♬ Spread the word around
Guess who’s back in town ♬
— “The Boys Are Back in Town,” Thin Lizzy1Picture a person who lacks every ounce of the charisma, raw sexuality and artistic talent of Phil Lynott and you have a good mental image of your returning WPT essayist.
Two score and fourteen weeks ago, your hortatory Weekend Politics Thread host hung up his quill and sleeve garters. He returns for one-time only to fill a gap created by the retiring-on-his-own terms Cajun Clearwater,2holds for applause to shill for pending 50th birthday upvotes, and to answer a riddle that plagues his present existence under, within and around the U.S. polity.
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♪ And the mercy seat is waiting
And I think my head is burning
And in a way I’m yearning
To be done with all this measuring of proof
Of an eye for an eye
A tooth for a tooth
And anyway I told the truth
And I’m not afraid to die ♪
— “The Mercy Seat,” Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
A fortnight of open hearings that revealed a Nixonian palimpsest of impeachable offenses and outright federal felonies by Donald Trump has clarified an undeniable reality. Congressional Republicans will never hold their god emperor to the barest minimum standards of lawfulness and respect for the norms of no-caps liberal democratic governance.
Everyone sees how Trump shoved the American Republic out of Air Force One, but his pusillanimous, prevaricating partisans refuse to pull the parachute ripcord for fear of admitting Dear Leader did a bad. To mix a metaphor so badly he retroactively fails freshman high school English, Uvular must concede that members of the GOP will die on a hill consisting of their own spent bodies just to give Trump carte blanche.3The jettisoned Republic could crater into an elevation. You don’t know.
It matters not a whit that each delusional defense rings as untrue as Johnson & Johnson’s explanation that it only left asbestos fibers in Shower-to-Shower to combat burning in the loins.4Heh. Score 69 internet points for The Uve. But why?
Why, in full knowledge of the odious outcome and no small amount of preplanning, strap a 243-year-old fitfully successful experiment in equal rights and the rule of law to an electric chair? Uvular posits three related possibilities.
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♫ Why? Why?
Tell ‘em that it’s human nature ♫
— “Human Nature,” John Mayer5No objectively good version of this song exists. Might as well go with an agreed travesty.
To rush with a broad brush, Republicans ride and die with Trump (and take us all down with them) because
- They never believed in republicanism—Today’s GOP devolved from an unimaginably unsexy ménage à trois of Dixiecrats, John Birchers and Randians. Put the Federalist Society with its bizarre theory of a co-equal unitary executive on jizz mop duty, and you get a remorseless snake orgy ball of autocracy acolytes.
- A sunk cost only looks fallacious when you actually crunch the numbers—Longtime Politicdos have stumbled across Uvular’s pet theory that an utter, perhaps genetic, inability to engage in meaningful self-reflection exists as a precondition for propounding political conservativism. To a rightwinger’s way of not-thinking, only liberals possess the capacity to do wrong. Even (especially) when a rightwinger does exactly the same thing.
- If this buffoon …—GOPers figure that a person so venal, mercurial, inept, ignorant, incurious, felonious, rapey, and hateable getting away with it clears the landing zone for a competent dictator invested with the nearly godlike powers of a U.S. president. The people who prop up Trump, particularly the white nationalist and MAGA church evangelicals, trot him out him as a stalking horse. If he survives, every other monsters can then operate unfettered in the broad light of day.
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♩ Never take any pictures
Just try to remember
All I remember is trying
Here’s a story I like
I think it happened to me
I don’t even know if I’m lying ♩
— “Half Life,” Too Much Joy, Live at Least 6Actual Fun Fact: Uvular appears on the fadeout for this live album, which documents the final D.C. show of TMJ’s too-brief career. Stream “Theme Song” by clicking the album title and hear your caterwauling co-commenter bellow “To create / You must destroy / Smash the glass / And cry / Too Much Joy!”
Allow Uvular to close with this middle-aged man’s lament for a jaded jubilee. He doubts he’ll get another half-century, but he extends sincere wishes that his coeval Sesame Street and his promised constitutional republic do. The choices each person (even you non-American Politicados) makes during the onrushing 2020 election year will greatly influence one of those futures. Impeach the motherfucker already. Work to put Democrats and liberal-minded lawmakers in office. Take pictures.
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