Slimed

Screencap from NBC. Commentary by HW

AP-NORC Poll: Low marks for Trump’s Puerto Rico response
By LAURIE KELLMAN AND EMILY SWANSON, ASSOCIATED PRESS 
WASHINGTON — Oct 4, 2017, 1:22 PM ET

Americans are more likely to disapprove than approve of President Donald Trump’s handling of the Puerto Rico hurricane relief effort.

According to a poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, just 32 percent approve of how Trump is handling disaster relief in the U.S. territory, while 49 percent disapprove.

“It took him how long to get to Puerto Rico?” said Bree Harris, a 25-year-old chef and Democrat from Los Angeles. She suspects Trump “didn’t even know that Puerto Rico was an island that was part of America. It’s embarrassing.”

Embarrassing? Well, yes, but then that is a monumental understatement.

I guess it was the spectacle of watching the Hirsute Cheeto Beast pretending to be a t-shirt gun in distributing paper towels to Puerto Ricans devastated by Hurricane Maria in perhaps the single most obscene photo op since the Bush Baby took over a square in New Orleans and backlit an equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson  so that he could have HIS Hurricane Katrina photo op in a city whose ONLY electricity (virtually) was from the generators Bush’s handlers set up to light his photo op — it was the spectacle of the cottonelle towel tossing that finally did it.

Looking at virtually the only lighting in New Orleans – for a photo op

I’ve been writing this essay in my head since November.  The thesis is simplicity itself: Donald Trump’s presence in ANY position of governmental responsibility makes me ashamed of my country. Trump’s residency in the White House makes me feel like I’ve been thrown in a septic tank and told to tread water.

Now, yes, I dealt the the usurpation of Bush the Dumber, and, for eight years, I stated my opposition to his vile imbecility virtually every day. Oh, and I was proven right, IN SPADES, by history.

Ick.

But at least Dubya was of the lineage, he actually knew something about government and governance. The same cannot, in any sense whatsoever, be said of Der Drumf. Dubya was evil and incompetent, but he wasn’t malevolent and clueless. Donald Jong Trump is entirely clueless. Malevolently clueless.

A man who picks a fight with and attempts to humiliate a Latina mayor of the largest U.S. territory. Who demands a Roundtable of Praise® at every major photo op, a casual cruelty towards anyone who dares oppose his spray-taniloquence with  toddler-esque self-absorbed mangolevolence.

Think about it: days without water, without food in many cases, without electricity, and Trump shows up for a photo op, with the obligatory Round Table of Praise™ so well-remembered from the days of Reince Prebus’ Trumpian posterior osculation and from the video releases of every tin-pot dictator of the modern world.

And THROWS paper towels to the audience like it was a minor league baseball game and the t-shirt gun wasn’t working. It’s a shtick leftover from the Buzz Windrip “It Can’t Happen Here” fall campaign: tossing his awful MAGA caps to the audience.

Trump comes to us from the world of bad entertainment, of media whoredom and PR flaks placing your name in the mass media to inflate your pufferfish profile.

So, it makes a bad psychological sense that he’d treat this as another “entertainment” event. The “have fun” comment to the couple without insurance whose house had been wiped out pretty much gives that away: one could imagine the Hairball working the room at yet another condo sales event. But what is appropriate for grifting is NOT appropriate for Real Life™ ofttimes.

The first image of the utter inappropriateness of Trump’s response that comes to mind would be a Catholic priest Frisbee’ing communion wafers into the audience or, instead of the communion wine, the priest brings out bunches of grapes and a large wooden mallet, and proceeds to recapitulate Gallagher’s “Sledge-O-Matic” act, replete with the first rows shielding themselves with clear PVC.

It COULD happen. It would be an utter abrogation of everything that communion stands for, but it COULD happen.

Just like what we saw yesterday DID happen.

But that’s not really my point. That act of prehensile imbecility will stand on its own for a very long time without any help from me. (Trump displays a genius for shooting himself in the face, no additional Cheneys required.)

No: allegedly we have “elected” a foul-mouthed egotist with zero governmental experience. Funny that no one in the USA would allow someone with zero medical experience do their colonoscopy, but it’s somehow OK for a complete newbie to learn on the job with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.

“I’m not a doctor, but hey, it can’t be that hard, can it?”

And that used to seem hyperbolic, but, instead, Trumpf ramps up the confrontation with a Nuclear North Korea and a dictator that is every bit as b*t sh*t cr*zy as Trump himself seems to be.

I was in the hospital during the election. I watched the miracle, and not believing in miracles, I didn’t believe it either and I still don’t.

My nurse awakened me for the obligatory midnight bloodletting and vital signs and she found me on my right side, with my left arm wrapped up around my right deltoid with my hand in a fist, middle finger extended.

Drawn from Real Life™

It was so surprising that she told me the next day that she’d told her boyfriend about it. He’d laughed and said he felt exactly the same way.

And every day since, I have awakened feeling morally slimed, feeling as though I had aided and abetted a sexual predator, or had inadvertently enabled a racist hate group. But, oddly, I feel no moral connection. I don’t believe myself guilty in any way, but I STILL feel disgusted with myself in my own skin, disgusted with myself in my own state and disgusted to live in a nation where ANYONE would vote for Comb-over Caligula.

I have never felt this way before, even in the darkest depths of Cheney’s depravity and Bush’s soft, clueless fascism. I did not feel this way when I flew into Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport in 2003 and found it guarded by camouflaged  troops with M-16s and thought I had entered into a Philip K. Dick novel (specifically The Man In The High Castle).

I didn’t feel this way during the eight years of Reagan’s jackbooted destruction of the New Deal, replacing much of it with the Big F*cking Deal, nor during the Bush the Smarter Era of phony patriotic Superbowl Displays (a là Orwell) and Christmas invasions of countries to shut up their dictators to keep them from revealing the CIA’s role in cocaine smuggling to finance their Nicaraguan Misadventure. Nor when Oliver North disgraced the uniform of the United States Marine Corps, hiding his extra-legal criminality and treasonous interactions with the US’ sworn enemy, Iran, to sell them spare parts and use the Swiss Bank Accounts to fund the Contras.

I felt bad, sure.

I didn’t feel this way during the 8-year GOP witch-hunt that stole my presidential vote for eight years while pursuing a clueless, and ultimately flaccid “impeachment” just to deny Democrats their legitimate, elected powers of governance. Yes, it was treason, but I’d long since come to expect that from the GOP (remember, I was a Republican until 1988, when I left the party in utter disgust, seeing that Reagan was not an outlier, but was, in fact the future).

You see, I have always been an AMERICAN first (hear me, Bob Dole, you scum-sucking traitor, who always thought that Party was more important than Country, or John McCain, who campaigned on “Country First” but never seems to actually govern in that manner. He killed the health care bills more to spite Trump than because he cared about millions of Americans losing health insurance, and, thereby, life — like, say, ME).

Except that he didn’t.

And there is now a “government” that cares very little about America and much more about INSANE notions that a) we are drowning in debt (from Obama, naturally, but not from GWB and his unfunded war, unfunded Medicare D prescription and huge, mindless tax cuts) and b) that a HUGE tax cut is necessary to grow the economy on “trickle down” principles, even though they have been UTTERLY REFUTED in actual practice. Just look at KANSAS, fer chrissakes.

But that is mere Republican treason. Trump represents not a betrayal of the nation by ideology, but, rather, the living Id of everything that is worst in America.

And I feel slimed. Each and every day. I wake up to our living national nightmare, and I cannot “normalize” it. I can only fight the queasiness that often edges over into nausea as I turn on cable news or read the Washington Post or read my other news sources.

I am sickened and disgusted, nauseated and slimed by this poltroon, this living monument to hereditary oligarchy (which is what you’ll get if they succeed in killing the Estate Tax: inherited money for the few, feeble a la Eric Trump, overlords of the Kleptocracy, the Kakistocracy, and we, the serfs of what had been a Free America will live in an eternal Company Town, the cyber version of “Sixteen Tons”).

His base and his baseness are one and the same: a real, palpable and omnipresent threat to the very NOTION of our nation, to the Constitution and the Declaration and to, let’s face it, humanity itself. Even the Pope “gets” what a slimeball the Hairball is, and the papacy has not been known for its forceful stances against the vilest dictators the world has ever seen.

I am ashamed and embarrassed and nauseated each and every day that Mango Mussolini squats on valuable American historic property, and I am repulsed by every moment that he draws breath.

Is that explicit enough?

I have been unable to articulate this and fear that I still am, but TRUMP DISGUSTS ME on every level, most especially MORALLY and on all levels of my patriotism and love of country.

As I have pointed out time and time again, America is not a NATION; America is a NOTION (from sea to shining sea). And the IDEA is what makes us exceptional, if such exceptionalism exists. There is no “American” nationality. Anyone can, theoretically, become an American and, at the end, it is by accepting the fundamental NOTIONS of what America is.

Trump destroys that notion, and the GOPs who mindlessly follow him like lemmings dismantle our Notion (and, thereby, our Nation) each and every day with the former’s Mega-boorishness aided and abetted by the latter’s Goebbels-like GOPaganda, and utter disrespect for rationality and fair debate.

We have been on the precipice of losing our Republic for a long time. And now seems to be the fateful moment.

And I carry the acute awareness of the obscenity that is Trump, and of the turd-in-the-punchbowl-of-Life that is the modern Confederate-flag-defending “Republican” party, the party that laughably claims any connection to Abraham Lincoln.

Put Trump and Lincoln on the same stage in your mind.

And then try not to vomit.

Courage.