The War is Over. We Lost.

A year ago, I wrote the following about the  incoming Trump presidency:  

He’ll be a strutting, tweeting, TV nation Mussolini while the real business of government is carried out by Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, and they are going to unleash the most reactionary, corporate friendly agenda we’ve ever seen. It’s going to be worse than Bush’s first term. It’s the Koch Brothers’ country now, and they’re going to nail down the plutocracy and make it a permanent fact of our national life.

And so it’s come to pass.  Regardless of it’s final details, this tax bill will nail in the plutocracy forever. But, hey, did you hear Trump called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” at a ceremony honoring the Navajo code talkers from World War II, and that he did it beneath a portrait of Indian killer  Andrew Jackson, no less?  What will that awful, awful, hideous orange vulgarian say next?  Titter titter. Let’s discuss it for a week.

Now the Republicans are planning phase two of the putsch,  cutting Medicare and Social Security.  Paul Ryan is walking around literally looking like he’s splooging in his slacks. After all, his life-long dream of making Ayn Rand’s vision of America a reality is about to take a giant leap forward. But, hey, did you hear Donald Trump just gave a speech supporting pedophile Roy Moore for the Senate? What will that awful, awful, hideous orange vulgarian say next? Titter titter. Let’s discuss it for a week.  

Coming up next, the end of net neutrality.  This means that the one area where you can find alternative opinions and independent news, i.e., the one medium where you can find fundamental criticism of the emerging corporate order, is going to be strangled to death by a cartel of monopolies, and the Internet is going to become exactly like cable TV.  But, hey, by then the awful, awful, hideous orange vulgarian will have made some outrageous new tweet for the pundit class to feign outrage over and titter about for the rest of the news cycle.

The Republicans have found the ideal front man, a shrewd con artist who knows instinctively how to manipulate and distract the media while they systematically dismantle the country and refashion in their interest. 

And whither the resistance, the one led by the youthful energy of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton? Well, Chuck and Nancy are doddering around looking for their spectacles and muttering about Russia, although Chuck is also taking time out to party in the Hamptons with Jared and Ivanka, and Hillary is still going around blaming everyone but herself for her defeat. Viva la Resistance!

The war is over and we lost. The Republican’s agenda, once passed, will become permanent. It will beome permanent in part because the Democrats will do nothing to overturn it. When they regain power, and they will at some point, they’ll tell us that they’re not going to dwell on the past, but, rather, do the work the American people elected them to do, and the next mushy, centrist, DNC approved creature who sits in the Oval Office will look us straight in the eyes — because that’s what his consultants tell him Real Leaders do — and boldly inform us that it’s time to move forward.