 The Invisible Hand is rooting around in the national cookie jar,
and Donald Trump has crumbs all over the front of his shirt. The
Republican Party has, in decades past, operated with some
measure of decorum by concealing its cravings for autocracy with
elaborate unproven theories and policy misdirection.
Trickle-down economics and small government rhetoric have served
them well in the past, but now our rising tide has only served
to draw the flotsam and jetsam of a predatory and intellectually
bankrupt party into power.
And as the last of the GOP old-guard tacticians shuffle off the
dais looking haggard and defeated, no sentient American can
stomach the prospect of an American government led by the GOP’s
current slough of ignominious grunters.
In the last 20 years, as the Republican Party coarsened and
gradually morphed into the party of saying the quiet parts out
loud, something extraordinary happened. Something breathtaking,
in fact. Republicans fell in love with its Cold War foe, The
Evil Empire. While Ronald Reagan inveighed against the USSR in
his Evil Empire Speech to the House of Commons in 1982, he asked
rhetorically:
“It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any
people prefer dictatorship to democracy. Who would voluntarily
choose not to have the right to vote, decide to purchase
government propaganda handouts instead of independent
newspapers, prefer government to worker-controlled unions, opt
for the land to be owned by the state instead of those who till
it, want government repression of religious liberty, a single
political party instead of a free choice, a rigid cultural
orthodoxy instead of democratic tolerance and diversity?”
Indeed. Who? Maybe we should ask Alexei Navalny whether he finds
dictatorship superior to democracy. But, tragically, he’s dead
now. How about investigative reporter, Malik Akhmedilov, or
Chechen politician, Ruslan Alikhadzhiyev? Both dead. The list of
political opponents that Russia’s President for Life has had
murdered by poisoning, shooting, or simply tossing out the
window is enormous, and we’re only at the A’s.
But now, 42 years after Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party is
somehow all about strong man idolatry and the virtues of
totalitarianism with a side-line of cheesy swindles, including
pillows and baseball cards. It’s as if the GOP is center stage
in a newly updated production of Mel Brooks’s, “The Producers”
where Donald Trump is the swindling Max Bialystock who sells
25,000% of his new, guaranteed to flop, Broadway show to his
regular investors so he can take the money and run. And the part
of Max’s accountant, Leo Bloom, is played by Trump’s real life
accountant, Allan Weiselberg - late of Riker’s Island. So it’s
“Springtime for Hitler” at polling places across the nation,
because this former anti-totalitarian political party can no
longer pass the Mirror Test as it Busby Berkeleys its way across
America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca7063tXIP4
“Don’t be stupid, be a smartie. Come and join the Nazi Party.”
America is experiencing a national code red, as it stumbles
toward November to select a new president. But before we vote,
it would be very helpful for all of us to remember that Bill
Barr, Trump’s former Attorney General, in his most sonorous
Neville Chamberlain voice reassured the nation in 2019 that the
Mueller Report had effectively exonerated the president. He was,
of course, lying.
How could this have happened? And why hasn’t anyone told us that
the Mueller Report was anything but an exoneration of Donald
Trump? Now, we have to pack up our stuff and move because
America is about to be sold off to a bunch of comic book
villains who imprison and brutally murder all opponents - while
promising that we’ll love what they do with the place.
And like all aspiring Presidents for Life, Trump has neutralized
all institutions capable of thwarting his plans, while purging
the Republican Party of all people capable of challenging him.
All that’s left in the GOP is the flotsam and jetsam –
politicians who couldn’t possibly get a job anywhere else.
But the worst part is that The Evil Empire managed to sneak into
our voting apparatus, our cyber security apparatus, our media
and its coverage of the 2016 Presidential election, and the
entirety of our Republican Congress because….
Donald Trump invited them in.
For the price of a brand licensing deal and another monstrous
Trump Tower in downtown Moscow, America was sold out from
beneath us. So much for “The Wealth of Nations”. So much for
Adam Smith, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson; so much for
those who fought and died in WWII; so much for The New Deal and
Martin Luther King. So much for the Cold War. And so much for
democracy.
To say that we have been fiddling while Rome burns is like
saying “Don’t worry, it’ll miss us” during an asteroid strike.
So, as we endlessly debate which presidential candidate is too
old to serve, or whether the Supreme Court is biased for Donald
Trump – as we fret about our nation’s backsliding on immigration
and abortion policy or whether to send funds to Ukraine – it
would be nice if we remember that some things are, indeed, worth
fighting for here at home. Because a dictatorship is unbearable
even for one day.
Image: “Still a Pig”, Leah Sauliner |
