Portrait of Doctor Gachet, Vincent Van Gogh, 1890
" … we're likely to be recovering for a very, very long time."

The news deeply disturbs me. We have a madman in the White House. It's not that I don't understand, because I do understand while reportedly so many clearly do not yet. Yet. Did we just grow to take for granted that an election would filter out the most glaring extremes and prevent anyone actually barking mad from taking the top job? I'll grant you that we've had a bad run, from Nixon to Reagan to Bush, we've seen Presidents push around our Constitution, largely, it seems in retrospect, due to their utter ignorance of its tenets. But this guy combines ignorance with arrogance, distain with cruelty, self-dealing with amorality, and lies heaped with even more lies until his inner insanity screams for wide public recognition. Yet the wheels of Constitutional government move achingly slowly, particularly when populated with those who've sworn fealty to absolute insanity.

Corruption should have more consequences than any election. When corruption first peeks over the parapet, our government should whack it into abject submission, with extreme prejudice and without remorse, giving only the due process corruption warrants. Deny the usual stalling tactics. Make the whole mess public. Label it what it is. Forego the dainty euphemisms. Call bribery just what it is. Call collusion a crime. Send the self-dealers to serve time where their Twitter feeds cannot continue poisoning the ignorant and easily impressionable. Stand up for something real this time.

The man is more than mere menace. He's a poisonous presence, equivocal and scheming, vividly dreaming of total dominion. He damns himself with hyperbolic praise, inflating every trait, misrepresenting himself even and especially to himself. His self-confidence crosses the line delineating the edge of simple confusion into damning delusion. He is the pox on our Presidency, for it is OUR Presidency and he our public servant. Instead of service, he brings a deepening disservice to the highest office in the land, populating his cabinet with the worst our country ever produced. He combines awful administration with an apparently absolute absence of concentration. He has not yet demonstrated any ability to negotiate himself out of even the flimsiest paper bag. He holds the strategic sensibilities of a wormless dirt clod.

I watch in genuine Dismay as another day goes by, another day pocked with half-baked denials and a lengthening list of civil trials impeded by his enduring bad faith. He plays the courts like a man guilty of much more than he's accused of, refusing to admit to even a single misunderstanding, let alone a deliberate crime. It's time this one was sent away. Napoleon's Helena would be too good for him. Ship him to the Far Tortugas to watch the sea level rise. Take him off Twitter, whose use policies he violates daily. Make him go away so we can continue our experiment with self-governance wiser than we ever were before. We've successfully answered the age old question which wondered what might happen if a madman gained that office. It was worse than anyone suspected. We'd better find some way to ensure another one never finds the way inside. If we don't die from this infection, we're likely to be recovering for a very, very long time.

©2019 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #GlancingKnow, #PureSchmaltz