Donald tRUMP is much more than a national
embarrassment; he is a national obscenity"
----from "The
Quotations of Chairman Joe"
Following the election, Time magazine published a cover photo of Donald tRUMP over which
was written the headline “President of the Divided States of America”. And so, he is.
To be fair to our Caesar Disgustus he did not
create these divisions but, like any Rescumlican worthy of the name, he has
done his level best to exploit them.
Divisions of race, class, geography; black and brown vs. white, rich vs
the rest of us, town vs country and the coasts vs the interior ‘heartland’. Many of these divisions have been eternally
with us bedeviling the republic since before its inception, race and class
being a legacy of our colonial heritage.
tRUMP, as Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes before him has been the happy
beneficiary of the politics of divide and rule; but the divisions now are so
marked and run so deep as to fragment the very foundations of the republic
itself.
Again, it is hard to lay responsibility for
all this upon the sorry head of Disgustus.
The Democrats, by encouraging international trade agreements and ‘free
markets’ as well as whoring after the moneyed interests on Wall Street have now
become the party of the coastal states.
Is it any wonder then that one would find Obama pushing the secret TPP
as well as an equally secret European trade deal, despite clearly predictable
consequences for the middle class and what is left of organized labor? The Democrats have likewise become a party
ossified by layers of special interests representing narrow bands of the
electorate and increasingly narrower bands of national territory. It is not mere happenstance that upon
election the first casualty of the Obama administration was Democratic Party
Chairman Howard Dean who had envisioned and worked assiduously to broaden the
party’s popular and geographic support, taking the Democrats deep within
Republican territory. Instead new
leadership in the form of Tim Kaine assumed control, an alumnus of the
Clinton-led DLC and firm believer in transforming the Democrats into America’s
second Rescumlican Party. The results
where wholly predictable with Americans consistently opting, when given the
choice, for the genuine article—as in the last presidential election. Again, tRUMP had nothing to do with these
developments, but he was the happy beneficiary thereof.
What tRUMP did do was conduct himself in such
a manner as to demean the process by which we choose who will represent us, and
now threatens to demean the process by which we govern.
The tragedy of 2016 was clearly demonstrated
by the second presidential debate featuring tRUMP fresh from allegations of
serially sexually abusing several women facing the Clintons with several of
Bill’s paramours featured prominently in the audience looking on. The national tragedy was that neither of
these aging “Boomers” could, unlike, for instance, the far more qualified Gary
Hart, be shamed from the national stage.
Instead the nation was forced to endure what became an openly
pornographic contest for the nation’s highest office; a contest which tRUMP did
his level best to lose but, unfortunately for the nation and perhaps the world,
lost the race to the bottom by an even more suspect opponent. Indeed, on election day more people trusted
Disgustus than our former First Lady.
The damage done to our politics by such a
spectacle is difficult to measure but it is becoming increasingly clear that
the longer this ‘Generation of Swine’ has its hands about the throat of the
republic, the greater the risk of its survival.
tRUMP is the quintessential “Boomer”,
willfully ignorant, narcissistic, paranoid, thin-skinned, self-serving, greedy
and with a propensity to vandalize whatever he touches. He is, in fact, the ‘Boomer’s” end game; a
national obscenity and now titular head of a movement hell-bent upon, perhaps,
destroying the republic itself.
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