Love trumps hate: to slay the regressive, 40-million-headed Medusa of racist/misogynistic/anti-government hatred, just VOTE!

When you take some deep breaths and reflect -- say, for example, on the dire straits we're in at this forward edge of American history -- understanding starts to crystallize around a few long-running strands.  The strands are long, inter-winding roots running back through time to the same original fundament. 

 

That fundament is the one to which our so-called American patriots nominally pay homage when justifying their cornered-rat opposition to every step of progress over the last 227 or so years: the Founding Fathers' design for democracy, with liberty and equal justice under the law for all.  The false patriots fondly remember the glory of revolutionary days, but they want to erase all the evolutionary dawnings of new days that have brought new definitions of many terms in that original design, now to include even "fathers".  They want to forget that inherent in that prescient original design was the expectation of and structure for evolutionary change. 

We are about to find out whether this nation, or any nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality, will survive half the nation acting in staunch opposition to progress.  Every serious commentator agrees that we are now engaged in a political civil war that threatens to undo everything that took 250+ years to grow. 

Trumpites (and those who say they'll hold their noses and vote for him) are holding on hysterically to a time and place wherein white men's lives were the ones that mattered more than others'.  Their own party lied to them for decades about how they'd get their country back again, and now they're raring to "turn [the government] upside-down" -- presumably to restore to the top of the heap the rightful owners and restore the darker people and the "fairer sex" to their rightful place, underneath.    

The willingness of half the electorate to place their perceived interests as well as their grievances and prejudices above the very survival of our Constitutional democratic national union has been breathtaking and continuously mind-boggling.  This massively exploding enmity certainly approaches the state of the disunion that finally breached the line between politics and treasonous violence at Ft. Sumter in 1860.  

These observations aren't any big insight, I know.  I'm just putting into my own words what's in plain sight.  Since that is the common sense of the moment we're in, I believe a campaign message speaking directly to that shared sense of imminent risk could move people in these last few days.  I wish I had a line into the Clinton campaign to suggest that they create a TV spot showing Lincoln's memorial, then zooming in to his chiseled face, then panning up to the words carved into the wall above him, resting on the last paragraph: 

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

This election hinges entirely on turnout, especially Latino and African-American turnout.  That's why the scum of the earth are talking about intimidation tactics to deter them from showing up.   In fact, though, most cities are run by Dems, so there is no excuse for any of the demi-nazis to get away with pulling any intimidation they may try.  In Philly I trust Jim Kenney to have extra cops on call.  With clubs and cuffs.  

And speaking of Philly, that's where the nexus of the political universe will be on Monday night, Election Day eve.  Hillary and Bill, Barack and Michelle will be here together for the climactic GOTV extravaganza. 

Yes, getting out the vote in Southeastern Pennsylvania may be the most consequential determinant of the fate of the election and the world (not in the least an exaggeration, btw**).   According to the strategists, pundits and pols, African-American turnout is the key to this thing.  As Obama told Al Sharpton yesterday, now is the time to demand full participation -- as much as was demanded in '08 and '12.  

So the choice of Philadelphia is strategic, but it's also evocative and symbolic.  It's meant to evoke the exhilaration and inspiration of what happened here in July, 2016.  The DNC lit up the sky and sent Hillary's numbers in the same direction.  

As for symbolism, the city is the birthplace of what is now in jeopardy.  I expect that meaning to be written large in Monday night's speeches; this turning point will have a place among all the peak moments.     

** Whether one is a minority member, a millenial, or a Bernie voter, to abstain now or to vote as if Hillary is as dangerous a choice as the p***y-grabber is to blind oneself to the consequences.  So here are two great links that speak to this monumentally important distinction.  The first features Daveed Diggs speaking primarily to millenials about the concrete, immediate impact of a Trump presidency compared to a Clinton presidency.  He starts with climate change and Trump's promise to annul the U.S.'s commitment to the Paris Accords on Day One.  In an MTV-ish high-energy format,  Diggs explains for fellow millenials why voting in this election is the most important thing they may ever do.  

This next one is a "We Are The World" retake called Holy Shit!   TV stars and celebs sing to exhort us to get the hell out and vote.  They swear so much and so bad that they have to make up new epithets because even the most not-allowed-on-TV curse words fall short of the revulsion to be expressed ("sentient septic tank" is the least filthy).  They sing in solidarity with the profound frustration we all feel that words just don't exist to express the disdain and disgust that this utter schmuck (see?) and his devotees fire up in us. 

Also it's convulsively funny and downright historically insightful, so just flow with the joyous vulgarity.  In 2012 it was "One More Day", in 2016 it's Holy Shit! 

And so it goes.


 P.s.  The Cubs in Game 7 built huge, insurmountable leads, and then the Indians surmounted the lead and drew dead even in the 9th inning.  Cleveland had all the momentum.  After a rain delay, during which the Cubs decided out loud not to let a little bump in the road keep them from reaching their goal, they came back and scored twice to retake the lead in the 10th.  They were the best team, and they won.

That's what I'm talkin' about!

.

                                                                              Keystone Progress Daily FunniesP.p.s. 

Speaking of Abe... 

Courtesy of Reader Supported News, which merits financial support from progressives for its much-needed journalistic resources, its integrity and its independence.

Fox: New Evidence Hillary Killed Lincoln

By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker

30 October 16

The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."

In what may be the most serious allegation ever made against the former Secretary of State, Fox News Channel reported today that Hillary Clinton was involved in the conspiracy to murder President Abraham Lincoln.

The latest charge against Mrs. Clinton was reported by Fox host Sean Hannity, who said that the evidence of her role in the Lincoln assassination came mainly in the form of e-mails.

According to Mr. Hannity, “If it’s true that Hillary Clinton killed Lincoln, this could have a major impact on her chances in 2016.”

The accusation against Mrs. Clinton drew a strong response from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R.—S. Carolina): “There’s been a concerted effort by Hillary Clinton to cover up her role in President Lincoln’s murder. She has said nothing about it. This is bigger than Watergate, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Second World War put together.”

Responding to the allegation, Mrs. Clinton issued a terse statement indicating that she could not have participated in Lincoln’s assassination because she was born in 1947.

“That’s what she wants us to believe,” Sen. Graham said.

Hill-Bern in New York: Of revisionist lenses, one who came and one who left

I'm anxious to pivot from Bernie-busting to Hillary-hiking, to shift away from venting my spleen and voiding my rheum (that's what Antonio used to do on Shylock's beard on the Rialto, btw) in reflexive anger at Bernie's demonizing of Hillary.  I want to accentuate the positive now.  And that's what I'm mainly up to with this.

But first, I want to address this phase of the primary campaign before it fades into background -- fades but at the same time leaves a hidden, and so indelible, mark on our psyches for or against some candidate or other.  By "this phase" I refer to the one wherein Bernie and -- in a fascinatingly timely coincidence that begs a question of where the impetus originated -- some very loud Black Lives Matter-ers have managed to get the media obsessed with the notion that Hillary Clinton is at the root of all mass incarceration of poor minority youth and adults who are in the most imprisoned population of any country in the world.

Hmmm.  Last night I walked into the bedroom around 11, and the Ken Burns bio-doc of Jackie Robinson was on PBS.  It was the second part, starting near the end of the playing years and then on to his death.  I didn't really want to watch it then, but Yona did, so I naturally got all immersed in it; Yona drifted off to sleep.  It was very moving when it became the story of Jackie's devotion to the fight for for civil rights.  This was all new learning for me, his engagement with MLK and his trips to hot spots like Birmingham during the voter registration battles and the church bombings.

Now here's the thing that connects with the Bernie-Hillary wars: I was smacked inside my head by the eventual repudiation by some of Jackie Robinson's unrele nting, authentically heroic engagement in the fight for freedom and equality.  That is, some vocal Black Power radicals in the 60's tarred Robinson as an "Uncle Tom" when Jackie spoke against violence and separatism.  They said he'd made himself subservient to the white man as a player and after baseball in his work and political life. 

In their righteous anger and frustration, in their new-found radical ideology of power and rejection of the establishment ways, they had abandoned the reflective capacity to see and appreciate, in the context of Robinson's own time, the challenges he faced down, his incredible accomplishments and his contribution to the emerging assertion of and belief in the full equality of black people -- i.e., in black people's self-perceptio n as well as white people's.  To me the ultimate measure of his devotion was that he died of a heart attack at the age of 53.  He had volunteered for as stressful a life as I can imagine.  

So now there is a parallel attempt from the left and some BLM zealots to slur Hillary as an oppressor of black people because she once referred to certain criminals in the black community as "superpredators" and because her husband signed a crime bill that had the result of putting more people in jail for longer times with less services and training.  According to the Hill-haters on the left, her years of arduous legal entrepreneurship and compassion-driven activism in the South mean abso-fecking-lutely nothing, less than nothing, because she "betrayed" those bedrock accomplishments by supporting Bill's crime bill. 

There is a strong strain among those inspired by the post-Ferguson movement for justice that seeks to rewrite history, to judge yesterday's words and actions by today's standards, by today's ethos.  For example, students brought Princeton University to crisis over the legacy of Princeton's past-president Woodrow Wilson.  (Just realized why it's never referred to by its acronym, PU.)  W.W. undeniably was a racist 100 years ago, and so they said his name must be expunged from the school or else the institution would be guilty of the same racism in 2015.  Sanity did prevail, as did the voices of many alumni.  To honor Wilson for the great developments he wrought as university president, as well as POTUS thereafter, did not imply condoning that he was a racist in a society that accepted prejudice even in the highest office.  At Princeton, more constructive ways have been collaboratively determined to bring the community to a higher level of sensitivity and understanding to move toward a deeper and truer integration and unification.

I've said before that I believe Hillary has changed over time along with the country.  The far left's conflation of Bill and Hillary, of Bill's presidency with the one they assume Hillary would create, is rooted in the same kind of anger-borne, frustration-pitched failure of perspective as the Uncle-Tom bomb thrown at Jackie Robinson and the attempts to rewrite history in the present.  Bill was compromised at best in his progressivism.  He led the repeal of Glass-Steagall.  Empathy was there, but not always reflected in governance. 

On the other hand, there was still the Reagan ethos in America, the Gingrich Contract [on] America; Bill played ball with the right.  There was, however, peace and job growth. The progressive voice pretty much wasn't heard in public.  

When Hillary spoke back then of super-predators, she wasn't talking about Willie Horton.  She was talking about people who terrorized black neighborhoods in inner cities.  Still, though crime victims were/are as disproportionately black as those arrested, the problem was that the politics made it possible to pass the lock-em-up part of the intiative but less so the bring-em-up-right/education/training/jobs/treatment part.  The 1994 Crime Bill, trimmed of the latter component by Repubicans, was recognized by many -- e.g., the NAACP -- as a bad bill for poor/black communities because it increased policing and incarcerations and did little to address constructively the socio-economic incubating conditions of crime as a livelihood/subculture.  Problem was, as explained in http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/opinion/did-blacks-really-endorse-the-1994-crime-bill.html?_r=0, the Repubicans used all the power they had to strip out funds and programs to scaffold pathways toward productive self-support.  

Twenty-six of the 38 black House members voted for that 1994 bill, judging that, with its cruel imbalances, this was the best deal they'd be likely to get.  (One of those 26 members, Rep. Rush of Chicago, said today on a TV interview that he is "ashamed of that vote".  I understand his saying that, but I believe he's burdening himself with the same revision of historical context.  Yes, dammit, we now know that that whole approach was insane and inhumane -- not to mention racist, venal and cruel -- but in hindsight we know for sure that it is not only an ineffective and extremely counterproductive attempt to address the problems of inner city society, not only has it failed and crippled many lives and families, but it's also created this huge sick problem of mass incarceration. So the pendulum has finally swung, and this only after seven years of having a black man in the White House, recently the first POTUS to sit and talk with inmates in a federal penitientiary.  So let's not trivialize or wipe away the meaningful differences between 22 years ago and now.)   

Looking back to the end of Bill's administration, how ready was the country then to reject trickle-down Reaganite Calvinist ideology powered by the Southern (racist) strategy?  Not so much; we elected friggin W, TWICE.  It was in those eight long years of slow mudslide ending in massive collapse that the tide started to rise for change, social, political and economic.   Pot, marriage equality, Lily Ledbetter, troop withdrawals, Rachel Maddow...

And now, now we're talking about prison reform, about all kinds of alternatives to locking people up, and it is jarring to me now to hear mainstream media commentary talking about the amazing revelation that our correctional systems have been designed to punish and not to rehabilitate and re-integrate!  No effin' duh!  I was visiting prisons for work in the '90's, and these truths were then self-evident to the naked eye. Today in Philly was just announced a $3.5M grant to reduce the prison population*. (*see Inqy article at the end) 

SO.  Bernie's weaponizing of the term "super-predator" against Hillary in attempting to impair her standing with African-Americans in New York is disingenuous, since he voted for the friggin 1994 bill.  But so are Hillary's lame attempts to attach Bernie's pro-gun votes to New York's gun crimes, so maybe we call it politics.  However, Bernie's attacks on Hillary's character by his incessantly implying that she does the bidding of Wall Street because some Wall Street people donate to her campaign and to pro-Hill PAC's are getting very frayed and off-putting.  Yeah, Bern, we also heard about the Iraq War vote, two dozen times... He dropped the same old dimes tonight at his yuge Washington Square rally around the corner from Eli's old place on 8th St.   Show us examples, Bernie, of Hillary's having acted as a senator or as Secretary of State to bend to the will of corpoorate donors against the best interests of the people.  Then I'll listen.

And the smears from the left that she betrayed her own good works as First Lady, that she is not a caring and progressive person at heart, and that the 90's are determinative of a 2017 Hillary presidency, all of that thinking reflects a choice to see what one wishes to see and to blind oneself to the profound changes that open us to new possibilities. 

Now the pivot to the positive!  The New York Daily News endorses Secretary Clinton for POTUS.  It's a good read at http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/vote-hillary-clinton-article-1.2598171.  The editorial fleshes out a strong, unambivalent pro-Hillary case, including Hillary's practicable and clearly conceived plans for rebuilding the middle class, closing the inequality gap for all income levels, investing in infrastructure, taking a series of grounded, doable steps toward progress.  It also points out her seasoning in international relationships and her strategic problem-solving experience in a crazy and dangerous world.   Bernie's assessment in the piece: he's a "fantasist" whose blueprints for his utopian visions all come down to 1) creating a "revolution" and 2) "trust me". 

The concluding lines go like this:

"Clinton’s proposals are shaped for the world in which we live, not the world in which we might wish to live. By any stretch of the imagination — except that of Sanders — they stand as the highflying progressive wish list of a results-driven candidate.

"Head to head exclusively on those terms — which are the fundamental terms of their debate — the former First Lady, senator and secretary of state promises to be a true Democratic champion."

* $3.5M for city to cut jail count

Phila. was selected from among 191 applicants for the grant to reduce its prison population.

By Chris Hepp STAFF WRITER

Philadelphia has been awarded a $3.5 million MacArthur Foundation grant to fund an aggressive plan to reduce its prison population by 34 percent over three years while addressing racial bias across the criminal justice system.

If the plan is successful, Philadelphia would offer a national model for criminal justice reform while ending its dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate of any big city in the nation.

“It is a bold and ambitious plan that is also sound, practical, and reasonable,” said Laurie Garduque, director of the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation justice reform program. “In terms of the kinds of changes Philadelphia needs to make, it rose to the top.”

The foundation chose Philadelphia from among 191 applicants, including New York City, Los Angeles, and Houston, for what is its largest justice reform award this year.

“This is a huge achievement that we have been selected,” said Julie Wertheimer, chief of staff for the city’s deputy managing director for criminal justice and director of the grant project. “It provides us an opportunity to continue the work we have been doing, and it shows that a third party, a respected national foundation, believes we can achieve our goals, which go beyond reducing the prison population. Equally important is having a more fair and just criminal justice system.”

With the grant, which is being announced Wednesday, the city will employ a variety of strategies to keep appropriate nonviolent offenders out of the criminal justice system, move those already in prison more quickly back to the community, and use alternatives to incarceration for others.

The plan relies in part on diversion programs, alternatives to cash bail, and early intervention by public defenders, police, and mental-health professionals. To reduce racial inequities, there will be bias training across the criminal justice system.

The plan’s success requires unprecedented cooperation among the numerous and often competing entities that make up the criminal justice system.

“There is absolutely no question that where the rubber meets the road will be in the implementation of what the grant promises,” said Benjamin Lerner, the deputy managing director for criminal justice, who in the past has led the Defenders Association and served as a Common Pleas Court judge. “But we can do it. I’ve never seen, in 40 years in this system, this degree of collaboration.”

The city’s winning proposal was the product of a months-long effort — one that straddled two mayoral administrations — by representatives of the District Attorney’s Office, Police Department, Managing Director’s Office, Defenders Association, Philadelphia Prisons, and the city’s courts.

They set out to attack one of the city’s most intractable problems — a burdensome prison population that now stands in excess of 7,000.

According to the grant proposal, city inmates are held in custody an average of 95 days, four times the national average. Sixty percent are simply awaiting trial. Seventy-two percent are black, in a city where 54 percent of the population is black.

The MacArthur proposal would address that racial disparity in a number of ways, including system-wide training to identify and avoid bias.

The city’s police, beyond bias training, would receive guidance in using the civil rather than criminal code when confronted with low-level nonviolent violations such as public drinking and smoking on SEPTA platforms, according to Mark Houldin, policy director at the Defender Association.

Rather than arrest, violators would face citations.

In addition, two adjoining police districts with high rates of minority incarceration will be chosen to train officers in identifying low-risk offenders who would be better served by mental-health or substance-abuse treatment than arrest.

The MacArthur proposal also provides a range of strategies to reduce the overall number of inmates.

Those include developing an objective way to identify defendants unlikely to miss court appearances and thus good candidates for release; increasing the use of alternatives to bail, such as house arrest and GPS monitoring; and providing earlier intervention by public defenders to improve a defendant’s chance of being released on low or no bail.

The city will expand felony diversion programs for those arrested for selling drugs, including crack cocaine and heroin. Many of those arrested for such crimes are nonviolent offenders with no previous history of felonies.

“We are being very deliberate in who we target, because we want this program to work,” said Derek Riker, chief of the diversion unit for the District Attorney’s Office. “We want to be sure we are targeting the right individuals, those who would be amenable to changing their life.”

The total cost of the project is $6.1 million, of which $2.1 million will be covered by the city. The remaining $500,000 will be raised from private sources, Wertheimer said.

Keir Bradford-Grey, chief defender of the Defenders Association, offered her summation of the project’s aspirations.

“We want to make sure we are not making people more desperate by coming into the system, to make sure we are fundamentally fair,” she said. “I am optimistic we can have a system that the public can trust, that they can rely on. I think we can do more than just reduce the prison population. We can have an outcome that will be even better.” chepp@phillynews.com

Teetering on the edge of D.J. de Trumpville's Great American Rabbit Hole

Holy Revelations and Armageddons!  The madness, the delusions, the violence, the hatred, the paranoia, the mistrust and fury at authority-tradition-precedent-convention-the rule of law; crashes and clashes of classes, generations, civilizations!  Are we falling into the rabbit hole of an id-ridden primary-process reality, or can we save ourselves from such a fall? 

Yesterday I spent some quality time talking politics with my father-in-law Will, who was already a sentient teenager during the maelstrom of the 1930's.  "They called Hitler a clown, too," he said.  That is, when Adolf was just starting to become publicly known as a gesticulating rouser of rabble.  Looking through the telescope of history through the mind's eye of someone who lived it, I had a shiver run through my gut over the mixture of nationalism, bigotry and brutality that Trump has been feeding anger-fueled masses at his campaign rallies. 

The media can't give Americans enough of the TV reality of watching a xenophobic racist jingoist narcissist, speaking from a third-rate sit-com script, being taken seriously.  The threat of Trump as a presidential possibility -- a campaign once confidently viewed by pundits as being a surefire flop, à la Springtime for Hitler --now ain't funny even a li'l bit.  It worries me enough today to put aside the dismissive "Drumpf" out of caution engendered by Will's reflection on the '30's.  

Matt Taibbi reflects that shivery, haunting sense of 80-year-old dejà vu in his most recent RSN op-ed on the scary sight of Trumpism's mass delusions seeping from the angry white know-nothing margins into the Repubican mainstream.  A few governors and a few congressmen now stand behind him, but more and more are saying they'll "support the eventual nominee", code for capitulating to the will of the rabble.  Most sane people (i.e., present company) have been see-sawing back and forth in our minds and our conversations between being appalled at the reality-TV lowlifery of it all, sort of a repugnant fad that we regard as "out there", and being deeply concerned about the rise of non-rational fascism cloaked in justifying idiocies such as "Make America Great Again", "he can't be bought", "he says what I'm thinking" and "he knows how to get things done".  Taibbi, in this post. being subject to the same confusion as the rest of us about the seriousness of the threat, thinks out loud that signs are pointing to the no-effin'-joke pole of the seriousness meter in this post.

Having our pants scared off is a good thing only to the extent that it gets us activated in every possible way to work, donate, and vote to deny Trump the seat of power. 

All that said, I have pasted in (below) an earlier RSN  piece also written by Taibbi about the origins of Trumpism in the form of President G.W. Bush and the people, politics and culture that made it possible for such a stunted intellect to sit in the Oval Office.  I copied this one here because it is brilliantly thought and written, not to mention that it's a spot-on valid historical explanation.  The metaphor of W as entitled spoiled empty-headed prince is almost perfect. It's the best writing I've ever seen from Taibbi, pulling together a number of threads into a richly drawn, coherent tapestry. 

Also included below it are a few of the reader comments, mostly offering substantive responses.  The last one though hints at the Hillary-hating that is rampant among RSN commenters.  These people scare the pants off me, because they seem not to have learned that rejecting the good to protest its imperfectness gets tens and hundreds of thousands of people killed.  I'll turn my glare on them in the next post.

 

GOP insiders are now frantic at the prospect of an uncultured ignoramus winning the presidency.

Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Trump

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

01 March 16

Bush was just an appetizer — Trump would be the main course

o hear GOP insiders tell it, Doomsday is here. If Donald Trump scores huge on tonight and seizes control of the nomination in the Super Tuesday primaries, it will mark the beginning of the end of the Republican Party, and perhaps the presidency.

But Trump isn't the beginning of the end. George W. Bush was. The amazing anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today's nightmare possible.

People forget what an extraordinary thing it was that Bush was president. Dubya wasn't merely ignorant when compared with other politicians or other famous people. No, he would have stood out as dumb in just about any setting.

If you could somehow run simulations where Bush was repeatedly shipwrecked on a desert island with 20 other adults chosen at random, he would be the last person listened to by the group every single time. He knew absolutely nothing about anything. He wouldn't have been able to make fire, find water, build shelter or raise morale. It would have taken him days to get over the shock of no room service.

Bush went to the best schools but was totally ignorant of history, philosophy, science, geography, languages and the arts. He once had to read War and Peace. His take? There were "thousands of characters" in it.

"I guess it had an influence because it was a discipline," he said. "It was more that than remembering anything in it."

So Bush's main takeaway from reading one of the greatest books ever written was that it contained many things to memorize. But he couldn't remember any of those things.

Bush showed no interest in learning and angrily rejected the idea that a president ought to be able to think his way through problems. As Mark Crispin Miller wrote in The Bush Dyslexicon, Bush's main rhetorical tool was the tautology — i.e., saying the same thing, only twice.

"It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade, there's more commerce" was a classic Bush formulation. "Our nation must come together to unite" was another. One of my favorites was: "I understand that the unrest in the Middle East creates unrest throughout the region."

Academics and political junkies alike giddily compiled these "Bushisms" along with others that were funny for different reasons ("I'm doing what I think what's wrong," for instance).

But Bush's tautologies weren't gaffes or verbal slips. They just represented the limits of his reasoning powers: A = A. There are educational apps that use groups of images to teach two-year-olds to recognize that an orange is like an orange while a banana is a banana. Bush was stalled at that developmental moment. And we elected him president.

Bush's eight years were like the reigns of a thousand overwhelmed congenital monarchs from centuries past. While the prince rode horses, romped with governesses and blew the national treasure on britches or hedge-mazes, the state was run by Svengalis and Rasputins who dealt with what Bush once derisively described as "what's happening in the world." 

In Bush's case he had Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove thinking out the problem of how to get re-elected, while Dick "Vice" Cheney, Donald "Rummy" Rumsfeld and Andrew "Tangent Man" Card took care of the day-to-day affairs of the country (part of Card's responsibilities involved telling Bush what was in the newspapers he refused to read).

It took hundreds of millions of dollars and huge armies of such behind-the-throne puppet-masters to twice (well, maybe twice) sell a voting majority on the delusion of George Bush, president. Though people might quibble with the results, the scale of this as a purely political achievement was awesome and heroic, comparable to a moon landing or the splitting of the atom.

Guiding Bush the younger through eight years of public appearances was surely the greatest coaching job in history. It was like teaching a donkey to play the Waldstein Sonata. It's breathtaking to think about now.

But one part of it backfired. Instead of using an actor like Reagan to sell policies to the public, the Svengalis behind Bush sold him as an authentic man of the people, the guy you'd want to have an O'Doul's with.

Rove correctly guessed that a generation of watching TV and Hollywood movies left huge blocs of Americans convinced that people who read books, looked at paintings and cared about spelling were either serial killers or scheming to steal bearer bonds from the Nakatomi building. (Even knowing what a bearer bond is was villainous).

The hero in American culture, meanwhile, was always a moron with a big gun who learned everything he needed to know from cowboy movies. The climax of pretty much every action movie from the mid-eighties on involved shotgunning the smarty-pants villain in the face before he could finish some fruity speech about whatever.

Rove sold Bush as that hero. He didn't know anything, but dammit, he was sure about what he didn't know. He was John McClane, and Al Gore was Hans Gruber. GOP flacks like Rove rallied the whole press corps around that narrative, to the point where anytime Gore tried to nail Bush down on a point of policy, pundits blasted him for being a smug know-it-all using wonk-ese to talk over our heads — as Cokie Roberts put it once, "this guy from Washington doing Washington-speak."

This is like the scene from the increasingly prophetic Idiocracy where no one can understand Luke Wilson, a person of average intelligence rocketed 500 years into America's idiot future, because whenever he tries to reason with people, they think he's talking "like a fag."

The Roves of the world used Bush's simplicity to win the White House. Once they got there, they used the levers of power to pillage and scheme like every other gang of rapacious politicians ever.
But the plan was never to make ignorance a political principle. It was just a ruse to win office.

Now the situation is the opposite. Now GOP insiders are frantic at the prospect of an uncultured ignoramus winning the presidency. A group of major donors and GOP strategists even wrote out a memo outlining why a super PAC dedicated to stopping Trump was needed.

"We want voters to imagine Donald Trump in the Big Chair in the Oval Office, with responsibilities for worldwide confrontation at his fingertips," they wrote. Virginia Republican congressman Scott Ringell wrote an open letter to fellow Republicans arguing that a Trump presidency would be "reckless, embarrassing and ultimately dangerous."

Hold on. It wasn't scary to imagine George "Is our children learning?" Bush with the "responsibilities for worldwide confrontation" at his fingertips? It wasn't embarrassing to have a president represent the U.S. on the diplomatic stage who called people from Kosovo "Kosovians" and people from Greece "Grecians?" 

It was way worse. Compared to Bush, Donald Trump is a Rutherford or an Einstein. In the same shipwreck scenario, Trump would have all sorts of ideas — all wrong, but at least he'd think of something, instead of staring at the sand waiting for a hotel phone to rise out of it.

Of course, Trump's ignorance level, considering his Wharton education, is nearly as awesome as what Bush accomplished in spite of Yale. In fact, unlike Bush, who had the decency to not even try to understand the news, Trump reads all sorts of crazy things and believes them all. From theories about vaccines causing autism to conspiratorial questions about the pillow on Antonin Scalia's face to Internet legends about Americans using bullets dipped in pigs' blood to shoot Muslims, there isn't any absurd idea Donald Trump isn't willing to entertain, so long as it fits in with his worldview.

But Washington is freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron. That's really what it comes down to.

And all of the Beltway's hooting and hollering about how "embarrassing" and "dangerous" Trump is will fall on deaf ears, because as gullible as Americans can be, they're smart enough to remember being told that it was OK to vote for George Bush, a man capable of losing at tic-tac-toe.

We're about to enter a dark period in the history of the American experiment. The Founding Fathers never imagined an electorate raised on Toddlers and Tiaras and Temptation Island. Remember, just a few decades ago, shows like Married With Children and Roseanne were satirical parodies. Now the audience can't even handle that much irony. A lot of American culture is just dumb slobs cheering on other dumb slobs. It was inevitable, once we broke the seal with Bush, that our politics would become the same thing.

Madison and Jefferson never foresaw this situation. They knew there was danger of demagoguery, but they never imagined presidential candidates exchanging "mine's bigger than yours" jokes or doing "let's laugh at the disabled" routines. There's no map in the Constitution to tell us how to get out of where we're going. All we can do now is hold on.
 

 

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