Susan Sontag, whose endearing efforts to increase her word power I mentioned here, wrote in her essay "What's Happening in America (1966)":
Today's America, with Ronald Reagan the new daddy in California and John Wayne chawing spareribs in the White House, is pretty much the same Yahooland that Mencken was describing.
Sontag lived to see California's daddy move to Pennsylvania Avenue but what would she say about the leader of the free world rising early to tweet insults at the successor host of the reality tv show he had abandoned in order to make America great again?
I don't think I'll ever be obliged to withdraw my low opinion of Trump. There is wisdom in crowds, and, scrolling about the Web, I see that people I never agree with about anything also hold him in contempt. Here is David Brooks, house Republican of the New York Times:
[E]ven if Trump’s ideology were not noxious, his incompetence is a threat to all around him. To say that it is amateur hour at the White House is to slander amateurs. The recent executive orders were drafted and signed without any normal agency review or even semicoherent legal advice, filled with elemental errors that any nursery school student would have caught.
It seems that the Trump administration is less a government than a small clique of bloggers and tweeters who are incommunicado with the people who actually help them get things done. Things will get really hairy when the world’s problems are incoming. . . .
[I]t’s becoming increasingly clear that the aroma of bigotry infuses the whole operation, and anybody who aligns too closely will end up sharing in the stench.
Of course Brooks, though conservative, writes for the New York Times, head of "the opposition party," but then, I see here that Michael Warren, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard, quotes from a news article in the Times in order to make the same Keystone Kops argument advanced by Brooks:
This confusion wasn't just happening on the level of the refugees and visa-holders, the law enforcement officers at airports, and for normal people watching the news at home. People at the highest levels of the federal government seemed just as confused. The New York Times has the perfect anecdote to demonstrate this:
As President Trump signed a sweeping executive order on Friday, shutting the borders to refugees and others from seven largely Muslim countries, the secretary of homeland security was on a White House conference call getting his first full briefing on the global shift in policy.
Gen. John F. Kelly, the secretary of homeland security, had dialed in from a Coast Guard plane as he headed back to Washington from Miami. Along with other top officials, he needed guidance from the White House, which had not asked his department for a legal review of the order.
Halfway into the briefing, someone on the call looked up at a television in his office. "The president is signing the executive order that we're discussing," the official said, stunned.
It wasn't just DHS who seemed to have been caught flat-footed by the order. CNN also reported that the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel was not consulted for guidance before the executive order was issued. The result, writes Benjamin Wittes, is that the order is something of a mess, with references to the wrong statutes and legal holes the ACLU is more than happy to drive lawsuits through.
Warren concludes by quoting a Republican congressman to the effect that, in the future, "policy changes should be better coordinated"--an understatement, according to the author.
Meanwhile, Dick Cheney, the effin' Prince of Darkness, said, when asked by Hugh Hewitt about Trump's executive order imposing a travel ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries:
I think this whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we stand for and believe in. I mean, religious freedom has been a very important part of our history and where we came from.
It seems even a blind pig can sometimes find the trough of truth. The judge who yesterday blocked the travel ban was appointed to the federal bench by the second President Bush. A White House statement called the decision "outrageous," but when Dick Cheney and I and a federal judge appointed by W are all on the other side, perhaps the possibility that it's the ban that's outrageous should be considered. I'm not going to get into the details of the corporate leaders, from GE in the east to the pooh-bahs of Silicon Valley in the west, who have harshly criticized the content of the executive order, without reference to the botched implementation: but it's clear that, in their view, an America contemplating its navel behind a locked door isn't compatible with their business plans.
Kellyanne Conway, Trump's "senior counsellor" who I trust will be remembered mainly for renaming falsehood "alternative facts," recently was asked in an interview whether Trump hadn't approved the botched Yemen raid while having dinner with Steve Bannon et al. She opened her mouth to lie, and you could then see her swallow it back before holding her silence, thereby confirming the premise of the question. I think Bannon is probably the worst of them all. I don't know if he's a booze-hound, but he has the face of one, all saggy and doughy with little splotches of pink. I suppose it might count as a kind of excuse if his racial and nationalist phantasms had been conjured while treading liquid inside a bottle.
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