7 Reasons I’m Thankful for Little Donald
It’s Thanksgiving time, when we remember our orangins and give thanks for all the good things in our life. Now I know what your thinking, this is gonna be some sort of tongue-in-big-flappy-cheek dissertation. But not at all; even with a dual disaster, dumpster-fire meets train wreck sorta guy like Little Donald, there’s plenty to get us into the holiday spirit… even if it’s ever so slightly the Black Friday sort.
#7: We haven’t been nuked yet. You pessimists. Always chicken little, yelling the sky is falling. Humph. That’s just acid rain… with a bit of nuclear fallout from some test missile. Stop the whining. When its a real nuke you’ll know it.
#6: I’m thankful that LD hasn’t killed more people. There’s the woman in Charlottesville; would she be alive if we didn’t have a president who fomented and sanctioned violence by extremists? And the father and daughter in the creek on the southern border… not to mention the six kids, 24 migrants in all who died during Little Donald’s reign; would they have died during George W. Bush’s administration, a man who presumably lived in interdependent harmony with Hispanics on his Texas ranch? Would Jamal Khashoggi have been killed while America had any other president at the helm? But these are just the high profile cases and I said I’d keep it brief. [Oh shit. Update for the period between Nov 26, 2019 and October 9, 2020: he’s killed about 150,000 more people, by failing to protect the American people from the global coronavirus pandemic.]
#5: We now know where the Ukraine is. And we almost understand why it’s important. Apparently Europe actually ends somewhere over thataway, and LD’s BFF Vlad has ships and tanks and other toys all pointing thisaway. Well, it’s all very nasty, with rockets’ red glare and that sort of thing. Anyway we sell Ukraine these cool Javelin missiles that you can launch from your shoulder and they use them to keep Vlad at arms’ length, which is 2,500 meters. I don’t understand Celsius but I’m sure that’s far, bigly far. In fact I’m running down to Walmart tomorrow to see if I can pick up a few, what with my constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms for my militia. And never know if your kid will need it to protect his classmates.
#4: We now know exactly what the Constitution rigorously ‘constitutes,’ versus what it merely stipulates. Apparently all of it is stipulation. What it constitutes can only be determined by an endless procession of legal appeals through our national court system. This is a system, where, for instance, a judge will explain the answer to a simple yes-or-no question in as little as 120 pages. And in as quickly as 120 days. And with only about 120 gazillion dollars paid to hardworking baristas or barristers, depending on what time you wake up and whether you could get a job after law school and going a quarter million dollars in debt. At the end of the 120 days and gadollars :) , whoever still gives a damn wins… and ironically, also loses. That’s called ‘the practice of law.’
#3: We now have absolute, positive proof that the Electoral College will not prevent any asshole in the entire world from being elected president, whether as a grudge by a begrudged populace, a plant by a murderous foreign autocrat, a crony installed by billionaire oligarchs in our own country… or all three at once. Now don’t get me wrong, those founding fathers were geniuses to write out instructions for running a democracy, instructions that worked great for 250 years. But they didn’t realize that emergency systems — which is what the Electoral College is — never work when they’re not put to serious testing almost every year. They typically rust into a locked state or are otherwise not kept in working order. The Electoral College was locked in a rusted (untrusted) state because it was in disuse; the founding fathers were too successful for their own emergency hatch to be operable when we needed it most.
#2: He has exposed, or highlighted, or reminded us that we are still very much the Divided States of America. To all of us liberals who were already bothered by W, the bar has been reset much lower on all things ‘conservative.’ In fact, we could further metaphorize (wow, it’s already a word; I didn’t invent it), again bigly, that the bar is now lying on the ground and the two limbo guys who held it up for others to either slink under or jump over, are at the other bar, the drinking kind, totally drunk. If it were as simple as geography, the red and blue states… the coastal elites vs rural blue collars, we’d be lucky. We could just work on structural reconciliation. But it’s much deeper. We’re really exactly like Sunnis and Shiites. Again, I’ll keep it brief but we have people in all areas who just want things to stay as they were in the good old days… and they get to determine exactly which days were good, and which people are good.
#1: And I’m most thankful that the rest of that Constitution has so far passed the greatest stress test in all its years. Sure, we’re learning how Congress ain’t worth a shit when it comes to ensuring our laws are upheld. And that in turn has revealed that being a member of congress is just too good a job… to the point where those who hold the job will sell their soul, their family, and their country to keep it. (Think about it: they have no boss, an office at home and away, free travel, lifetime tenure… it’s no wonder.) We didn’t need Trump to learn that the lifetime in Congress was a problem, but I’m thankful for his role in highlighting just what a weak point our lack of term limits has become. In the age of rapid technological change, we must have term limits. The founding fathers were geniuses, not seers.
