Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.
Spare a thought for Mike Beaton.
Who? He’s a British Airways pilot who has been sacked after reportedly snorting cocaine off a topless woman before trying to fly a packed passenger plane from Johannesburg to London. Let those of us who haven’t had a day like that at work cast the first stone.
Beaton seemingly had some downtime in South Africa and decided to turn it into, er, uptime, revealing the sordid details about his drug-taking and sexploits to a friend by text.
An unnamed airline official told The Sun: “This behavior was the opposite of what is expected of British Airways pilots.” Hang on, so they are supposed to blow cocaine out of their nose onto a topless woman? Odd.
Alas, Donald Trump has yet to weigh into this international incident.
Of course, no one can top Trump when it comes to batshit crazy public utterings. The former golfer-in-chief and cheeseburger aficionado was at it again this week, claiming that windmills are driving whales “crazy” and causing environmental damage.
“There has only been, listen to this, one such whale killed off the coast of South Carolina in the last 50 years,” he said. “But on the other hand, their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. Nobody does anything about that. They’re washing up onshore.”
“You wouldn’t see it once a year,” he added, by now careering down the highway to nonsense. “Now they’re coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They’re driving the whales, I think a little batty.”
There is, you don’t need me to tell you, no evidence for any of this whatsoever, as there wasn’t four years ago when he claimed that the noise produced by windmills “causes cancer.”
However, Trump has form when it comes to whales. In 2019, he mixed up Wales (a country in the United Kingdom, home of Snowdonia National Park, famous for its rugby team and known as the “land of song”) and whales (marine mammals and members of the cetacea order, which also includes dolphins and porpoises) when he said he had spoken with the “Prince of Whales” on a recent trip to Europe.
Neither the former prince of W(h)ales nor Moby Dick were available for comment.
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Thanks for all the entries. Here’s the best from our postbag — there’s no prize except for the gift of laughter, which I think we can all agree is far more valuable than cash or booze.
“With former President Trump, ‘Concerned’ goes in one ear and comes ‘Org’ the other,” by Frederic Myers
Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s slot news editor.
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