CSotD: Under Our Noses, Behind Our Backs
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Wuerker takes advantage of a metaphor coined by Dan Tom Tomorrow Perkins in a 2017 interview with the Irish Times:
[It’s] like waking up and saying ‘I’d like a glass of water’ and then having someone spray you in the face with a fire hose. One of the biggest challenges of the Trump presidency has been coming up with something satirical that’s crazier than the things that are actually going on.
That was in Trump’s first administration, when he didn’t know the ropes and, in surrounding himself with a staff that did, had inadvertently also surrounded himself with people who did their best to confine his worst tendencies and cover his lack of discretion.
Perkins was right: Those who deal in straight-faced satire, like him and like the Onion, Tom the Dancing Bug and Andy Borowitz, are struggling to create parodies of the ongoing insanity. Work that would have elicited laughter in the past now merely rates a nod.
Wuerker is also on target: Dear Leader has figured out how to use that fire hose to create a constant, overwhelming flood of inane distractions while his loyal second-term crew works to carry out policies and actions that would shock America’s conscience if we weren’t gasping for air in that constant, heavy flow of toxic nonsense.
How loyal is Trump’s cabinet? After he watched Escape from Alcatraz on television, Trump came up with the utterly asinine, unworkable idea of re-opening that ancient prison, which sounded like some satirist mocking his tendency to spout foolish whims a wiser person would keep to himself.
The building itself, which was closed 16 years before the Clint Eastwood movie was made, is so dilapidated and outdated that there’s no possibility of fixing it up. A new prison would have to be built from scratch, on an island that has no water supply.
People with any knowledge of the place quickly pointed out that the idea was completely unworkable, even those with the tact not to say that it was completely idiotic.
Last Thursday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Attorney General Pam Bondi loyally toured the old prison to assess its viability, a publicly-funded waste of time explained in a press release that is funnier and more off-the-wall than Mike Smith’s cartoon.
Except for the fact that they were looking for another place to carry out a policy of appalling cruelty. But that’s a given, isn’t it?
It requires the skills of a contortionist to have so much destruction of the American system being carried out both under our noses and behind our backs, and Stahler marvels at how the Republican Party has unanimously kowtowed to Trump.
Better presidents have had to meet regularly with their own party members to gain approval for legislation, and often a charismatic president was paired with an experienced, pragmatic vice-president who had well-established contacts on Capitol Hill and a background in back-patting, logrolling and arm-twisting.
JD Vance was a Senator for two years. He can barely find the bathrooms in the Capitol building, much less exploit friendships and collect on debts there.
But, then, the days when senators and representatives voted their consciences and for the needs of their constituents are over. Isn’t that right, Senator Murkowski?
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has a conscience and, as Necessary recalls for us, is deeply opposed to pornography, having worked out a deal with his son to make sure neither of them accidently see bare-naked ladies and other near occasions of sin.
But when faced with the choice of punishing pedophilia or remaining loyal to Dear Leader, he avoided the Democrats’ attempt to bring up a bill releasing the Epstein files by declaring an early start to the House’s month-long vacation.
Granted, this was one time Trump did some arm-twisting, given that Johnson had earlier called for the release of the files, but then explained that he had conferred with the president.
Though perhaps it was more a case of wing-twisting, given how relieved legislators seem to have been to get out of having to vote one way or the other on the Epstein issue, and either infuriate their constituents, 79% of whom want the files released, or get on the wrong side of Dear Leader.
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and Congress isn’t the only branch of government twisting in the breeze.
We can’t count on the third branch of government acting as a control on the executive, either. It’s not just the number of victories the Trump administration has enjoyed at the Supreme Court, but the contrasting number of times lower courts have ruled against him, and the apparent inconsistencies between how the six conservatives ruled for him compared to how they ruled in cases brought by the Biden administration, sometimes with conflicting explanations of the same legal principles.
John Roberts has been called by several columnists and court-watchers the worst chief justice since Roger Taney, who ruled on the Dred Scott case, and in looking for examples, I found most of them a year or two old.
This isn’t an opinion formed in the current chaos.
Granted, some of Trump’s claims are so absurd that they give cartoonists fodder, and shortly after Trump said he never drew anything, several of his drawings emerged.
Rogers not only mocks his blatant dishonesty, but uses it to draw further attention to his suicidal lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, in which the defendants’ right of discovery should uncover whatever connections with Epstein he’s been so intent on hiding.
On the other hand, a political cartoonist who is loyal to the president also has the ability to draw attention to things, and here Benson promotes Dear Leader’s bizarre plan to institute show trials of political opponents based on nonsensical “evidence” that crumbled to dust when it was first examined.
But you don’t have to be right, or honest, to rule a compromised democracy. You only have to have the most votes, and, as Parsons says, Hate is having a very good year.
We’ll say it again: If you’d been in Germany in the ’30s, you’re doing now what you’d have done then.
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