Pat’s Polemics

I was working on my massive blog entry “What Conservatives Think” today and as I tried to sink into a nap to get away from my post-surgical miseries, my grandson came in and said Trump just fired FBI Director Comey. We thought Nixon’s Saturday night massacre was bad. Are conservatives beginning to see the outline – looming in the dark – of a true tyranny? Maybe they’ll stop their ignorant, stupid railing about Obama the tyrant. I doubt it. They’ll just tune in Alex Jones or some other certifiable nutcase to soothe them.
Trump’s rationale for firing Comey is absurd but it makes sense, as it did to Nixon, to fire the guy who is investigating your wrong-doing and getting close. But Trump goes further. Just as he ran for president simply to avenge himself for the roasting Obama gave him at the White House Correspondents Dinner, so he waited until Comey was out of town, at an FBI conference, to fire him and so he would hear of his dismissal on television, in front of everybody. It must have been delicious for Trump when he found out that at first, in front of everybody, Comey dismissed it as a clever prank.
We must see in Trump what his followers so relish, his delight in humiliating people. Trump supporters don’t want undocumented Mexicans to be deported, they want them arrested and humiliated in front of their children and then literally tossed over the border so their faces are mashed into the dirt. That is the morality of a Trump supporter. And Trump did just that to Comey today.
MSNBC pundits are wondering if there will be any “profiles in courage” among Republican Congressmen, pinning their hopes on our two senators here in Arizona, McCain and Flake. Hard to say. Talking about humiliation, the image that has haunted me since Trump’s election is the photo of Mussolini and his mistress hanging upside down, bullet riddled, in a town square. When I saw Huckaby, Spicey’s stand-in, I had an image of that one woman being hung in the 19th century as part of a conspiracy. Just tonight, I told my wife that Trump’s maneuver of sending the official letter to the FBI office hand-delivered by his personal body guard of many years – a man who hit a protester at a Trump rally – comes right out of the Sopranos, only to hear someone on TV say it was right out of The Godfather. The pressure on wealthy Chinese to invest in Trump enterprises in return for visas to the U.S. should have struck someone on the Trump bandwagon as a false note, but I guess not. In fact, it’s possible these Trumpsters will support even treason.
Early on, and you can check this on my blog, I said it would be the civil servants who kept us afloat. I was thinking of Trump’s incompetence then, but after hearing Sally Yates among so many others and hearing predictions of mass leaks and mass resignations at the FBI and other agencies, I realize they may be the bulwark against tyranny. Malcolm Nance on MSNBC said it’ll be the intelligence services that bring Trump down and one reporter quoted an friend deep in the intelligence service as saying Trump will die in prison. As hyperbolic as that sounded, it is sounding more possible now. The Congress does have a way of getting to see Trump’s tax returns. Let’s see if they force the issue.
I’m home tomorrow, no therapy (my last session laid me out), so I’ll be glued to the TV. I just wish I could walk so I could march. Well, soon.