WHEN UNPATRIOTIC newspapers like Newsday splash pictures of tiny, rain-soaked children crying in their mothers’ arms across page one, it can only lead to misunderstanding of the government’s decision to send women and children back to Venezuela in open pirogues.

WHENEVER the world gets too ridiculous to take seriously – like when the interloper of the most powerful political office in the world gets a resounding cut-ass but claims he really won the election, if you just don’t count the 80m people who voted AGAINST him – I cheer myself up by printing a few letters from the editor, an idea stolen from the 70s & 80s American National Lampoon satirical magazine. As always, I certify these letters are 100 per cent authentic because I made them up myself.

THE MOST SHOCKING thing about the US presidential election was that 70m people voted for Donald Trump. Everything else was entirely predictable, from Trump throwing another toddler tantrum because Joe Biden did indeed beat him like a drum, to the evil Moscow Mitch coldly calculating the advantages to himself and swiftly abandoning America herself: better to let the man-baby in the Oval Office whine and risk a constitutional crisis than to increase the risk of losing the Georgia senate seats next January.

This was last week’s column but I pulled it because I thought it was too bleak; I didn’t realise its real failing was that it wasn’t bleak enough! Imagine yourself, then, reading this last Friday.