Clusterfuck Nation

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It’s beginning to look a little like The Day the Earth Stood Still out there, with Devin Nunes in the Klaatu role, roiling the Earthlings into a frothy hysteria as they attempt to defend their puny empire of errand boys, grocery clerks, and elected buffoons. At dawn’s early light, we await The Memo.

The New York Times was running veritable Chinese fire drills on its front page this morning denouncing The Memo in advance, shrieking about the end of the Republic, with the laughable caveat that… “None of this is to say the F.B.I. and the rest of the federal law enforcement apparatus should be immune from criticism or reform.” The Times editorial did not go into any detail about what exactly might invite that reform — like perhaps one top-rank agent telling another one that the “loathsome” president had to be gotten rid of at all costs.

The casual observer — say, one who is immune to the charms of Donald J. Trump — can’t fail to notice that there is a bit more smoke emanating from the upper echelons of the FBI than has yet been seen in the sludgy narrative called “Russian Meddling in the 2016 Election.” Going into two years of that yarn, not one concrete detail has emerged. Meddled how? For all the “we now know” talking points uttered by Grand Inquisitor Rachel Maddow, it seems to me that we now know next to nothing about “collusion” between Russians and Trump, while we know a great deal about the indelicate behavior of FBI officers in important positions with grave responsibilities — government agents with the power to wreck lives — who cooked up an enormous hysteria in the body politic.

The situation certainly puts the nation in a quandary. An uncouth and ridiculous President called forth to battle a vicious, dishonest, bureaucracy and in particular its gigantic, out-of-control “security” apparatus, which appears to have been hijacked by politically interested parties — namely, the minions of Hillary Clinton. You have been reminded here before that history is the supreme prankster. In Fourth Turning terms, the poor old disintegrating USA pined for a “gray champion” and all it got was this booby prize: a Manhattan real estate schmikler with a mean streak. Well, that’s how things roll in a long emergency. And this might only be the beginning of it.

In any case, it appears that the FBI, in the hallowed words of Ricky Ricardo, has got some ‘splainin’ to do. Recall, it was not so long ago that the FBI was run by a cross-dressing maniac addicted to blackmail, so let’s not act as if the agency was something that the Lord Yahweh brought into being on the fifth day of creation, after the lobsters and the cockateels. Granted, J. Edgar Hoover was a hard act to follow, but we are now, evidently, living in an age of even lower men (and women, to be fair).

CNN reminded viewers relentlessly last night that The Memo was sure to be a disappointment, a “nothingburger,” for a nation that expects a righteous half-pound beef patty with lettuce, tomato, pickle, and special sauce on a sesame bun. Personally, I expect something more like a three-day-old dead carp in a plain brown wrapper. Maybe “the Resistance” will try to make gefilte fish out of it, which is a burger of sorts: chopped meat, anyway.

Meanwhile, we await the report of DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who has been rooting around in the same burger den as the House and Senate committees, questioning the same cast of characters. The DOJ report is liable to be more damaging than The Memo. The whole nasty gumball of suspicion and innuendo seems destined to climax in a constitutional crisis. Ludicrous as it seems — like some rogue army out of the stupid Star Wars epic — the “Resistance” bethinks itself the nation’s savior. In the best American tradition, they’ll burn the joint down in order to save it.

New Paintings by JHK 2016 — 2017

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