Conservative George Will has a lovely and hilarious opinion piece in the Washington Post. I really do recommend that you go read the whole thing, but I’ll include a few paragraphs to entice you. One warning: you will probably need a dictionary.
Will’s claim is that Donald Trump is actually something that the nation did not know it needed, which is essentially a good kick in the pants so we can wake up and stop giving all the government’s power to the president. Not just Trump, but all presidents. As the saying goes, “absolute power corrupts absolutely”, and so this inexorable transfer of power to the executive branch absolutely has to stop.
To the list of history’s sublime romances — Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy — add the torrid affair between Anthony Scaramucci and President Trump. The former’s sizzling swoon for the latter is the most remarkable public display of hormonal heat since — here a melancholy thought intrudes — Jeff Sessions tumbled into love with Trump. Long ago. Last year.
Fortunately, today’s president is so innocent of information that Congress cannot continue deferring to executive policymaking. And because this president has neither a history of party identification nor an understanding of reciprocal loyalty, congressional Republicans are reacquiring a constitutional — a Madisonian — ethic. It mandates a prickly defense of institutional interests, placing those interests above devotion to parties that allow themselves to be defined episodically by their presidents.
Fastidious people who worry that the president’s West Virginia and Ohio performances — the alpha male as crybaby — diminished the presidency are missing the point, which is: For now, worse is better. Diminution drains this office of the sacerdotal pomposities that have encrusted it. There will be 42 more months of this president’s increasingly hilarious-beyond-satire apotheosis of himself, leavened by his incessant whining about his tribulations (“What dunce saddled me with this silly attorney general who takes my policy expostulations seriously?”). This protracted learning experience, which the public chose to have and which should not be truncated, might whet the public’s appetite for an adult president confident enough to wince at, and disdain, the adoration of his most comically groveling hirelings.
8 Comments
I did use the word PINO on this site first which Congress is beginning to realize. All they have to do is put a piece of paper in front of him to sign and stand there while he remembers to sign it.
Daily briefing? Waste of time with PINO
I doubt he actually reads those things he signs. I wonder what you could stick in front of him. I’m thinking about what Radar O’Reilly could do.
George’s column is quite interesting. What he appears to miss is that while he and others are so totally focused on Drumpf and his White House antics, he has installed several sycophants that are actually capable of destroying years of progress in environmental and human health. As Drumpf remains the idiot in chief, his ranting and ravings continue to embolden those who hold racist and misogynistic credos close to their hearts.
Let’s not forget Sinclair Media and net neutrality.
Ah, IK, you skipped over my favorite piece of Will’s column — not elegantly put, but a wonderfully true sentiment:
“Speaking of Scaramucci, and in his defense: His love interest, the president, was elected for his persona rather than his principles. Hence there is a vacuum at the center of the person who is at the center of the country’s absurdly president-centric conception of government. Therefore, loyalty inevitably manifests itself as sycophancy. ”
In other words, Trump is such an empty husk of a human, loyalty to him is by definition sycophancy.
Westomoon, I didn’t want to give away all the best words!
I’m getting tired of getting kicked in the pants. Every Republican president since Ike was a kick in the pants.
Frankly, I think Will is projecting. He and other Republican fake intellectuals like David Brooks are the ones who needed a kick in the pants after enabling the steady decline of the morality and reason of the Republican Party behind a veneer of religion and bogus economic theory.
The “nation” knew it did not need another kick in the pants. The nation voted for Hillary.
The kick in the pants now, is coming from the front, not the rear.