“Yesterday, our Caesar Disgustus was observed on the White House lawn in earnest debate with a tree. The tree was having the best of it.”
----from “The Quotations of Chairman Joe”
“I am the great and powerful Oz,” shouts our Caesar Disgustus; and, like “Oz” in Baum's fiction, he is nothing more than a common carnival barker at the controls of the latest technology projecting a frightening façade. It is all about façade, for our Disgustus, bereft of knowledge, curiosity, or intelligence, is hollow to the core.
These columns are replete with evidence and have been the subject of commentary more than once. But it is important here to return to an essay written more than a year ago to put this into perspective, an essay on tRUMP's management style. (1) Disgustus, like the Great and Powerful wizard, is nothing but a hollow projection made painfully apparent in the last month as he was bitch-slapped first by Ann Coulter and then decisively by Speaker Nancy Pelosi over the foolishness on the Southern border: his temper-tantrum producing nothing after 35 days of hardship inflicted on hundreds of thousands, indeed well over a million federal employees and contractors ending with nothing, not a single dollar for the monument to himself in waiting.
But this deep-seated need to maintain this façade, this pathological need for pretense, has consequences that reach far beyond the moment.
Columnist Gail Collins is apparently about the business of holding annual, though unofficial, contest to name the worst of the worst among the rogue gallery orbiting the 'Great and Powerful Wizard'. It is one reporter's way of using satire, humor and commentary to bring attention to the depths of depravity.
And, quite a rogue's gallery it is.
“No fair just yelling “Wilbur Ross!” she writes. “Our secretary of commerce appeared to be trying to sweep the field last week when he expressed bafflement that federal workers were going to food banks during the government shut down rather than taking out loans.
“Ross also volunteered that 800,000 people going without pay for a month was only 'about a third of a percent of the G.D.P. So it's not like it's a gigantic number over all'. I am convinced he heard that a Worst contest was on the way and wanted to nail down first place,” Collins observed, (2) without once mentioning Ross' connections to the laundromat at Deutche Bank, nor his later involvement with a Cypriot bank known for laundering money for the Kremlin and the Russian mob.
But wait! Before you rush to judgment, Ross, Collins duly notes, has stiff competition.
There's Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielson, who has “enthusiastically generated false evidence to justify the president's xenophobic immigration policies, zealously executed those policies in ways that have shocked the world, and brazenly lied about both” .(3)
There's Betsy DeVos, she of SCAMWAY fame and sister of the world's most notorious mercenary. “Betsy DeVos”, writes Collins, “would certainly like to privatize the nation's public schools, but she barely seems organized enough to get dressed in the morning. Still, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, believes DeVos should get Worst points for having 'basically spent her time in that office working for everyone but the kids.” (4). As of this writing, I am unsure if she has yet to set foot in a public school—after having managed to get an education of sorts without every having done so.
Ditto for Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, whose qualifications for administering our nation's nuclear stockpile appears to have been his appearance on “Dancing with the Stars”.
“Some cabinet-watchers are discovering, to their shock, that they miss Scott Pruitt,” Collins notes, “who won last year's competition as the anti-environment head of the Environmental Protection Agency.” (5) Pruitt's misdeeds appear, like Housing Secretary Ben Carson's petty graft, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's promoting a new 'swagger seal' for the Department of State, like adolescent pranks compared to the heavy-hitters in Disgustus' line-up.
“One challenge in picking the Worst Cabinet Member is that there's so much competition” concludes Collins. “Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, ticked off Pompeo, DeVos, Nielson, Steve Mnuchin ('certainly the slimiest Treasury Secretary ever') and Housing Secretary Ben Carson”
'“But the winner is Wilbur Ross,”' Ornstein concluded. 'Lied about the citizenship question on the census. Powerful allegations of insider trading. Dissembled about his holdings before that. And wins the Marie Antoinette Award to boot.” (6) Observations that again fail to mention his involvement with some of the seediest international financial institutions on the face of the earth.
The endemic corruption in this administration serves the purpose of occasionally leading investigators, congressional committees and the press away from the stench that permeates tRUMP Tower and now the oval office. But this isn't the whole story.
There are other dimensions to the threat now facing the republic. To wit: lack of experience and qualification, and the destruction of institutional memory.
Disgustus, himself knowing nothing and famous for his inability to listen to anyone who does, has surrounded himself with those who are equally as ignorant and unqualified. Indeed, disqualifying ignorance is a bar one must slither under in order to gain admission to this White House. I present to you one Sarah Huckleberry Sanders as Exhibit One. His daughter and son-in law come immediately to mind and, as noted, his Secretary of Education had not spent a day in a public schools prior to her appointment and his Secretary of Energy's main qualification was his stint as governor of Texas and dancing with the 'stars'. Disgustus, famously, didn't appoint Senator Corker, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be Secretary of State because he was 'too short'. He didn't fit Disgustus' image of what 'central casting' would have chosen for this position.
Indeed, with very few exceptions, Disgustus sought out the most inexperienced and the most ignorant to control the levers of government precisely, one suspects, because they had no expertise and, therefore, are not in position to question his proclamations. To question, is to challenge the image projected by the Great and Powerful Oz. By surrounding himself in a vacuum of ignorance, our OZ has now encased himself in the ultimate echo chamber.
But it goes deeper still. The appointment and the legacy of Steve Bannon—another Russian Agent—lingers in this White House; for the war on the 'institutional memory' of the bureaucracy continues unabated. Nearly the entire top echelon of the Justice Department, FBI, State, and several other agencies have been destroyed.
In previous columns I have noted that every major institution survives incompetence through institutional memory. That is, the bureaucracy or Corporation is manned by technocrats and administrators that have been in place for some time. These are careerists who have climbed the ladder of the organization serving as apprentices and then able assistants to those higher in the scheme of things earning their credentials as they make their careers. Eventually, they move up, through experience and skill, honed by years of service. With them they acquire the accumulated knowledge necessary to run the ship.
Normally, when an administration takes shape between election and inauguration day, one sees paraded before the public the usual suspects who have played prominent roles in previous administrations—usually, but not always from the same party.
Not this time.
Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was tasked with putting together a tRUMP administration in the summer of 2016, should the damn fool win the election. Christie spent six months putting together a book filled with recommendations about who should be placed where. Upon election, Disgustus, dismissed Christie and threw the book away. It is commonly understood that Christie had run foul of Disgustus' son-in-law Jarred Kushner because Christie had put Kushner's father behind bars when Christie was a federal prosecutor. I don't think so. The truth is more likely to be that Disgustus found the list of appointees intimidating knowing that they would question the man behind the curtain. The result has been chaos, as the 'Great and Powerful Oz”; our all knowing and all-seeing Caesar-in-waiting, set about selecting a much less threatening group of people; underlings who may be intelligent enough to recognize his breathtaking ignorance but lacking the fortitude to demand competence. Chosen because they had no experience, Disgustus would move to erase all previous knowledge so that 'his misunderstandings, his madness' would become the new normal.
Disgustus, like Henry Ford, is wreaking destruction upon the machinery of the republic. It is not without consequence. It impairs the ability of the government to not only function normally but, more importantly—as the response to the devastation in Puerto Rico suggests—the ability of the government to respond to crises.
Look about you. America now finds itself as isolated and alone as Disgustus in the dead of night with his iPhone and Cheeseburger. Ask yourself how this ship of fools will respond to the next international crisis, be it military or financial. That should scare the hell out of you.
“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”
Impeach and Imprison
____________________
- See August 7, 2017: Hollow To The Core, Ode To Ralph, Only Confusion Now.
- Collins, Gail. “Help Pick The Worst of Trump” The New York Times. Thursday January 31, 2019: Page A23.
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
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