Let’s be honest, shall we? We all love a hot mess. Not that you want to be related to one (or two) or live next door to one or work for one, but from a distance hot messes supply a certain ghoulish sense of superiority-inducing reassurance. “I may be a mess,” you say to yourself, or spouse, “but I’m not nearly as hot a mess as [insert object of current fascination.]”

This deep insight came to mind yesterday watching the surprise appearance of Hunter Biden at the MAGA-led House Oversight Committee hearing into you know … Hunter Biden. It was a surpise because as everyone with more than two functioning neurons knows that very same commitee has been howling and puffing ad nauseum for over two years now demanding Biden show up and answer all their questions about how he scammed $2 billion from the Saudis to A: buy a new laptop, B: buy a new pickup truck, or C: take more d*ck pics on his cell phone.

(Oh, sorry. That bona fide/actually happened $2 billion scam was pulled off by a different relative, a guy actually in a government job, and not Hunter Biden, who did however get a roughly $6000 loan from his old man to cover the payments on his new truck.)

The issue of course is that Biden, who is to be honest more than a bit of a hot mess himself, has repeatedly said he is only willing to testify … in public. With cameras rolling. (The nefarious, tricky bastard! What’s he tring to pull?) So what happens when the Oversight MAGA crew spots Hunter right there in their hearing room? They demand — demand, by all that is MAGA and God-like — he be arrested on the spot and jailed and soon thereafter voted to hold him in contempt … for … for … showing up and being willing to answer their questions?

One perpetually camera-ready MAGA congresswoman sniped at Biden that he didn’t have “the balls” to … to … mmm … I’m not sure what. And minutes later the biggest MAGA-naut of all, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Atlanta suburbanite carpetbagging over in Georgia’s Cracker Holler First District was holding up … yup, you gussed it … the same d*ck pics of Hunter Biden she’s flashed in other super serious MAGA hearings. (She’s flashed these pix so often I think it’s fair to ask if she has them Velcroed to the ceiling over her bed.)

Simultaneous with all this, MAGA Speaker Mike Johnson, the forelocked Bible study savant from Lousiana’s Cracker Holler Fourth District, was getting the word from some of the same people irate about Hunter Biden showing up to answer questions that his days are numbered. Why? For agreeing to a deal with Democrats to fund the government, avoid another MAGA-driven shutdown, supply bullets to fight off a Russian invasion in Europe, and keep Israel in the business of driving every Palestinian into the Sinai desert.

And with all that, I won’t even bore you with the story about the lawyer for Orange Jesus, the Supreme Leader of the Cult of MAGA, arguing in court and with what I presume was a straight face that his client — the very large, weirdly groomed fellow to his right — had the absolute immunity to murder a political rival if he woke up one day and felt like it.

And folks, that was pretty much 36 hours in the Fevered Hot Mess that is MAGA-verse 2024.

So okay, maybe the only way to “love” a mess as hot as these Real Ding-A-Lings of DC is to take a step back to a safe distance from the dumpster and just savor that fleeting sense of superiority. A moment that reassures you that no matter what indisputably stupid thing you may have said or done in your life, you at least stopped short of doing it live in public, on an official record and on camera for the entire world to see.

All this is a long wind up to encourage you to take 15 minutes out of your day and watch the two videos I’m linking here.

Since the war in Ukraine war began I’ve been watching the daily, Moscow man-on-the-street interviews conducted by a young guy named Daniil Orain for his 1420 YouTube site. Shot mainly in Moscow — which truly a world apart from everything beyond its city limits — the interviews are a revealing assessment of what ordinary Russians think and dare to say in public, in front of a camera beaming out to the entire world.

For the most part, older Russians habituated to state TV (think FoxNews Rooskie style) believe Ukraine is full of LGBT-loving fascist Nazis and Glorious Leader Vladimir Vladimirovich is the only man to protect the empire and stop NATO from overruning the Motherland. Younger people, when they’re not reluctant to “talk politics”, seem to understand what’s really going down but are helpless to do anything about it, lest they get hauled before some hot mess Kremlin tribunal and forced to explain what they saw on the internet.

Then there’s the two people in these videos. One, an 83 year-old woman, a “babushka” in Russian terms, absolutely unloading on Putin, authoritarian bullshit, the astonishing sheep-like cowardice she sees all around her.

And second, a 30-something construction worker/remodeler with the wit and affect of a stand up comic walking his interviewer through the facts of life in Russia 2024.

I’d enjoy seeing both of them live on camera at a MAGA House Oversight hearing.