By Spy Pentagon Bureau Chief Douglas MacArthur reporting from his new office at the Pentagon City Cinnabon with Medical Correspondent Vincent Boom-Batz, M.D.
After four weeks of unrelenting Blitzkrieg against all institutions of democratic government in the United States, our great bulwarks, the free press and the Democratic opposition, are, like the French Army in 1940, beginning to realize that there is a problem here.
At first our great Democratic Generals didn’t see the problem with a Panzerkorps in the Ardennes. Gen. Amy “Hot Mess” Klobuchar advocated a strategy of bipartisan cooperation sprinkled with standup comedy. Gen. Ruben Gallego suggested reaching out to the armored spearheads racing toward Abbeville. And bugler John Fetterman, like Gen. Gamelin, declared all was lost even before Paris had fallen.
Now with the enemy at the gates, the mood has changed. Recently, in the New York Times, where up to now fifth [Surely, fifth-rate? – Ed.] columnists like Bretbug urged us to embrace the New American Order and blamed the assault on Biden’s pardon of his son, began to sing a different tune:
They told us they would smash the institutions that safeguard our democracy. And that is exactly what they are doing.
Many Americans chose not to believe what they were saying. Will we now believe what we are seeing?
To be clear, “they” are not just Donald Trump and his billionaire co-pilot. Over the past half-century, an anti-democratic movement has coalesced in the United States. It draws on super-wealthy funders, ideologues of the new right, purveyors of disinformation and Christian nationalist activists. Though it pretends to revere the founders and the Constitution, it fundamentally rejects the idea of America as a modern pluralistic democracy.
The natural tendency in a functioning democracy is to look for ways to “work across the aisle” and “agree to disagree.” But appeasement now would be a mistake. This anti-democratic movement has no interest in compromise. Any concessions will help consolidate the powers of a lawless presidency and entrench a new, kleptocratic, authoritarian form of government in the United States.
Ya don’t say.
A precious few of shrewder Democrats have also figured out that we are in mortal peril:
"We have a responsibility as a party to block absolutely everything when they are putting a match to the federal government." — @aoc.bsky.social on IG live just now
— Pablo Manríquez (@capitol.press) February 3, 2025 at 10:46 PM
Others including Thomas Zimmer have correctly noted that the multipronged Republican attack is generated by an uneasy alliance of enemies with disparate goals and interests, ranging from re-establishing white supremacy to undoing a century’s worth of progress in using government to ameliorate human suffering to establishing a monolithic theocracy between the Mediterranean and the Jordan through ethnic cleansing to bringing about the end of life on Earth as we know it:
 |
| Bipartisan problem-solving, 1940 |
But the most plausible interpretation, I believe, is that it isn’t just one thing. The assault is coming from several directions. There are the reactionary elites mostly aligned with Heritage and Project 2025; there are the America First nativists; there are the techbro feudal barons. There is also, let’s not forget, Donald Trump as a slightly idiosyncratic factor, driven entirely by a sense of grievance, a desire for revenge, and his personal obsessions (tariffs, for instance; and the urge to install a politics of domination both domestically as well as on the world stage). All of these different factions of the Trumpist Right have been let loose on the government. Invoking the will of the president, they have declared themselves masters of the world. It is genuinely unclear how much coordination there is between them. Their actions add up to an often chaotic, but nevertheless comprehensive assault on the constitutional order. Less the execution of a single master plan – and more a MAGA feeding frenzy.
As Mr. Zimmer notes, the attack depends both on speed and on overwhelming us on a number of fronts. We can’t defend Flanders and Sedan at the same time, especially when the enemy may open half a dozen new fronts (the Office of Personnel Management?) simultaneously
Of course a few great strategists like Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman have told us not to worry about Panzer divisions reaching the English Channel because we will be saved by our Maginot Line of federal courts. Some have indeed fought back effectively.
There is of course no assurance that these courts, static and passive by nature, will be able to meet all the threats, or that their bent Republican masters on the Supreme Court will support their defense, or that the courts will act before millions overseas suffer and die in the siege of USAID. But those are problems for lesser mortals than Prof. Feldman.
One difficulty facing resistance forces is figuring out the intentions of the enemy’s Tangerine-Faced Leader. Zimmer suggests rage, grievance, and retribution. Others believe him to be a pawn in the hands of Boer fighters like Leon Musk or Stalinist strongmen like his buddy Putin. Still others see him as a classic dictator interested in power, glory and plunder, like Vlad the Impaler.
We have an explanation that passes the test of our old buddy Bill Occam.
We submit that’s he’s bats**t crazy because he’s demented.
There is actually a definition of dementia, which is normally diagnosed unlike say infectious disease by its symptoms. They include:
a generalized, pervasive deterioration of memory and at least one other cognitive function, such as language and an executive function, due to a variety of causes. The loss of intellectual abilities is severe enough to interfere with an individual’s daily functioning and social and occupational activity....
Let’s just take a few examples and see how they match these warning signs of dementia.
Recently, the patient has hatched a scheme to solve the long-standing conflict in Gaza by moving the indigenous population somewhere else against their wishes, selling the territory to him, and letting him use other people’s money to redevelop it as a playground for the rich and disgusting. Think a super Merde-a-Lardo on the Mediterranean.
This idea requires forgetting the entire history of the Israel-Palestine Conflict since 1947, not to mention the legal and moral prohibition on forcibly expelling a native population. You can trace its roots to the Likudnik wet dream of expelling the Palestinians and taking over their lands, including Gaza and the West Bank. It has remained an inchoate Likud talking point because its proponents know it is crazy. They are content to limit themselves to a creeping annexation of those territories and giving the Palestinians a choice of exile or permanent second-class status. This is both cruel and contrary to the teachings of the religion they profess, but it’s not insane.
 |
| Maybe he's barking mad! |
In our patient’s version though, the Palestinians are to be removed by force by Jordan and Egypt. These are two countries that have absolutely no interest in relocating the Palestinians to their own countries, where they will be a powerful destabilizing force, and have no means of forcing them to do so. Due to his loss of executive function, the patient cannot articulate or carry out the series of steps needed to make this nightmare a reality.
The icing on this beautiful fantasy cake is the grandiosity of its proponent, who apparently advocates putting him in charge of the now depopulated territory, where other rich people will build fancy resorts with his name on them.
Simple greed and callousness, although his stock in trade, cannot explain this bizarre fantasy.. We submit that it betrays a loss of cognitive function with fatal signs of detachment from reality, grandiosity, and mania.
And yet that is just one thing.
Consider the patient’s willingness to let an unelected ketamine-demented billionaire take over federal agencies, rewrite their code, steal their data, and fire their employees, all in violation of federal law. Talk about a loss of executive functioning, Chief Executive version.
When asked he betrays no knowledge of what is going on or why it is dangerous. Yet he continues to let the billionaire plunder undisturbed because he believes falsely that it is all being done on his command.
If a rich old lady walked into her bank and asked for piles of cash to distribute to the nice young men who promised to take care of her, the bank would freeze her account and report her to Protective Services because they would have credible evidence of her incompetence.
What more evidence of our patient’s incapacity could there be?
We could cite other examples of his bizarre out-of-touch behavior that go beyond his normal cruelty and callousness. He responded to questions about visiting the cite of the National Airport plane crash by asking if the reporters wanted him to swim in the Potomac. Hint: they were not.
He fired the Board of the Kennedy Center on the paranoid theory that the productions at the Center were attacks on him. Asked if he had seen any of these shows, he replied he had not, and could not in fact remember any of them.
Finally last week we saw the first signs that the reality of a demented President is beginning to break through to some in the media. The editors of The Bulwark, who just 20 years ago bought into and spread an insane fantasy about Saddam Hussein dropping A-bombs on Disney World to justify an illegal, bloody, and disastrous invasion, printed a good piece by Will Saletan concluding “He really believes this lunacy. He’s deranged.”
But our media lords and ladies are still propounding the narrative that the President is bold, aggressive, and unconstrained.
The same media, who trumpeted on A1 that every stutter and misstep by President Biden proved he was a gibbering idiot, even though every single action he took until January 20 was apparently reasonable and well thought out, can’t bring themselves to state this obvious truth.
They need help.
From whence will their help come? It can only come from the Democratic opposition. If every day Speaker Jeffries and Pops Schumer and their allies led with the consistent message that the day’s fresh outrages were traceable to Presidential dementia, sooner or later even the feeblest media outlet would have to report it.
Sooner or later, when everyone starts noticing that the Emperor is striding around the White House with his Tiny Toadstool flapping in the breeze, public opinion will start to shift. When the story is accompanied by higher prices on tariffed goods and finished products made with those goods (like cars!), some portion of the 49.87% might finally catch on that they voted not for a bold, aggressive leader who would hand out free eggs and dollar-a-pound bacon, but a madman.
It might not save what’s left of our democracy, but at least we would all be living in the real world. Unlike the self-appointed Chairman of the Gaza Redevelopment and Gambling Authority.
No comments:
Post a Comment