Last week the comic geniuses at the Pixelated Boat, my new favorite Twitter account, published a fake but utterly inspired parody of a passage from Michael Wolff’s anti-Trump book “Fire and Fury”. Here in its entirety is the spoof:

“On his first night in the White House, President Trump complained that the TV in his bedroom was broken, because it didn’t have the “gorilla channel”. Trump seemed to be under the impression that a TV channel existed that screened nothing but gorilla-based content, 24 hours a day.

“To appease Trump, White House staff compiled a number of gorilla documentaries into a makeshift gorilla channel, broadcast into Trump’s bedroom from a hastily-constructed transmission tower on the South Lawn. However, Trump was unhappy with the channel they had created, moaning that it was “boring” because “the gorillas aren’t fighting”.

“Staff edited out all the parts of the documentaries where gorillas weren’t hitting each other, and at last the president was satisfied. “On some days he’ll watch the gorilla channel for 17 hours straight,” an insider told me. “He kneels in front of the TV, with his face about four inches from the screen, and says encouraging things to the gorillas, like ‘the way you hit that other gorilla was good’. I think he thinks the gorillas can hear him.”

This is beyond brilliant. But the best part is that the predictably humor-impaired “Trump’s-Not-My-President” crowd believed it was a real excerpt from Wolff’s book. In droves they tweeted that this confirmed their belief that Trump is a deranged simpleton.

Okay, so they were fooled. But how were they supposed to know it was a joke? Not only does it track the style and fabulous (as in having no basis in reality) content of Wolff’s book, it is indistinguishable from the mainstream media’s incessant deluge of anti-Trump reporting. For over a year, the mainstream media have been hammering away at Trump. But, as one wild, unsourced expose after another has blown up in their faces, the progressive media are becoming desperate.

The Russia collusion narrative is not only collapsing, it appears to be turning into an investigative predicate for ridding the FBI and Department of Justice of the pro-Hilary Clinton political operatives who faked an investigation of her private email server and – as appears likely – used the equally fake Clinton-funded Fusion GPS dossier to wiretap the Trump campaign. So, given the increasingly dire circumstances, what can a concerned media do to save America from the Trump menace?

Visualize a badly singed Wiley the Media Coyote perusing the Acme Political Smears catalog. The “Russia, Russia, Russia rocket skates” have blown up and burned off 90 % of his fur, but he hasn’t quit. Suddenly his eyes narrow. What’s this on page 23? The Acme Crazy Smear Kit? Crazy? Trump? We can say Trump’s crazy! Um, yeah, that’s the ticket! Wait until I tell my girlfriend…um, no, my uh…fiancee…uh…wife, yeah, that’s it, Morgan Fairchild Coyote, whom I have seen naked!

We have already witnessed the opening salvo of this latest offensive. In addition to Wolff’s book and the well-publicized discussions of Trump’s mental state by his political enemies, there have been media reports featuring mental health professionals questioning Trump’s sanity. This despite Section 7 of the American Psychiatric Association’s Principles of Medical Ethics which provides that it is unethical for psychiatrists to give a professional opinion about the mental condition of public figures they have not personally examined and from whom they have not obtained consent to publicly discuss their mental health.

This provision, called the “Goldwater Rule”, was adopted after the 1964 presidential race when the liberal media made Republican nominee Barry Goldwater’s mental stability a campaign issue. This attack reached its crescendo in a special issue of Fact magazine bearing the banner cover headline “1,189 PSYCHIATRISTS SAY GOLDWATER IS PSYCHOLOGICALLY UNFIT TO BE PRESIDENT!”
Although none of the quoted experts had personally examined Goldwater, among other things, they diagnosed him as “paranoid”, “a dangerous lunatic”, and a “latent homosexual” . One of these eminent doctors concluded that Goldwater had “the same pathological make up as Hitler, Castro, Stalin and other known schizophrenic leaders.”

All of this was deemed fair and necessary to save the country from a Goldwater presidency. After all, allowing a nut job like him to inhabit the White House would have gotten us bogged down in Vietnam. Oh, wait…

So here we go again. What’s old is new. Given the media’s failure thus far to derail the Trump train, here comes the Goldwater gambit. Sixty million pro-Trump voters were wrong and must effectively be disenfranchised because the Democrats and their media steno pool claim that Trump is too unstable to be trusted with the nuclear launch button.

This latest effort to undermine Trump brings to mind Abraham Lincoln’s defense of General Grant during the Civil War. After years of equivocal battlefield results, the Army of the Potomac was placed under the command of Grant who led it and the Union to victory. But, even as he was winning the war, many derided Grant as a common drunk who was unstable and likely to take to the bottle in the midst of battle. To this criticism Lincoln replied, “Tell me what brand of Whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.”

Under Trump’s leadership the economy is booming, unemployment is dropping, our horrendous tax code has been overhauled, ruinous and useless government regulations are being slashed, outstanding judicial appointments are being made, and the military is being rebuilt. We are achieving energy independence, and control of the federal government is being wrested from the hands of the immutable deep state and returned to the people.

In light of these welcome developments, let me paraphrase Lincoln: if Trump’s crazy, I hope he stays off his meds. This country simply can’t afford for him to get well.