That's All, Folks

 

W

hile I don’t expect the Electoral College to be anything but the rubber-stamp it’s always been—one of the lamest dodges the framers came up with in their desperate attempt to reach some compromise between democracy and autocracy—this would be a good year for it to actually do the goddamn job it was supposed to do and deliberate on just who would be the most competent captain of our Ship of State. The United States is now at the point of crossing the Rubicon, of reaching its rendezvous with destiny, of leaving the Republic behind and charting its course to Empire. The Groper is no Julius Caesar, but then, that isn’t a requirement. He doesn’t have a pretty face or a pompadour either, but that doesn’t mean he’s not going to be the next teen idol.

The guy that the Electoral College is about to put in charge of the most powerful military force on earth is Osama Bin Laden’s wet-dream. Ever wonder why the jihadists of the so-called Islamic State are cheering? They’ve been fighting a losing battle against a fragile coalition that is destroying them—and now the linchpin of that coalition is about to field a clown against them, a naïve bumbler whose blithering bombast directed against all Muslims will bring in hordes of recruits to their idiotic cause. Saved by the bell indeed.

Who owns this blowhard? Where does his money come from? We don’t know. Is it the Russians? They certainly worked overtime to get this empty-headed buffoon into a position of power. Whose interests is this bozo going to be working on? There’s no way to tell, though his appointments of ignorant incompetents to key positions suggests it won’t be on behalf of the American people. Seriously, his picks are minnows being set loose in a sea of sharks. It may of course be good for the world to have an America on the ropes, but there’s no way it can be good for America.

Bluntly his cabinet (and other) picks show that Donald J. Trump is either a blithering incompetent who should be removed from office before somebody gets hurt, or a damned traitor who should face whatever penalty that brings in these benighted times. (I favor trial by a jury of sane people followed by a prompt execution by firing squad, but that’s so nineteenth century.) In either case the simplest thing by far would be to keep him out of the office he is so obviously unqualified for before he can screw us all over and take the country down the drain to oblivion.

But, as I said, I am quite confident that the Electoral College will do as its predecessors did and rubber-stamp the election. It is a sad ending to a once-glorious nation, and even sadder if he manages to take the rest of humanity along for the ride. Will we go quickly, via nuclear holocaust? Or slowly roast to death as the temperatures rise? But with barbarians running things, people like Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, even pipsqueaks such as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Bashar Hafez al-Assad, what better fate should we expect? It’s over, folks. Humankind had its shot and we blew it. The looters, torturers, and rapists are in charge, and not just in backwaters like Syria and Michigan. There is no future, so we all might as well go down in a blaze of inglorious debauchery. I won’t be with you—but I’ve always been out of step with the times.