The Methodical Retreat from Goodness

Around the time #LittlePrincePumpkin managed to reach one hundred days in office, there was a spate of completely pointless public conversations, each of which began with a variation of “What have we learned about #LittlePrincePumpkin?” Of course, we haven’t learned anything at all. There’s nothing deep or mysterious about this rotten gourd. We all knew exactly what he is a year ago. He hasn’t changed. He won’t change. There’s nothing to learn.

Which is why the public conversations of the past twenty-four hours have also been pointless. #LittlePrincePumpkin had no rationale when he fired the director of the FBI. He doesn’t have a plan. He doesn’t have a strategy. The lying POS that inhabits the White House these days did what he did because the lying POS is a temperamental moron. The only potential complication in all of this is the distinct possibility that the lying POS is also suffering from a literal, not-metaphorical, mental illness.

Whatever #LittlePrincePumpkin was thinking is not the story, today, because we all know very well that #LittlePrincePumpkin—and I mean this in the most literal, not-metaphorical, way possible—does not think. We’re all well past any genuine wonderment over this bewigged lunatic’s way of lurching through existence. Any sputtering we do over his most recent criminal misconduct is a waste of time that ought to be spent considering at least two other matters.

First, what’s going on with health care, these days? We know just how eager Republicans are to act inside the noxious cloud of stupidity that billows out of the White House. While we’re shouting in outrage over what causes no surprise at all, there’s a cohort of twisted gnomes hammering together the substructure for a proper American society in which eleven sixty-year-old white guys periodically consider whether or not the rest of us have been sufficiently well-behaved to merit an extra ration of wheat.

Second, why isn’t the media breaking down congressional doors to find out why impeachment proceedings are not already underway? We know #LittlePrincePumpkin will act the fool and rob us blind. We know that the majority of elected congressional representatives will take as much advantage as they can of #LittlePrincePumpkin’s gleeful corruption. What does remain a dangerous mystery is the media’s willingness to chase the barrage of flares that our orange emperor farts with abandon. I’m looking at you, NPR. Every instance of the question, “Why did he do it?” that I heard today on our public radio network ought to have been a variation on the question, “When will you indict this nincompoop?”, posed in each case to a different elected official.

Let us please stop staring at #LittlePrincePumpkin as though anything he has done has crossed some new boundary that we couldn’t imagine any elected official would ever cross. Where our experience of this national nightmare is concerned, we, ourselves, crossed the last boundary of incredulity months ago. If #LittlePrincePumpkin were to bring Kim Jong Un to Washington, DC, to join him in making an explicit sex tape on the South Lawn, and Sean Spicer were to step out of the bushes to assure us in his most patronizing tones that the president is an exuberant person who takes seriously his responsibility to engage with the leaders of foreign nations, and #LittlePrincePumpkin voters were to insist that Obama did the same thing with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there would be nothing to do but roll our eyes and sigh the way we do over the two-year-old who has dumped his oatmeal on the floor, again.

Never mind, anymore, the boorishness that covers the surface of the country like scum on a pond. There’s no understanding it. There’s no changing it. There’s no use in pretending it surprises us. Let’s instead direct our attention and our outrage to what is turning out to be the most craven, cowardly Congress in the history of craven cowardliness. That at least three hundred and fifty-four congresspersons and seventy-eight senators have not already stormed the White House personally to drag the sprayed-brown swamp monster to a Supermax prison is a national disgrace. Rather than drafting articles of impeachment in accord with the bare-minimum commitment to truth, freedom, and representational democracy that the founding fathers must have expected of the heirs of their experiment, these sad excuses for patriots instead give us the cartoonishly poltroonish pretext that they can’t even authorize an independent investigation of #LittlePrincePumpkin’s patently felonious witness tampering, harassment, and extortion because more investigation will mean less investigation. (Or, tell me, please: What can it possibly mean to say that an independent investigation will “impede” partisan investigation that is already, sorta, underway?)

The House and Senate have a sober-voiced determination not to disturb the plunder of the USA and the desecration of the Constitution while there’s any chance that, in time, we’ll accept such obscenity as normal. While it may be no wonder that our elected congresspersons and senators won’t do anything without a swift kick in the ass, it is a wonder—perhaps the last possible wonder—if we don’t deliver that kick.

So: news folks. Stop tossing questions at this so-called president’s administration. When the lump in charge of it all can’t utter anything more than the fragments of sentences that are just barely sufficient to constitute a lie, there’s no possibility that you will discover any sense or conscience in the White House. Start jamming your interrogative palms into the chests of the people we elected to act as a check on the executive branch’s abuse of power. Because those folks need you to challenge their methodical retreat from goodness. We need you to challenge that retreat.

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Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/United_States_Capitol