"WTF, Flynn? You're counterintelligence. That means you help me when I don't know stuff!"

From the movie Airplane: "Captain Oveur: Joey, have you ever been in a... in a Turkish prison?...You ever seen a grown man naked?"

New York Magazine has a story from upstairs at the White House: 

President Donald Trump was confused about the dollar: Was it a strong one that’s good for the economy? Or a weak one? 

So he made a call ― except not to any of the business leaders Trump brought into his administration or even to an old friend from his days in real estate. Instead, he called his national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, according to two sources familiar with Flynn’s accounts of the incident. 

Flynn has a long record in counterintelligence but not in macroeconomics. And he told Trump he didn’t know, that it wasn’t his area of expertise, that, perhaps, Trump should ask an economist instead.

In 1970 President Nixon, stung by the Senate's rejection of his Supreme Court nominee, put up a second one: G. Harrold Carswell, an Eisenhower federal court appointee Nixon had jumped up to the Court of Appeals six months earlier.

Carswell had problems, it emerged. For one thing, he'd run the Georgia legislature as a full-throated, Jeff Sessions racist in 1948. The Attorney General, John Mitchell, said people shouldn't be punished for stuff they said- over and over- that they really believed when it was over twenty years ago.

That is why Senator Warren was silenced by the Republican majority last night. She was trying to cite comments by Senator Sessions, but they were thirty years old, so that proved she was just being a bitch.

Leader McConnell having left his ball gag in his office, he just told her to STFU. You put 40-some old Republican men in a room and give them a chance to tell a woman to stifle, whatcha think they're gonna do, huh?

Judge Carswell didn't think of women's rights, either.

It also emerged that in a decade as a trial judge, Carswell's opinions were overturned 58% of the time. While Nixon apparently felt the answer was to put Carwell on the Court of Appeals to improve his batting average, most people just said it showed Carswell was a mediocre judge.

In fact, Nebraska Senator Roman Hruska (the surname is pronounced by clearing your throat) thought the charge so unfair he tottered out to declare:

Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.

The Senate rejected Carswell, and finally relented for Nixon's third try, Judge Harry Blackmun, who proved the truth of the song You Can't Always Get What You Want by writing the Roe v. Wade decision three years later and then turning into an implacable opponent of the death penalty.

Nixon said Senators would never confirm a Southerner who held Right-thinking views, a comment that time proved almost as dumb as "you won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more" and "I am not a crook."

"Like the sands in an hour-glass, so are the days of our lives," the soap opera announcer of the day intoned.

Carswell resigned his seat to seek the Republican nomination for the US Senate. He said it was to get back at the liberals who shot him down- the "dark evil winds of liberalism" and the "northern press and its knee-jerking followers in the Senate." John Wayne endorsed Carswell, so that was that.

Carswell lost the Republican primary, 2 to 1. He resumed the private practice of law and homosexual inclinations not even J. Edgar Hoover picked up on in his Supreme Court background check. Carswell was convicted of battery after a Senator Larry Craig-style encounter in a public restroom in 1976. In 1979 he was beaten up by a man he invited back to his hotel room (whether either had ever seen Midnight Cowboy was never sorted out). He died in 1992.

Richard Nixon resigned ahead of impeachment four years later. He died in 1994 and went to Hell.

Senator Roman Hruska insisted Watergate was manufactured by the Democrats and retired in 1976. A federal courthouse and the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center was named after him. He died in 1999.

President Trump realized Senator Hruska's dream of a more mediocre America in 2016.