The latest news from Camp Runamuck down in Manhattan is that, somewhere in what the late Gram Parsons undoubtedly would have recognized as a Gilded Palace of Sin, a craftsman's hands have cleverly taken the basket of deplorables and fashioned it into an entire Cabinet of Deplorables. There really is some art in how the minions of El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago have managed to make a Wednesday that was worse than Tuesday was, a Thursday that was worse than the Wednesday was, and a Friday that, long before noon, was the worst goddamn day of a godawful week. I mean, they call it stormy Monday, but Tuesday was just as bad. And so on.

Before we get to the proposed elevation of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions to the position of Attorney General which, in 2016, is like hiring Hannibal Lecter as your chief of thoracic surgery, and even before we get to the fact that the president-elect's National Security Adviser is a walking ad for the finest in tinfoil pillbox hats, let's pause and reflect on the fact that the brain trust has decided to hand the CIA over to Congressman Mike Pompeo of Kansas, who has to dial one and an area code in order to contact crazy. From the NYT:

Mr. Pompeo, who has served for three terms in Congress and is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, gained prominence for his role in the congressional investigation into the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. He was a sharp critic of Hillary Clinton on the committee.

Well, "gained prominence" is one way of putting it, I guess. "Constantly showed his ass on national TV" is another. Pompeo is a perfect specimen of the Uruk-hai produced in the muck of the Koch political caverns. (This is the time, I think, to point out that any Republican from Brownbackistan at the moment should be thought prima facie to be too bazats and too obviously for sale to be hired by the national government.) That just makes him a big old 'ho. What bothers me is that he's probably one of the noisiest Benghazi truthers we have. What bothers me is that, late last year, Pompeo was out there encouraging sedition within the American military.

"It's unconscionable to put our military leaders in this position, where the commander-in-chief asks of them something that is unlawful," Pompeo told [Frank] Gaffney. "And my intention was not to put pressure on those amazing soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, but rather to inform everyone that you can't ask folks in the military to execute an unlawful order. And I hope that they understand that there are members of Congress that have their back in the event that they choose to make a decision that comports with their duty."

That's just the kind of guy you want running covert ops for a president who can't find a clue with both hands and a flashlight.

Now, as to the other atrocities. Michael Flynn is seven kinds of nutball. Not my opinion, Colin Powell's. Via Business Insider:

"I spoke at [Defense Intelligence Agency] last month," Powell wrote after Flynn spoke at the Republican National Convention. "Flynn got fired as head of DIA. His replacement is a black Marine 3-star. I asked why Flynn got fired. Abusive with staff, didn't listen, worked against policy, bad management, etc. He has been and was right-wing nutty every [sic] since. I watched about five minutes on line of his talked [sic] and switched off."

Again, just the guy you want to have the ear of a president who thinks Ukraine is a wading bird common to the north shore of Long Island.

But nothing puts the rotting fish atop the cholera sundae quite like the nomination of Sessions, a rank segregationist and career opponent of everything for which the Civil Rights movement stood for, to run the Department of Justice. Sessions is a thoroughgoing horror, and he's also a product of the rather successful attempts by the Reagan administration 30 years ago to pander to the detritus of American apartheid, and to reinstate white supremacy by any covert means necessary, from having Reagan launch his campaign with a states rights speech across town from where murdered Civil Rights workers once were buried in a dam to the nomination in 1985 of William Bradford Reynolds to be assistant attorney general. Reynolds was a protégé of Edwin Meese, that deathless old authoritarian yahoo who's now advising the staff of Camp Runamuck. Reynolds was a determined foe of "quotas," and he wasn't real fond of federal efforts to protect the franchise on behalf of his fellow citizens who happened to be African-American.

The Reynolds nomination occasioned a bipartisan brawl in Congress, because there were still some Republicans in Congress who were proud of having stood with Dr. King. In his The Age of Reagan, historian Sean Wilentz recounts how, in 19-freaking-82, Reynolds had Ronald Reagan inches away from not renewing the Voting Rights Act. Only the intervention of Senator Bob Dole, god bless him, convinced Saint Ronnie that to not extend the act would be politically catastrophic and morally ruinous. In 1985, when Meese tried to make Reynolds the third-highest ranking official in the DOJ, the Senate Judiciary Committee spat in his eye. The critical votes came from Republicans Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Charles Mathias of Maryland. Around the same time, the Senate rejected Sessions as a candidate for the federal bench because he was worse on these issues than Reynolds was.

Sessions deserves no less resounding a rejection as Reynolds got, but it's unlikely he'll get one. Republicans like Specter and Mathias do not exist in the Congress any more. I'm sure the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee will raise holy hell, but they'll be shouting down a well. Sessions is going to be a real gutcheck for the Senate.

Taylor Hill Getty Images

(For example, what in the hell is Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina and the only African-American Republican in the chamber, going to do? He and Sessions have been friendly in the past, but voting to make your racist pal the nation's highest law-enforcement officer is different by an order of magnitude.)

But there's also another sad factor to be considered. The attitude toward, say, voting rights held by Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is almost exactly the same as the attitude demonstrated by the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court when that worthy declared the Day of Jubilee in the Shelby County decision that gutted the VRA. Not to fight someone like Jeff Sessions is to surrender hard-won gains that, quite frankly, were won by people with their blood. Here's John Lewis, accepting his National Book Award this week, talking about how, when he was a kid, he couldn't get a library card.

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To hell with Jeff Sessions. You don't squander the legacy that John Lewis nearly paid for with his life. That would be an obscenity. Putting the likes of him in Robert F. Kennedy's old chair would be taking economic anxiety a little too far, I think.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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