SOTU Drinking Game: The Absurd Arena – Useful Idiots Discussion Board
Hey Useful Idiots,
Turns out I’m a fool. I thought I’d have a lovely Tuesday, sit at The Bean and type up the fun Absurd Arena I promised after last week’s heavy one. I even opened up the Useful Idiots chat (if you don’t have the Substack app, get it. going to start hosting chats there a lot) to ask my fellow idiots for some fun ideas to write about, like, as I promised, who in Congress would look dumbest in bike shorts.
And then I remembered the awful news, worse than having to watch the Sunday news shows so that you don’t have to: tonight is the self-pleasuring propaganda-spreading war-mongering smarmier-than-ever State of the Union. Now the fool has that to look forward to for the evening.
If, as Walter Kirn put it, the New York Times is now filled with “All the President’s Mice,” then tonight the US Capitol is infested with rats, scurrying into the halls of Congress, screeching for any mention of war, pooping all over the seats of American democracy, gnashing their sharpened teeth, ready to tear apart the Constitution for a chance at more rat power.
But then the chat reminded me of the two things that Useful Idiots have been forced to become better and better at as the world has submerged deeper and deeper into filth: making fun of politicians and drinking games.
So for this Absurd Arena, let’s unveil the official Useful Idiots SOTU Drinking Game rules: Take a sip when Biden says “defend democracy.” Take a shot when he mentions the balloon. Finish the whole bottle if Zelenskyy shows up for a surprise video address. Those are mine, probably already enough to get sufficiently wasted. What do you got?
Comment yours and then watch it live with Katie at 9pm.
As usual, the best comments and questions will be read on the show. Here’s the prompt:
What are more rules for the Useful Idiots State of the Union Drinking Game?
Hey, I have an idea, instead of a "drinking game", let's mastermind a "board game" where like your drinking game hedges on expected outcomes of public rhetoric and policy (i.e what politicians promise and what they deliver). Each person "chooses" a board token like in monopoly and in this case if a person chose the Biden Token, s/he would "own" all the successes and failures of the real Biden by either being rewarded or punished in the game. I extrapolated this idea to a virtual, public Vegas model where people could actually bet on their board token at scale across the US and IMO would lead to a total meltdown of our system as we know it. Masses of people would be calling BS on political rhetoric and winning HUGE on the outcomes. Imagine this! People who were Biden supporters (or whoever) would be losing their shirt over his failures while everyone else with a brain would be cashing in. In essence, what this means is now people would have to "own" the successes and failures of their game piece (a real person in real time) and I'd bet $1 you'd find public sentiment shifting in radical and dramatic ways that would crush the current political system. Walk it back and forward. Voting for public policy makes more sense and is more honest in the board game than it is currently. If someone makes this game, they'd get rich on it but my version would be first and is nearly complete in concept.
Maybe this year McCarthy will tear up Biden’s transcript channeling Pelosi