The Education of President Moron
Just to clarify, since we all seem to be a little confused on this front: when Bob Corker called the White House an “adult day care center” last week, he was not conjuring a fanciful image of giant man-babies, being cared for by sane adults. The media has been pushing that line rather aggressively, as if they are collectively unaware that “adult day care centers” are already a thing, that does not cater to some fictional concept of adult infants.
In reality, “adult day care centers” provide care to mentally and cognitively disabled adults. In other words, the words Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Robert Corker was barely bothering to euphemize: he was calling a sitting president from his own party “a retard.”
Our political-correctness-obsessed media chose to ignore that subtext when reporting on the exchange, since they couldn’t have taken as much delight in the story if they had to soberly respond to the true intent of the Senator’s words, as that was a pretty goddamned offensive thing for an elected official to say. Instead, they softened it to a more acceptable condemnation of the president’s stupidity, which nicely dovetailed with another narrative from last week: that the Secretary of State called the President a “fucking moron” to his face.
Granted, Tillerson might have only said that to some aides in the room, or he might not have said “fucking” beforehand, but when asked by the press, he couldn’t in good conscience refute calling the Leader of the Free World a moron. After all, Secretary Tillerson totally said that shit. A week later, these are still the leading search results for “Fucking moron” on Bing:
To hear various sources tell it, Mr. Tillerson was already a bit miffed at the president going into the meeting. As the former head of the Boy Scouts of America, he was annoyed that the President had gotten nakedly political during his address to the Jamboree, and I can only assume he was bothered by the nakedly irrelevant sex-yacht story. Also, the whole purpose of the strategic meeting was “to slow down a little and explain the whole world” to the president, because Mr. Trump is “a little slow” in the words of one high-ranking source.
In that meeting, Donald Trump was shown a graph of the United States’ nuclear stockpile over time, and shocked that we once had 32,000 active warheads to our current, pitiful 4,000. The President, appalled that we had relaxed our nuclear posture over the past five decades, demanded a tenfold increase in our nuclear stockpile so that he could have the most nukes ever, of any president.
It was apparently lost on the president that we only had that many nukes before the détente during the Cold War, and those 32,000 warheads were aimed at the current residence of his benefactor/pimp. Unburdened by context or knowledge, he was simply voicing his displeasure that another American president had more weapons than him [back when all of humanity was being forced into an insane suicide pact by 7% of its population] and he demanded that he hold the record for the most things that go boom.
That wasn’t his only gripe during the de-retardization session. He wanted the commander of the Afghanistan War fired, because some random servicemen had shot their mouth off to the president about Gen. Nicholson’s poor leadership. He was incensed that Chinese firms were mining in Afghanistan, because in Trump’s mind, only the conquering Americans have the right to exploit Afghanistan’s $1 trillion in rare-earths reserves. An alleged international businessman is so obtuse to the workings of the global economy that he can’t see how those rare-earths will come around to the U.S. via Chinese-made products, let alone see the strategic utility of enlisting a rival economic power to diversify an economy that currently consists of 30% warlord-produced hashish and 70% warlord-produced heroin.
When Korea came up in this illustrious meeting of the minds, Trump wanted to know why South Koreans aren’t more publicly grateful towards their American military protectors. His tweets have compelled an internal debate at Twitter over whether to include “users may not use this platform to foment a thermonuclear war” in its terms of service, and he’s spent weeks casually threatening a strike that would kill tens of thousands in one of the world’s greatest cities, but he still wants to know why those little yellow bastards don’t give him the credit he so richly deserves for inheriting a defense posture he knows nothing about.
Which brings me back around to Bob Corker: why are you suddenly so scared of the president, Bob? What are you so afraid of now, that you weren’t when you and the rest of your party lent a veneer of credibility to this asshole’s stated quest to destroy the world?
The Republican establishment has long operated on the assumption that American institutions are too strong to be destroyed, and that our rights and freedoms are keep alive through sheer inertia. Thus, in their minds, our institutions can be attacked for their political advantage without consequence. From Reagan’s concept of government as “the problem,” to Gingrich’s ransacking of the House’s regular order, to the entire Boehner-Ryan-McConnell era, the party seemingly believes that America’s civic fabric is so strong that it could withstand decades of active degradation by Republicans without producing a fundamentally degraded country.
Part and parcel to that effort was the cultivation of racial and social resentment, and the emotional excitement of their base it provided. They were training their voters to be unable to share the body politic with anyone who disagrees with them, and to value brain-dead catharsis spouted by avatars of white crankiness above anything resembling conservative thought. By the time Trump declared his candidacy, the party had intellectually hollowed out the American Right to the extent that a cranky white dumbass, and literally nothing more, could hijack their base and take over their party.
By the time he clinched it, the Country Club Set’s capacity for self-reflection and self-restraint was so damaged that they were honestly telling themselves that Hillary “Insert Bullshit Accusation Here” Clinton would somehow be worse for the country than an orcish, pussy-grabbing racial demagogue who arguably does not speak fluent English.
The party was so addled from decades of misleading their voters that they managed to mislead themselves. Everyone in politics shares the same dream of the presidency, yet a good quarter of our politicians collectively rationalized support for a candidate less worthy of the job than themselves, simply because he was a Republican. They only know how to play for the team anymore, not for the public good.
Also, the inertia of the Washington system kept on chugging in one sense at least: too many the red team’s ambitious players in DC couldn’t afford to sit out an election cycle out of principle, and the vacancies left by those who did only made complicity more tempting for a lesser class of Republican. President Faulkner has swelled the ranks of that lesser class considerably since the election, with his managerie of slimy GOP D-listers taking whatever gig they can get, once-marginalized racists like Sessions who speak Trump’s language, and various foul-mouthed Irish, Italian, and Hebrew goons from the Five Boroughs.
I say to the Republican Party, as Thor said to Loki in the first Avengers movie as the Chautari invaded New York, which hopefully destroyed at least one Trump property:
Look around you! Do you really think this madness ends with your rule?!
I know you people care about virtually nothing anymore — democracy, shooting victims, civil rights, the imminent glacial minimum, the economic injustice of our healthcare system, black children breathing a thin haze of hexavalent chromium and lead paint chips in school classrooms — you’ve proven time and time again that nothing fazes you in the slightest as long as you get to repeal the estate tax. I get it. But still, as you look upon the chaos sewn by a man-child who is truly the anti-Napoleon in his absolute incompetence, do you not feel some twinge of regret that you assumed the dumbest fuck in the history of dumbfucks could or would figure it out?
“Mr. President, don’t decertify a deal that the Iranians are honoring!” “Don’t end subsidies for Obamacare out of spite without a legislative solution!” “Don’t quote Elton John while promising casualties in megadeaths in the same sentence, while speaking before the UN General Assembly!” “Don’t take birth control away from your whores! They’ll have to charge more!” The President of the United States not only needed to be told all of these things, he also lacked the wherewithal to listen to the advice.
See, he had to keep his stupid, self-destructive promises that he made purely for cheap applause, from adoring campaign crowds who also knew nothing about the issue at hand except for whatever another handsy old pervert blathered on Fox News the previous night (or inexplicably fixated on for weeks on end). He can’t actually grasp the constituent parts of presidential success, so he opts to look like he’s doing something, no matter how counter-productive or unwise that thing might be, via schemes of sabotage provided by the vast right-wing legal conspiracy, as Hannity nods along in unblinking, reflexive non-comprehension.
I’m running out of scary new phases, but I’ll call this a statistically significant new grade of ominousness. The people around the president are the only thing preventing the utter implosion of an office to which we have anchored the geopolitical order. I pray we can hold it together until his mental incompetence becomes too much to defend, or his ass goes to court for the other stuff. After all, we’ve been through worse.
Still, I can’t help but fear that if Mattis, Tillerson, and co. can no longer carry the weight of this box of rocks, our troubled nation may be too politically frail to bear this bag of hammers upon her back, and for the first time Americans will feel the painful consequences of empowering the biggest jackass among them as their leader, as in so many other failed states. However, while I wait for the other shoe to fall: I think, therefore I Resist.