August 29, 2017: Beware of Darkness, Faux Populism, Herding the Swine

“Watch out now

Take care, beware
Of greedy leaders
They take you where
You should not go”

                            ----George Harrison “Beware of Darkness”

Last week’s departure of Steve Bannon from the White House was celebrated on nearly all sides as a move toward sanity.  The adults have finally triumphed, it is earnestly held, and now the Rescumlicans can move on to the real business at hand, which is always cutting the tax rates imposed upon their benefactors and paymasters.

Bannon had always been a cruel joke, a national embarrassment.  The darling of the Mercers, Bannon had commandeered tRUMP’s presidential campaign as it reeled from the emerging duel embarrassments of Paul Manafort and the ‘pussy-grabbing’ tapes, lending it enough of a ‘populist’ narrative to secure narrow victories in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania thereby winning the Electoral College and, with it, the presidency.  But it was always a ‘faux’ populism, emerging as it did from the darling of a hedge-fund manager and the political party of Wall Street financiers.  For no matter, what was being said about the return of good paying jobs and infrastructure investments, the real agenda of the Rescumlican Party, since its inception, has always been about comforting the comfortable. Lincoln and Stanton were, after all, renowned railroad and corporate attorneys. 

No sooner had Bannon been banished than Disgustus could be found once again on the anti-social media ‘twitting’ away his presidency by calling out the Rescumlicans in congress for failure to repeal ObamaCare; once again on the campaign trail this time in Arizona calling out and criticizing its two Rescumlican senators; and on the phone with several Rescumlican senators demeaning them for not adequately defending him and protecting him from the ongoing Russian investigations.  In sum, it is difficult to tell, as of this writing, that Bannon is gone.

I suspect he isn’t.  For Bannon is a bit of a queer bird: a conservative at war with the conservative movement.  Bannon is said to represent the ‘base’ of the movement as it has morphed from a loose coalition of religious evangelicals and Wall Street financiers to now include a strong contingent of White Nationalists, crypto-fascists and Neo-Nazi’s marching under the guise of a ‘populist’ banner.  These people have little in common with main-line religious fundamentalists and loathe Wall Street and international financiers-- with the single possible exception of another queer duck: Robert Mercer.

It appears to this observer that Bannon, like nearly all of tRUMP’s appointees, was ill-suited for his appointed tasks—and no more obviously than his short stint on the National Security Council, an act almost on par with Caligula’s appointment of a horse to the Roman Senate.  Bannon’s role in life is as provocateur, not administrator.  But Disgustus, never able to tell the difference, judged him the man of the hour. 

Now Bannon returns to “Stale-Fart” News to once again lay hold of his weapons and the West Wing breathed a sigh of relief.  It was a short-lived respite.  For while General Kelly is said to have gained control of the paperwork, we find Disgustus openly waging Steve Bannon’s war upon the Rescumlican establishment. 

Bannon immediately announced that the tRUMP presidency, from the point of view of achieving any of the agenda that his ‘movement’ represents is over.  He has returned to his role as rabble-rouser, provocateur, and cattle-prod hoping to herd the swine toward some white nationalist restoration.  Disgustus, however, now finds himself face-to-face with his real mistress: greed.  Having assembled a cabinet based entirely upon greed and the service thereof, and having swallowed whole Paul Ryan’s philosophy of greed, Disgustus is now the puppet of the very forces that he so recently vanquished:  greedy leaders, about to take us where we should not go.

Impeach and Imprison.