(The government) accused us and the other reporters of spreading falsehoods. We were politically suspect. We ought to be fired. Many of our editors doubted us. -Neil Sheehan about he and David Halberstam’s early 1960s reporting from Vietnam that the war was neither successful, nor likely to become so. Both would win Pulitzers.
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For many long weeks the stench of Illegitimacy has been spreading below the surface of American politics like oil below the Deepwater Horizon. So many geysers of sulfurous treason have now erupted that the whole Republican party smells like something dead on a hot beach. These maniacs spent nine years promising they would build a white man’s Utopia from whole cloth on their first day in office. Today they find themselves the sworn enemies of anything Jesus Christ actually died for, about to blow the best economy an American President ever inherited on entire new fleets of drunken sailors and bonded in blood by feudal debt to a savage Russian Tsar called Vlad the Knife.
In truth the only tangible achievement the Republican Party has made since they destroyed the entire global free market economy ten years ago was to replace our fear of Terrorism with new fears of Unarmed Refugees, Educated Women and Health Insurance. Never mind that every single Latin American and Middle Eastern refugee since 1950 can trace their plight directly to the destabilizing interventionism of America’s radical Neo-Conservative world agenda. Never mind that it was educated women at CIA who found Osama Bin Laden and Hillary Clinton who risked her political career to force a Democratic President to go kill him. And certainly never mind that before the reform legislation that Republican’s demonized for nine long years as “ObamaCare” came to enjoy a current 56 % - 17 % approval from the American people, it started out as “NixonCare" moved to “DoleCare” and still enjoys a shamefully unacknowledged 20 year success at the state level as “RomneyCare”.
All that really matters is this: In the current century the GOP has occupied the White House exactly twice and both times by means of getting fewer citizen votes than their opponents. They got so good at cheating they abandoned all forms of learning. This week’s collapse was the culmination of a flat decade of serious planning by their best and brightest. In terms of the news cycle; for a party that is successfully defending their President from the visible reality of abject treason by proclaiming they are all too stupid to have understood what they were doing, this week should have been an easy ride down an empty parade route. They should have been able to phone it in and still put their first ink in the Win column in thirteen un victorious years. Instead they broke all their own spines in 88 hours of debauched cannibalism and toxic dunselry.
The Republicans have not formed a new government so much as they have installed a new form of government. Their vision is founded on a kind of bizzaro-world campaign rhetoric conservatism: Those who carry the least sophistication are thrust into authority regarding the most complex governance. Those with the most fleeting attachment to stability are sent to command against the most dangerous threats to order. Those with the weakest affinity for reason are, obviously, the spokespeople.
By Thursday morning’s 1st K Street cocktails it had become globally obvious that in the 21st century every member of the Republican party have themselves also been party to a Bright Whining Lie. They have grown so full of themselves in their fakery that they can’t even get off the floor to change their own channel. A fake party filled with fake intellect driving fake competence to support fake patriotism and defend the fake Christian values of a fake electoral mandate.
In seeking to unspool the stability of Obama’s Presidency the Republicans have unhinged the ethos of Jefferson’s. In order to save us from Hillary Clinton’s village The Republicans found it necessary to destroy Ronald Reagan’s nation. To paraphrase a great speechwriter, Donald Trump’s administration is the greatest gathering of morally corrupt absurdity that has ever gathered in the White House. With the possible exception of when Ulysses S. Grant drank alone.
This is undeniably the most bizarrely failed season of leadership in American political history. If anyone in the GOP still believes this is “Morning in America” they have exactly eighteen months to explain what in the name of John Wayne’s whiskey they were doing the night before. The rest of us will have to find solace in another kind of reality. In consolation for being criminally cheated out of the sane leadership an honest election seemed certain to produce we will now watch a drunk slob in a clown suit get kicked in the balls all day long until the Russian tanks arrive to collect Putin’s vig.
If Jimmy Breslin is looking down from the H.L. Mencken Bar and Grill in Heaven he will note that the incredible shrinking Presidency of Putin’s Trump is about to be labelled a permanent failure by everyone with a keyboard and cheap wifi. (Thanks for the career Jimmy, you will forever be memorialized as the answer whenever some kid asks how we survived without Twitter for so long).
Ninety four days into America’s new tyranny of the absurd it has become clear that the Republicans can no more succeed as leaders of the free world than their President can succeed in crossing the ocean on a bicycle made of gold. Fake or real, Journalism has only one question left to ask: When the President of the United States is impeached for treason will his usurping Supreme Court appointee resign or just be quietly hanged in front of the Washington Monument with the others?
Ride for the High Country