December 26, 2018: Our Intrepid Disgustus, Swallowed a Rat, Trembling on Twitter

On Christmas Eve, our intrepid Disgustus was found deep in the bowels of the White House twitting out the message: “So alone, so sad...”

It is quite fitting that Disgustus should so find himself: alone with his cheeseburger, his wife and children having long since fled the residence seeking asylum elsewhere; for the culmination of a half century of Boomer Vandalism is reaching its predictable crescendo.

Gone now are his chief advisers, for the adults have left the room. First it was national security adviser H.R. McMaster then, in recent weeks, John Kelly and now Defense Secretary 'Mad Dog' Mattis, all military generals, all competent at management, all of at least a modicum strategic thinking, all adults and now all gone.

Disgustus now has no one around him with the expertise, experience or understanding about how a government operates and, as the skein of governance begins to unravel, there is now no one to step in and manage the crisis.

So now we have a government shut down. It is ostensibly over a dispute about building a damn wall on the Mexican border but it is about much more than that. Eight hundred thousand employees are now either on furlough or working and not being paid, among them TSA officers who stand guard at our airports and traffic control agents manning the control towers.

The imbroglio began as the Congress, still under ReSCUMlickan control, passed by a wide margin and with bipartisan support, spending bills that would fund the government until February giving the new Congress a few weeks to negotiate a resolution over the damned wall. Disgustus had signed on to the proposals promising to sign the legislation. Then Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter stepped in condemning the 'president' for caving in to the Democrats—overlooking the cooperation of the ReSCUMlickan members of Congress who signed on to the measures—with Coulter—ever the 'praying mantis' awaiting to strike (1), declaring that if tRUMP didn't veto the measure his presidency would be a joke, it would be over.

Disgustus, trembling took to twitting from his toilet, that he would not sign the legislation and so several agencies of the federal government have now run out of money, among them the Coast Guard, the Transportation Safety Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Food and Drug Administration. How this action is going to make us safer in a fight over safety has not yet penetrated the dense skull of our breathtakingly ignorant chief executive.

The nation has devoured a rat., In yet another act of vandalism, perpetrated by the “Generation of Swine”, the nation now finds itself in yet another shutdown. I make this charge because tRUMP's support, fewer and full of labor, is becoming ever more white, and ever more aged. Disgustus from the beginning has represented and increasingly represents the last gasp of the “Generation of Swine”; and, as the rat moves through the bowels of the body politic, it is finding ever more toxic means of devouring its host.

As we bid a fair adieu to 2018, let's take stock of the half century that the cancer that is the American Conservative Movement has had upon the republic.

We are now as far from 1968—that year in which the consensus forged by the New Deal came under frontal assault by the acolytes of Barry Goldwater and Ayn Rand—as we were then from the end of the First World War. From 1918, to 1968, the country had moved from horse drawn artillery and the model T Ford to sending men to the moon; from rural to urban America. From hardscrabble hardship of the working classes to a large and controlling middle class. But the next fifty years gave us a space program reduced to low altitude circling of the earth, and an assault on the middle class that now threatens the very foundation of the republic. As the top one percent absconds with the wealth generated by labor, the country increasingly represents societies held together by potentates in control of the military. So serious has it become that even the validity of our elections are becoming increasingly questionable as the nation careens down the the scale toward a bona fide banana republic.

I have written extensively about this in these columns, pointing out the importance of a large and controlling middle class as necessary for the function of a true republic. It is an idea as old as Aristotle for a middle class acts as a buffer between the political extremes, forcing the moderation and compromise necessary to a republic. (2)

And now the cancer is spreading to a global scale as the Boomers, driving the conservative movement, have taken us out of global agreements on climate change, forced a withdrawal of the United States from arms agreements with Russia and Iran, and declared war on every major international institution from the United Nations to N.A.T.O., to trade agreements. While it is true that there comes a time when adjustments in these arrangements need to be made, an all out frontal assault upon institutions that have kept the peace for nearly a century is beyond ill-advised, it is needlessly reckless.

Disgustus represents the last hurrah of a generation of vandals. His appeal does not lie in his interpersonal skills, it lies in his lack of them. The 'Swine” love him because he is the ultimate boar. He never fails to satisfy the generational impulse to stick its thumb in the eye of authority. They love him precisely because he's a horse's ass; because he can be relied upon, when arriving at a formal function, to piss in the fireplace.

A half century ago we stood sure-footed and foursquare, astride the world ready to explore the universe. Today we find ourselves deeply paranoid; huddled alone with one hand trebling on twitter and the other holding a badly abused cheeseburger.

“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”

Impeach and Imprison.

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1. For previous treatment of Coulter see: September 30, 2007: I Stink Therefore I Am, Polythene Ann, False Pearls Before Real Swine”, also September 20, 2015: “See The Old Hag, Dressed In Conservative Drag, The Damage Done”: for Limbaugh: June 18, 2015: “The Great Boar, Losing His Squeal, Better For It”, among others.
   
2. See, for instance: September 14, 2015: “To Sustain A Republic, Wealth Must Be Distributed, The Middle Class Must Have Wealth”.