The Ballad of Jed’s Cousin Don

(You can almost imagine Jethro D. Vance swimmin’ in the cement pond)

Illustration by ChatGPT-5

With apologies to Flatt and Scruggs I present:

“The Ballad of Jed’s Cousin Don”

Come and listen to my story ’bout a man named Trump,
Said the pool by his house looked like a D.C. dump.
Then one day he decided to paint it blue,
And suddenly he’d turned our water into goo.
(Algae, that is. Pond scum. Green slime).

Well, the billionaires arrived to see what they could do.
One suggested silver flakes, one suggested glue.
RFK Jr.: “Ivermectin oughtta do the trick,”
But the algae just got thicker and the smell got mighty sick.
(Algae, that is. Pond scum. Green slime).

Trump blamed the mess on Democratic vandals,
But after Epstein, he needed no more scandals.
There were more arrests and arguments of state,
But before too long the papers were callin’ it …

Water Gate.
(Cover-ups, that is. Dirty tricks. Pond politics)
Y’all come back now, ya hear? 

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Mr. Write Coach

Stuart Warner can help you become a better writer. Warner has developed a national reputation as an editor and journalism teacher. He has written or edited three Pulitzer Prize-winning entries and edited three other Pulitzer finalists As the writing coach at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, he edited stories than won more than 50 national awards. Currently, Warner teaches journalism at Case Western Reserve University and is a regular contributor to AOL.com. He has been honored numerous times for his own writing. He has also been invited to speak on writing at the Nieman narrative conference at Harvard, the Let’s Do It Better conference at Columbia University, the National Writers Workshop sponsored by the Poynter Institute, the IRE’s national Computer Assisted Reporting workshop and at Capitolbeat, the national seminar for state government reporters. He has also worked with the writers at a number of companies, including Politifact, Key Bank, Signal Cleveland, the Akron Beacon Journal, Cleveland Jewish News, Akron General Hospital and also taught at Cleveland State University.

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