LINDSEY MOORE (HOST):
Lord have mercy, y’all… this week, the circus rolled into town, set up its tent in the Oval Office, and handed the trapeze ropes to a bunch of folks who ought not be trusted with a butter knife, much less the nuclear launch codes.
Now I don’t say this lightly, and I certainly don’t say it without a tall glass of something strong nearby: today we’re diving into what I can only describe as a Shakespearean farce rewritten by a squirrel on moonshine and performed entirely via a group text.
Yes, yes—we’re talkin’ ‘bout a national security disaster so doltish, so flagrantly reckless, so jaw-droppin’ in its idiocy, that it makes the plot of Hee Haw look like a Tom Clancy novel.
And who better to help me unpack this leaking pressure cooker of incompetence than my guest today—Miss Tallulah Braxton-Davenport, cyber-espionage expert, possum therapist, and part-time church sign haikuist from Lafayette County, Mississippi.
TALLULAH BRAXTON-DAVENPORT (GUEST):
Why thank you, Lindsey. I come today with a heart full of outrage and a tote bag full of deviled eggs. Because when the Lord said “Render unto Caesar,” He did not mean render unto Caesar’s press pool the coordinates of a tactical airstrike.
LINDSEY MOORE:
Ha! Now Tallulah, walk us through it. These officials, they got the same relationship with the press as a catfish has with hot grease—ain’t never been pretty. And yet! There they were… finger-peckin’ their war plans into a Signal chat like hens at a prayer meeting. What in the seven-spiced hell were they thinkin’?
TALLULAH:
Lindsey, I tell you what. I have seen some fools in my day—men who used a paper plate to shovel coals into a barbecue pit, women who put bleach in their sweet tea because they “thought it’d brighten the flavor”—but I have never, not once, seen such glorious, star-spangled stupidity as this.
Now mind you, these are the same men who clutch their pearls anytime a journalist so much as frowns near a federal document. “Lock her up,” they say, “for mishandling classified materials.” Yet here they are, hand-feeding a reporter their war strategy like it’s communion.
LINDSEY MOORE (INTERRUPTING):
Oh Lord, they passed it around like a casserole at a wake.
TALLULAH:
Exactly! And the sheer irony, Lindsey—the delicious, molasses-thick irony—is that they hate the press. Despise it. Wouldn’t spit on it if it were on fire. And yet they somehow invited the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to their digital war room, like he was Cousin Kenny and they needed a fourth for Euchre.
LINDSEY MOORE:
Makes you wonder if “PC Houthi Small Group” was their way of sayin’ “Please Confirm: we are all incompetent.”
TALLULAH:
And I’ll tell you somethin’ else, Lindsey—everybody’s focusin’ on the “oops” of it all. The misfire, the digital whoopsie. But that’s just the tip of the cornbread. The real scandal ain’t that a journalist got invited. The real scandal is that none of ‘em questioned it. They just kept talkin’ like it was a Tuesday night church supper—“Oh look, there’s Jeff from The Atlantic. Anyway, here’s the launch time and target coordinates. Pass the emojis.”
LINDSEY MOORE:
Oh, those emojis. You could practically smell the Axe body spray through the screen. I mean, Tallulah, how’d we get to a place where a muscle emoji is now part of official foreign policy?
TALLULAH:
Because these folks ain’t leaders. They’re performative charlatans with delusions of competence. The kind of men who think using Signal makes ‘em Edward Snowden, when in fact they’re just your cousin Dale trying to send a thirst trap and accidentally texting the church secretary.
LINDSEY MOORE:
Tell it, sister. Now before we go any further, let’s take a moment for a word from our sponsor—the only AI system that doesn’t accidentally start a war.
LINDSEY MOORE:
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LINDSEY MOORE:
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LINDSEY MOORE:
Now, Tallulah, partin’ thoughts. What are we to learn from this tragicomic parade of jackassery?
TALLULAH:
Well Lindsey, I believe the lesson here is simple. If you put a fool in a suit and hand him a smartphone, he don’t become a statesman—he just becomes a fool with a data plan.
They claim to be warriors against the Deep State, but really? They’re just clowns throwin’ pies at their own faces. It’s digital slapstick—military-grade Benny Hill.
LINDSEY MOORE:
And down here, we’ve got a sayin’ for that: “If you build your barn outta baloney, don’t be surprised when the raccoons show up wearin’ bibs.”
TALLULAH:
Amen.
LINDSEY MOORE:
And that’s the gospel truth, friends. Today we learned that you can build all the encryption in the world, but if the minds behind it are soft as wet cornbread, then national secrets are just a group text away from turning into international incidents.
Next week, we’ll be talkin’ about AI-generated possum migration forecasts and their impact on moonshine routes in the Tennessee foothills.
Till then, may your phones be private, your group chats secure, and your emojis never fire a missile.
Copyright © 2025 by Paul Henry Smith
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