the pyre of our burning planet?”

It took a village to get here. Smothering North America in toxic fumes takes a team, and that team is called climate change and carelessness.

Heat and dry conditions created by climate change made the conditions ripe for a fire. According to The Narwhal, an award-winning Canadian science magazine, “Such conditions will become the norm for longer periods of time as Earth’s atmosphere warms rapidly due to carbon pollution created from burning fossil fuels. Wildfire seasons will start earlier, last longer and be more intense. As of June 20, almost six million hectares of land in Canada have burned. That’s more than the amount of land that burned in 2016, 2019, 2020 and 2022 combined.”

But through this burning smothering fury comes an idiocy with the force of flames that would outlast the sun. Into this world on fire comes a dingusry so painful that you might want to self immolate. Into this inferno comes Scott Walker.

On Tuesday, the former governor of Wisconsin tweeted, “The radicals will claim that the air quality is instead [sic] of the fires in Canada. If liberals spent more time fighting forest fires than pushing woke agendas, the air quality would be much better.”

I’m sorry, but Scott, have you seen Smokey Bear?

Smokey literally voted for Bernie Sanders and is the number one preventer of forest fires. I mean, look at him! No one listens to Chapo Trap House more than this shirtless, hairy, motherfucker. This guy sits around and calls himself a male feminist but refuses to go down on women and in high school he put a Ralph Nader sticker over the Abercrombie logo on his baseball hat. He is a liberal man!

Scott, you are going to tell me, that this hairy, hard working, shitlib isn’t preventing forest fires? Are you out of your mind? That’s his entire job.

In defense of Scott Walker (a sentence that will be the reason I don’t get into heaven), most forest fires are caused by lightning. And lightning is four times more likely to strike men than women. Lightning is our misandrist queen. She is definitely a liberal. Although, it’s clear lightning kind of hates Joe Biden and wishes he’d do more on abortion. And also, lightning can’t vote since she doesn’t have a permanent residence. Calling lightning a tool of the woke liberals is like calling Gladis the Whale a tool of the woke.

Is it woke to be mad that our land is on fire and our seas are poluted, Scott?

Also, I am pretty sure it was the liberals who said, “Hey, maybe don’t ruin the environment because there will be disastrous consequences. Real bad consequences even.” And look at this, Scott! Breathe the air! It smells like consequences, you out-of-work rube!

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A Dingus Mad Libs:

By the time you read this, I will be on vacation with my kids. And the dingus for next week will be a guest post from the extremely talented comedian,

Josh Gondelman

. While dinguses are ever with us, they do take turns being dingusy. And it’s possible, that while I am on vacation, a dingus may get away scot-free! This is why I created a dingus mad libs for you. So that you can always mock the dinguses you see in life or in the news. This is vigilante dingus justice! You are all deputized now.

Before we begin write a list of the following words:

Your dingus

1. Adjective

2. Scatological noun

3. Pronoun

4. Verb

5. Adverb

6. Verb

7. Place noun

8. A city in Wisconsin

9. Offensive verb

10. Noun

11. Foul adjective

12. Noun for something truly vile

This week, [ 1 dingus ] was a real [ 2 scatological noun] . This [3 pronoun] [4 verb]ed America in such a [5 adverb] manner. As if to [6 verb] us all into [7 place noun]. And no one wants that!

Look, everyone likes [1 dingus] like people like [ 8 a city in Wisconsin ]. Which is to say, not a lot.

Furthermore, [1 dingus] has been known to [9 offensive verb] in parking lots. Even though [ 3 pronoun] believes in the religion of the one true [10 noun], [3 pronoun] fails to follow the tenants of the faith. What a rube.

Listen, [1 dingus] is the equivalent of [11 foul adjective] [12 noun for something truly vile]. And that’s why [1 dingus] is the dingus of the week.

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And Now For Something Good:

• Yusef Salaam, a member of the Central Park 5, won the primary bid for a city council seat in Harlem.

• In a real 1-2 punch, the Supreme Court ruled that the independent state legislature scheme (listen, please read

  Law Dork with Chris Geidner
  for a more thorough explanation) was not good. But then, they ruled that affirmative action for minorities was bad, but still okay for people who are legacies.

• There is no real silver lining for rollback of the 14th Amendment, but we did get this scorcher of a take from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

  With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces 'colorblindness for all' by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country's actual past and present experiences, the court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America's real-world problems. No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal race linked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today's ruling makes things worse, not better.

• Oh look, a little octopus daycare.

• JONI MITCHELL!!!!

• COLACHUP!

Listen, those last three things. I can’t explain them except to tell you my brain is fried.

What I Am Drinking:

This week I was supposed to go to New York and see my friend Elon Green and celebrate the HBO documentary based on his incredible book Last Call. My plan was to write a little paragraph about drinking to celebrate my dear friend who has been a lifeline for me these past eight years. Elon is the friend who helped me get a job with the Columbia Journalism Review. He is the one who found Tucker Carlson’s email for me. He has always hated all my enemies with enough force that you would think they were his enemies. (Gross, don’t tell him I said all of this nice stuff.) That’s what was supposed to happen. I was supposed to see my friends and celebrate Elon and get a little tipsy and then write a missive about friendship and how great it is to celebrate the wins of my friends. Instead, what happened was a confluence of storms on the East Coast combined with an FAA shortage and outage and plane maintenance issues, meant I was left crying in the long-term parking lot of the Cedar Rapids Airport at 4:45 am on Tuesday morning.

I was grounded in Iowa.

So this week, I stayed home and built a podcast studio. (Yes, I’m going to make a podcast. More on that in another email.) I drank cheap rose, liked pictures of the documentary premier on Instagram, and missed my friends so much it hurt.

Sometimes, when I am feeling like I am the worst person in the world and I am taking the sociopath test convinced I should send myself to jail, my therapist reminds me that I have good friends, friends I’ve kept for a long time. “Sociopaths don’t keep friends that long,” she tells me. She’s had to tell me this a lot.

So, this weekend, once my kids and I get to our vacation spot, I’ll get some cheap champagne and toast to Elon Green, who is a good friend and a hell of a writer. And I’ll cheers you all too. We are friends after all and I want to celebrate you for making it through one more week of living in this inferno.

Cheers! Here is a song about women and whales.