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Orange Meanie: So as you know last week long before the crash, I signed an executive order restoring our higher standards for air traffic controllers and other important jobs throughout the country. So it was very interesting about a week ago, almost upon entering office, I signed something last week that was an executive order, very powerful, on restoring the highest standards of air traffic controllers and others, by the way. Then my administration will set the highest possible bar for aviation safety. Toad: You don't think the first large-scale fatal commercial air crash since 2009 has anything to do with firing the FAA director, freezing Air Traffic Controller hiring, disbanding the Aviation Safety Advisory Committee, or your demanding the retirement of two million federal employees. Orange Meanie: The FAA's diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities...and then it says FAA says people with severe disabilities are most underrepresented segment of the workforce, and they want them in and they want them, they can be air traffic controllers...This was uh, In January 14th, so that was, uh, a week before I entered office. Toad: You're just quoting the New York Post now. This is the Post, not anything from the FAA itself. Orange Meanie: We must have only the highest standards for those who work in our aviation system. I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary. You remember that. Only the highest aptitude. They have to be the highest intellect and psychologically superior people were allowed to qualify for air traffic controllers, uh, that was not so prior to getting there when I arrived in 2016, I made that change very early on because I always felt this was a job that -- and other jobs too -- but this was a job that had to be superior intelligence and uh we didn't really have that and we had it. And then when I left office and Biden took over, he changed them back to lower than ever before. I put safety first. Obama, Biden, and the Democrats put policy first, and they put uh politics at a level that nobody's ever seen because this was the lowest level. Their policy was horrible and their politics was even worse. Toad: Common sense, sir. This is the fault of someone who hasn't been president in eight years.

NEW COMIC MONDAYS, WEDNESDAYS, AND FRIDAYS AND WHEN THE MOOD STRIKES

I know the press usually smooths out Dear Leader's pronouncements but I really feel this week has been a stark reminder of just how much of a disservice journalists are doing when they make statements about what Trump says. They made it sound as if he made an admittedly evil and wrong connection between Diversity Equity and Inclusion initiatives in the Federal Aviation Administration and the tragic accident over D.C. on January 29, but if you check the transcript, or listen to his actual speech, you find a nearly incoherent mess of garbled concepts barely held together by the throughline no doubt suggested by a flunky just before Trump took the stage: "Blame it on the Democrats." I'm sorry for the Wall of Text strip on this but damn, I had to get across the actual words this man used and how absolutely stupid they are. "We have to have our smartest people. It doesn't matter what they look like, how they speak, who they are. It matters intellect, talent, the word talent you have to be talented, naturally talented geniuses. You can't have regular people doing that job."

Plus I don't hear enough people pointing out that his discussion of the FAA's initiatives he's disparaging, which he nonsensically dates to January 14, 2025, six days before he took office -- as if someone did this specifically to fuck him up -- is word for word from a New York fucking Post article written from the idiot point of view of a propaganda organ trying to undermine a legitimate concern of good governance. It sounds like my New York City Italian-American relatives bitching about "the govvinmint" and how stupid they are. "Wouldja believe they don't care if you kin do tha job, they just wanna know if you're a [unprintable slur]."

The Post approvingly quotes medical asshole Stanley Goldfarb, who is bankrolled by billionaire hedge fund dickhead Joseph Edelman, without mentioning that his group, Do No Harm, is in fact an anti-racist, transphobic lobbyist. Do No Harm literally believes "efforts to recruit a more diverse group of medical practitioners will result in lower standards of care", which is to say women and Blacks and gay people are worse at health care than white men. You'd think a guy named Goldfarb would know where this kind of thing leads, but I guess we're back in leopards eating faces territory.