Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

A Bad Week For National Socialism

First, can we all take a moment to consider the entertainment offered by Sean Spicer on a daily basis?  And can we hope against hope that Melissa McCarthy is free this Saturday night?

Spicer's tone deaf comments proved he was not good at his job.  His immediate impulse to double down and dig himself deeper into his rhetorical hole proves that he is truly incompetent and yet also representative of the Trump White House.  NEVER SURRENDER.  Except today, he's having to apologize.

Meanwhile, tea leaf readers in DC are counting the hours until Steve Bannon gets the ax.  Bannon's influence was primarily in shaping the rhetoric of the Trump campaign and White House.  My guess is that he was behind the language in Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III's speech that was too extreme even for AG Sessions.  Bannon is the poet of Trump's dystopian hellscape.  He is not, nor has he ever been, a policy thinker or a competent political manager.  He's a bomb thrower.

Trump, or perhaps Co-President Jared Kushner, has had enough of the bomb throwing.  It would be tough to see who has Bannon's back right now, beyond Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka.  Purging the White House of those three would give Spicer some breathing room, too.

In my dream world, they fire Bannon, who immediately turns on Trump with the venom that only he can.  Bannon knows, perhaps, where some of the bodies are buried with regards to Russia.  Plus, Bannon has always said his desire was to create an ethno-nationalist party within the heart of the GOP.  If he get booted from the GOP, I certainly hope he creates his American Party to draw his voters away from the GOP.  Last night's special election in Kansas suggests that the current dysfunction in Trumpistan has about a 20 point effect on the margins of victory.  Ten points is a landslide; twenty is a fundamental realignment.  Siphon off 5-10% of Republican voters into the American Party, and Democrats will romp.

Hey, a guy can hope.

No comments: