…and they only get better one by one. That’s what the song says, but it’s even worse, I think. They go crazy in congregations. Full stop.
My God, the latest Trump rally, with Orange Mussolini strutting triumphantly around spewing more lies than ever, each lie more vile and dangerous than ever, the crowd stuffed with braying lunatics waving QAnon signs, was the worst one yet.
Have a look. No, go ahead, look. Do it. No, I insist. Do it. Watch, damn you. Watch until your eyes bleed. I demand it. I refuse to be alone in this.
No? Fine, I’ll give you the CliffsNotes. It was all sinister deep state, attempted coup, illegal effort to sabotage the greatest electoral victory in history, corrupt media, total exoneration, witch hunt framing innocent Americans, fake news, Russia Hoax, and finally, in all of history, not only of the US but the whole world, there has never been anything like what was achieved in 2016, and this is the most successful Presidency in history. Oh yeah, and he threw in the word “bullshit”. And called Adam Schiff a “pencil neck”.
With his collaborator A.G. Barr, who has a long history of this sort of skullduggery – look up the Iran Contra scandal and its aftermath of multiple pardons – playing hide the ball just long enough for Trump to sell the message so well that nothing in the Mueller Report will stick, however ugly and disgraceful, Trump isn’t just taking a victory lap. He’s out for revenge, and he’s whipping people into a furious lather, and I’m scared, actually afraid.
It’s amazing, really, how many different institutions have failed us during Trump’s rampage, how weak, snivelling, and ineffective they’ve all been. Comey, going on and on in public about Hillary’s f*%$ing emails, while staying tight-lipped about the exponentially more serious malfeasance, not to mention the threat to democracy, posed by Russian involvement. Obama, letting that pasty bastard McConnell cow him into doing nothing when he knew that Putin was pulling every lever he had to rig the election, just as McConnell did, too. Congress, absolutely gridlocked by Republican fear and complicity. The Justice Department, clinging to its simpering and now manifestly obsolete “can’t indict a sitting President” policy. Mueller, refusing to make the call on obstruction – we don’t know the story there yet, and I’m sure he had his reasons, but goddammit he should have made the call, and right now I feel I’ll never forgive him for having failed to do so. Even if it was just to say that all the elements of criminal obstruction were there, albeit a sitting President can’t be indicted, he should have made the call. Adam Schiff, whom I greatly admire, thinks Mueller may have shied away from that because it would have amounted to a recommendation to impeach, which is not within his bailiwick. I see that argument, but no – he should let Congress make the impeachment decision based on whether laws were broken, and making the call on that is within his bailiwick. In the result, Barr made the call. Should he have? No, but who’s to stop him?
Everybody, every link in the chain, just so weak and powerless against this fraudulent, bloviating, incoherent, moronic grifter who doesn’t have the wit to run a car wash and has never, until now I guess, succeeded at anything in his whole life.
Then there are all the collaborators who gleefully help him. God help us. God help us.
I really don’t know any more. Here I am talking about letting Russia go, planning for the next election, selling a positive message, the sun’ll come up tomorrow, and then I see a Trump rally and I’m completely unnerved. It may be too late for elections, and laws, and rules of any kind. Just now, watching this, I feel like we’re beyond that. Those intervals when I pull myself together, imagining a rules-based democratic cure for the Trump Virus – is that just denial? Are these moments when I’m jolted awake the only times I’m seeing things clearly, when it looks as if the righteous swords of law and order are nothing but sad, limp little wet noodles, and the system has no answer, and no defence? We’re hamstrung by our own rules while he is not, and what he says up there on stage is an assault on the Republic and tantamount to treason, except the enemy to whom he gives aid and comfort isn’t always foreign. What do we do?
In a world in which more than a dozen people can fall for this, can believe Trump, can believe that Hillary rapes children in the basement of a Washington pizza joint, can proclaim themselves disciples of QAnon, and chant “Lock Her Up” at the mention of any female’s name, what hope can there possibly be? When this legion of lost souls, irredeemable now, is aided and abetted by cackling oligarchs and their stuffed shirts in Congress, eager to exploit the dysfunction for their own gain, what hope can there possibly be? When a foreign dictator can not merely undermine the world’s mightiest democracy, but be caught in the act and still get away with it, what hope can there possibly be? When such vast numbers of people turn into a mob, and become crazed in a way we’ve seen before, when watching those under the spell of other totalitarian strongmen, what hope can there possibly be? When four of ten citizens sport nose rings though which any chrlatan with a line of bull can thread his rope, what hope can there possibly be?
Just yesterday I was feeling the opposite. Hope all around. But then I see this. Who is like the Beast? Who can wage war against it? You tell me how to stop him. I have no idea, or none I could suggest without having the RCMP and Secret Service pay me a visit.
I guess it’s prudent to wait until 2020 before giving up, officially, anyway. Meanwhile, round and round I go.
the needlefish 