Before Donald Trump made the U.S. presidency less dignified than workaday gigs like assistant bovine inseminator, I posited that voting for him would be like willfully electing Caligula. Or maybe Michael Scott.
Either way, I knew it would be fucking bad. But clearly I underestimated how gobsmackingly bad it would actually be.
This may not end up being just a four-year blip that we all laugh about and move on from. The Trump years are gonna leave scars, and even (marginally sane) conservatives know it.
One of those conservatives is veteran Washington Post columnist George Will. I’ve always grudgingly admired Will’s facility with the language when he makes his awful, retrograde arguments, so it’s refreshing to be able to read a Will column that I 100 percent agree with.
And today he was on fire. Or as on fire as the stolid Georgie Dub-Dubs can be, anyway.
Some choice excerpts:
Never has a U.S. election come at such a moment of national mortification. In April 1970, President Richard M. Nixon told a national television audience that futility in Vietnam would make the United States appear to the world as “a pitiful, helpless giant.” Half a century later, America, for the first time in its history, is pitied.Not even during the Civil War, when the country was blood-soaked by a conflict involving enormous issues, was it viewed with disdainful condescension as it now is, and not without reason: Last Sunday, Germany (population 80.2 million) had 159 new cases of covid-19; Florida (population 21.5 million) had 15,300.
Yup. The butcher’s bill is kind of difficult to hide when it’s this outrageously high — plaintive yowls of “WE HAVE THE BEST TESTING” notwithstanding.
And Will has realized, along with the rest of us in the resistance, that we’re going to have to win big in November to beat back the ocher abomination’s fascistic jibber-jabber about a “stolen” election.
This year, the pandemic will be an accelerant of preexisting trends: There will be a surge of early and mail voting. So, an unambiguous decision by midnight Eastern time Nov. 3 will require (in addition to state requirements that mailed ballots be postmarked, say, no later than Oct. 31) a popular-vote tsunami so large against the president that there will be a continentwide guffaw when he makes charges, as surely he will, akin to those he made in 2016. Then, he said he lost the popular vote by 2.9 million because “millions” of undocumented immigrants voted against him. Making a preemptive strike against civic confidence, Trump has announced that the 2020 election will be the “most corrupt” in U.S. history.
Will also acknowledges the grim irony of a man coming into office pledging to make America great again before ineluctably transforming it into a nidorous heap of pestilence and ape sharts.
This nation built the Empire State Building, groundbreaking to official opening, in 410 days during the Depression, and the Pentagon in 16 months during wartime. Today’s less serious nation is unable to competently combat a pandemic, or even reliably conduct elections. This is what national decline looks like.
The entire column can be found here. It’s def worth a read.
“This guy is a natural. Sometimes I laugh so hard I cry." — Bette Midler on Aldous J. Pennyfarthing, via Twitter. Find out what made dear Bette break up. Dear F*cking Lunatic: 101 Obscenely Rude Letters to Donald Trump and its boffo sequels Dear Pr*sident A**clown: 101 More Rude Letters to Donald Trump and Dear F*cking Moron: 101 More Letters to Donald Trump by Aldous J. Pennyfarthing are now available for a song! Click those links, yo!
