There I stood in the Varied Industries Building at the Iowa State Fair, mouth agape, jaw slacked. My eyes must have been a little glazed over. I stared at the Republican Party of Iowa booth.
Actually, I stared at the Crooked Hillary photo booth. That stood in front of and perpendicular to the life-sized Donald Trump cutout, where bunches of good Iowa people were lining up to take a picture with the cardboard candidate. I found myself compelled to take pictures of the people taking pictures, if for no other reason but to reality-check myself that this campaign -- this insane presidential contender -- was really happening, and that a formerly mainstream political party had entered the terminal stage of a decades-long descent into bat-shit madness.
THIS COARSE display . . . this supreme unseriousness and spleen venting . . . this is how the the government becomes delegitimized (see Obama Derangement Syndrome) and the country becomes ungovernable. This is how we lose faith in democracy, and how we cast off all our hopes for the future.
This is so beneath us as Americans. Weare so beneath us, at least beneath our better selves, as Americans.
This is how everybody becomes The Other, and this is how opposing political parties become Lebensunwertes Leben. How damned sad that what's left of Republicanism sounds so much more serious in the original German. The Real Donald J. Trump -- star of stage, screen, divorce court and bankruptcy -- would sound just as nuts in Classical Latin, alas. As we were leaving the fair Sunday, I asked my wife whether this would be the last Iowa State Fair we'd go to without having to get a passport or obtain a visa. Would Iowa end up in the Republic of Heartland, while Nebraska joined with the Dakotas in the new Canadian province of South Manitoba? Would the United States still be united in 2017, somehow, despite Trump ginning up panic and rage among the booboisie about the "rigged election"? Could be a hell of a "reality show." Call it The End of the World as We Know It. And we feel . . . pissed.
Hell, it's hard not to have been hard in the throes of abject depression since this miserable year first showed its miserable face.
SO FORGIVE ME if I find it difficult to just suck it up week after tumultuous week to be Mr. Hail-Fellow-Well-Met on 3 Chords & the Truth.
It's been one damn thing after another, and I'm sure you're feeling just about as cheery. In other words, not at all.
So, if you're feeling like I am, join me in a few hours as I indulge myself with some comfort music from a time long ago and a culture far away from us today. Maybe it was listening to stuff like this that kept "the greatest generation" from completely losing its s*** during the 1960s. Maybe it'll still work today.
Says the man who cites "two Corinthians," when trying to bamboozle Evangelical voters. If the vicar of Christ, who Catholics believe to hold "the keys to the Kingdom," given to him in Matthew 19 minutes after 16 o'clock, doesn't have the right to proclaim Donald Trump not a Christian in any sense we're given to understand the term, then who the hell does? Donald Trump, obviously:
How can Ted Cruz be an Evangelical Christian when he lies so much and is so dishonest?
FRANKLY, I don't really care whether the Donald is a Christian. Like the pope, I have my serious doubts on the question. What I do care about is that he's a loose-cannon neofascist who plays to and feeds off the darkest human instincts among the angriest and most alienated (generally for good reason) Americans. What I also care about is that, in the world of Trump, those of us who believe what the Catholic Church proclaims are somehow, no doubt, un-American. And if that were the case, it's a label I'd wear with pride. Donald, whether you're a Christian or not, you can go straight to hell.
He keeps saying outrageous things. He keeps doing outrageous things. He keeps proposing outrageous things.
Downright un-American things. Downright inhuman things. And it's working for him -- big time.
Some say the Republican presidential candidate, reality-show host, Chapter 11 specialist and all-around boor is an American fascist. Others say he's merely George Wallace with a bad comb-over.
Many agree Donald Trump is a problem.
I disagree. Donald Trump is a rich blowhard with more money than scruples . . . and seriously bad hair. The problemis us.
We're the ones cheering his Mexicans-as-rapists-and-drug-lords meme. We're the ones treating his "I'll build a 2,000-mile wall" twaddle as an actual policy proposal on illegal immigration. We're the ones roughing up a campaign-rally protester when The Donald orders the mob -- er, crowd -- to “Get him the hell out of here, will you please?”
We're the ones who believe Trump's regular exaggerations, swear to the veracity of his outright lies and laugh and nod when he disparages the appearance of a woman candidate and makes fun of the physical disability of a newspaper reporter.
WE'RE THE ones who cheer when he proposes a religious test for entry into the United States, advocating banning Muslims from entering this country "until we figure out what the hell is going on." Well, I have some thoughts on that.
Donald Trump has no army or paramilitary force at his disposal -- yet. He's not putting a gun to anyone's head to force their complicity in his David Duke act. That, we're doing of our own free will -- because we are the problem.
We are the one feeding the monster with our fear, our hatreds, our paranoia and our sheer stupidity.
We are the ones giving the devil his due, and a lot more. Indeed, we're the ones doing the devil's bidding and calling it the Lord's work. We bury hope and replace it with fear. We banish love from our hearts and replace it with hatred. We can find no room for empathy with our fellow man, but we have plenty of heart-and-mind space for petty resentments, rampant stereotyping and rank selfishness.
The all-American clusterf*** that is Trump 2016 is powered solely by the devil sitting on our shoulder. It is an all-out war on the better angels of our nature. Donald Trump's bad behavior is feeding off our own, not the other way around. TODAY, for Catholics, is the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It's the national feast day of the United States of America. The first reading my wife and I heard this afternoon at Mass was from Genesis 3:9-15, 20:
After the man, Adam, had eaten of the tree, the LORD God called to the man and asked him, “Where are you?” He answered, “I heard you in the garden; but I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid myself.” Then he asked, “Who told you that you were naked? You have eaten, then, from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat!” The man replied, “The woman whom you put here with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and so I ate it.” The LORD God then asked the woman, “Why did you do such a thing?” The woman answered, “The serpent tricked me into it, so I ate it.”
Then the LORD God said to the serpent: “Because you have done this, you shall be banned from all the animals and from all the wild creatures; on your belly shall you crawl, and dirt shall you eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel.”
The man called his wife Eve, because she became the mother of all the living.
THE BLAME GAME has been with us from the beginning. Eve knew better than to eat the forbidden fruit, but the serpent gave her an excuse. So she did.
Adam knew better, too, but Eve gave him an excuse.
Eve blamed the serpent, Adam blamed Eve, Trump blames the Other, and pundits blame Trump. We, meantime, pretend to be blameless.
So, go ahead. Vote for the fascist . . . or the demagogue . . . or the fascist demagogue . . . whatever the hell Donald J. Trump is, that monster of our own making in this land of malcontent. Vote for him. On your belly shall you crawl to the polls.
And dirt shall we all eat all the days of what life is left for what used to be a great nation. May God have mercy on us, for history will have none.
Now that Bobby Jindal has been reduced to bouncing the rubble of his native Louisiana after nearly eight years as governor, it's time for a new challenge.
Finishing off the United States of America. We now know officially what we previously held as common knowledge -- Louisiana's worst governor ever (and believe me, that's saying something) intends to knock James Buchanan off his lowly throne as worst president of the United States. Ever.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a one-time rising star in the Republican Party now struggling to become one again, announced Wednesday that he is running for president in 2016.
Jindal made his entry into the race on Twitter, ahead of a planned formal announcement in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner later this afternoon.
There had been little doubt that the 44-year-old second-term governor would run. He has already traveled multiple times to early-primary states -- spending 45 percent of his days outside of Louisiana last year. And this year, some of Jindal's top state-government aides left to join his presidential "exploratory committee."
Jindal becomes the first Indian American to ever be a serious candidate for president. But at this point, his chances of winning the GOP nomination seem extraordinarily low.
WE CAN only hope, Washington Post. We can only hope. But there's reason to hope the worst ever governor of Louisiana hasn't a snowball's chance in Hades of becoming the worst ever president of the United States, judging by the less than auspicious goings-on on the candidate's official Facebook page.
BETWEEN the open mockery by detractors and at least one instance of a supporter calling President Obama "the Muslin Arabian prick that's in the White House," this campaign should be as entertaining as (God willing) it is doomed. Get your popcorn now. You won't want to miss a minute of this one . . . because you gotta laugh to keep from crying.
Actually, I stared at the Crooked Hillary photo booth. That stood in front of and perpendicular to the life-sized Donald Trump cutout, where bunches of good Iowa people were lining up to take a picture with the cardboard candidate.
This is so beneath us as Americans. We are so beneath us, at least beneath our better selves, as Americans.
