A free jet, a grounded Boeing program, and a shopping spree for spare parts — Washington proves once again that nothing costs more than something we’re told is free.

There was a time, not long ago, when the American taxpayer was fleeced with a certain modesty — a sheepish decorum, as if the pickpocket at least tipped his hat after lifting your wallet.

Those days, alas, are gone.

We have entered a new era of plunder so brazen, so operatic in its stupidity, that it deserves not merely condemnation but a brass band and a commemorative plaque.

Consider the current aviation burlesque unfolding under the august banner of the United States government.

The Glorious Return of Military Darwinism

There are bad ideas, and then there are ideas so catastrophically, historically illiterate that they feel like they were drafted on a cocktail napkin somewhere between the third Old Fashioned and a lobotomy.

Enter Pete Hegseth’s latest brainwave: making flu vaccines optional for members of the United States military.

Optional.

In the military.

Yes, the same institution that regulates the angle of your shoelaces, the exact geometry of your haircut, and the moral alignment of your socks now apparently draws the line at… vaccines.

A partial inventory of the Trump Administration's Ongoing Demolition of Public Life

Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigns. The Border Patrol chief solicits prostitutes abroad. Trump sues the IRS he controls. Corey Lewandowski sells federal contracts. This is Washington, D.C.

Let us begin with Lori Chavez-DeRemer, because she is the freshest wound, though in this administration, she is barely a paper cut.

The Labor Secretary — former one-term congresswoman, former mayor of the magnificently named Happy Valley, Oregon — resigned Monday, departing "to take a position in the private sector," which is the Washington formulation for: the inspector general was about to interview her and the walls were closing in like a particularly well-upholstered trash compactor. The White House, with its customary relationship to reality, announced that she had "done a phenomenal job."

This is the same White House that will, when the report drops, have no memory of her whatsoever.

The allegations against Chavez-DeRemer constitute a scandal so baroque it would embarrass a Medici.

An affair with her security detail.

Fabricated official trips to cover personal travel. Fancy hotels, SUV rentals, and meals billed to the public.

And now, for his next miracle, he will attempt to read

There are moments in American public life that force you to confront the outer limits of plausibility. This is one of them.

Donald Trump is scheduled to read from the Bible.

Read.

Not wave. Not autograph. Not hold upside down like a prop in a hostage video for literacy. Read. Words. In sequence. Out loud. Presumably without filing a lawsuit against the vowels.

I want to be very clear: I am not questioning his faith. I am questioning his relationship with sentences.

This is a man who has spent a lifetime treating language the way a raccoon treats a garbage can—aggressively, opportunistically, and with no long-term plan. His public statements read like autocorrect gave up halfway through and went out for a drink.

And now we are to believe he will navigate Scripture.

The Bible.

On the Obama Presidential Center, the Trump glass tower, and the magnificent American tradition of gilding the public with someone else's ego.

There is a window-starved building rising on the South Side of Chicago that looks, to any honest eye, as though a Crusader fortress mated drunkenly with a parking garage and produced this gray, hulking, joyless monolith — so aggressively ugly that one suspects the architect was settling a personal grudge.

This is the Obama Presidential Center, which cost $850 million, a figure so grotesque it should be carved above the entrance as a warning, the way Dante inscribed Abandon hope above the gates of Hell.

Santa Claus, Beloved Symbol, Alleged Fraudster

We are gathered here today to mourn the passing of Santa Claus’s reputation — found deceased under circumstances involving wire fraud, luxury dining, and what federal prosecutors have described, with the delicacy of people who have seen everything, as “extensive renovations to a lakefront property in New Jersey.”

The accused, Stefan Pildes — president of SantaCon NYC and evidently the first man to look at a red suit and see a revenue stream — stands charged with diverting more than half of nearly $3 million in charitable donations into what can only be described as a personal North Pole slush fund.

The state that invented “Virginia is for Lovers” has decided it is no longer in love with paying for your favorite insurrection

There is something uniquely, magnificently, almost acrobatically American about a government financially underwriting an organization whose entire purpose is the loving maintenance of a rebellion against that same government.

It has the gymnastic elegance of a man hiring a skywriter to commemorate the time he burned his own house down — the nostalgia-industrial complex in full, flag-draped, tax-exempt flower.

For decades, Virginia — once the Confederacy’s capital, now the capital of belated self-awareness — extended tax exemptions to groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894 with the serene audacity of people who lost a war and decided the solution was better marketing.

The FAA clears lasers for civilian airspace, and suddenly turbulence isn’t the worst thing overhead

There it is, tucked between a coffee cup and the polite typography of institutional calm: the Federal Aviation Administration has cleared the use of high-energy lasers in civilian airspace.

Read that again slowly, like a man checking the label on a bottle he swore was bourbon but now glows faintly in the dark.

Lasers.

In.

Civilian.

Airspace.

Sam Kinison would already be screaming—“THE SKY?! YOU PUT IT IN THE SKY?!”—because there used to be rules, or at least the illusion of them, that the heavens above your head were for clouds, birds, and the occasional piece of lost luggage.

Now it’s an arena.

Now it’s a firing range with frequent flyer miles.

The air itself has been deputized.

The sky is no longer a sanctuary but a jurisdiction.

You used to worry about turbulence; now you’re wondering whether your connecting flight to Chicago is passing through a silent light show of classified intent.