TOTAL BS!

If you’ve spent any time at The Daily BS, you know what we’re trying to build here.

Our regular news stories are designed in three layers: the BS BULLETIN for the quick facts, the full story for readers who want the details, and our sources for those who want to dig deeper and check things for themselves.

Facts first. Depth if you want it. And whenever possible, a little fun along the way. This is my daily stack.

Now we’re adding something else.

TOTAL BS!

I’ve always been drawn to the absurdity of politics. I spent a lot of years around a guy who understood that pretty well.

Rush Limbaugh called it “illustrating absurdity by being absurd.”

His Updates, song parodies, fake commercials and the brilliant work of people like Paul Shanklin weren’t disconnected from the news. The news was the raw material. The funniest stuff worked because underneath the exaggeration was something recognizably true.

That’s the spirit behind TOTAL BS.

Every TOTAL BS story starts with real news — a real event, quote, controversy or political character. Then we take a sharp turn into satire.

The fun is wondering for a moment exactly where that turn happened.

A few readers have raised a fair concern: What happens when somebody sees one of these headlines, doesn’t read the story and shares it as fact?

We hear you.

We also don’t want to kill the joke by announcing the punchline before you’ve read the first sentence.

So we’re going to be responsible without taking the fun out of it.

From now on, these stories will begin with TOTAL BS at the top of the page. They’ll be written by our suspiciously named correspondent Snerd Lee Satire. They’ll feature Jack S. Donkey – tho sometimes he’s in drag – and his TOTAL BS newspaper. And we’re making the satire notice at the end larger and impossible to miss.

Those aren’t accidents. They’re our signals to you.

We’re not trying to fool our readers. We’re inviting you to play along.

There will only be a couple of these stories each day. Everything else at The Daily BS remains what we’re building this place around: quick facts, the fuller story, original perspective and sources that let you verify it for yourself.

But politics has become far too absurd to cover it every day without occasionally returning the favor.

So when you see TOTAL BS, you’re in on the joke.

The story will start somewhere in reality.

Where it goes from there is between Snerd Lee Satire and that donkey.

— Bo