The New Bolshevism

A lie told often enough becomes the truth. 
-- Vladimir Iliich Lenin 

So the Trump reality show continues.    Now that Trump has fired the FBI director, what can we expect next?   Will there be a staff shakeup with Spicey being shown the door, because he could not anticipate what the President would say next?   Even Mike Pence echoed the first impression he was given that the President followed the recommendation to sack Comey of the acting Attorney General, backed up by his boss, the inimitable, Confederate flag waving Jeff Sessions, who supposedly had been recused by his own hand from anything dealing with the Russian investigation over which the President has clearly been losing sleep.  Spicey and Sessions can be fired; Pence cannot.  Somehow that paradigm of "I am a Christian first, American second, and Republican, third,” must be going home to his equally devout wife and privately saying, "Golly gee, honey!  I may be President sooner than we thought!"

Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have already revealed their unwillingness to stand up to a President who is clearly unhinged, or as David Brooks notes in his New York Times column today, is a child with the inability to control himself.  Witness the revelation of intelligence data that could compromise sources in allied countries, which the Russians can probably clearly figure out. In this case, Israel, the enemy of Russian clients, Assad, Iran, and Hizbollah. And Donald thinks that it was a "productive" meeting, especially the day after he fired Comey, investigating the administration for possible collusion with those same Russians.  And today, breaking news, Putin wants to help with release of information concerning the meeting where American journalists and photographers were excluded.

Ryan, by pushing through the House a health care bill that marginalizes the poor, the unfortunate, the sick and the elderly who have not yet reached the Medicare starting line, should be worrying about voter wrath come the next election.              Under Trumpcare, bulldozed through the House by a President whose ego needed a "win" more than caring about the angry constituents who put him in the White House to "drain the swamp," will have to look up from their far right websites and blame the elites for not recognizing that Trump is not on their side.    The cynicism of it all is unimaginable. 

A recent Netflix documentary about Roger Stone, the consummate Machivellian operator who ports a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back ( I am not making this up,) and described by Trump as a "good guy,"  is so disquieting, that the entire nature of our political process blossoms into some scary Steven King scenario about evil. The court of the Borgias, if you will.   Roy Cohen, the lawyer for Joseph McCarthy, and one of the darker stains on our Communist baiting past, appears as one of Stone's heroes.   Cohen was Trump's mentor and taught him how to defraud with impunity all the naifs who came his way; the documentary catalogs all the dirty tricks that make Frank Underwood look like a volunteer for medcins sans frontiers.  The man is totally  devoid of any moral compass, just as his boss is.  From Watergate to Trump, Stone has triumphed in lowering the bar so far, the most accomplished limboist could not emerge from the other side.

But this time it may be too much.  Even Republicans are beginning to wake up to the "Art of the Deal, the author of which was not really Trump.   In fact the author had to follow Trump around, listening to his phone calls to be able to assemble a skeleton of a manuscript.  We are not some Atlantic City stone masons, stiffed by a scoundrel who now happens to occupy the oval office.  The great legal scholar Lawrence Tribe, has already called for impeachment for obstruction of justice.  Trump's conversation with Comey, possibly taped should be subpoenaed by either the house judiciary committee or by a special prosecutor.  And the assistant Attorney General ought to appoint one immediately.  If the President is exonerated, then we can lurch to the next manufactured crisis.

On top of the daunting issue of possible collusion with the Russian government to tamper with our election, looms the greater threat to the nation:   The subversion of our separation of powers, the disbanding of the administrative state, the denigration of the judiciary and of the press, and the admiration for a Russian kleptocrat and other authoritarian leaders, including African dictators, European and Hungarian autocrats and other scalawags.    The idea that all reliable information (or misinformation) comes from the leader.  The rest is fake news.

Anyone who has studied European history knows that it part and parcel of a mindset that is totally un-American, denigrate the media, call them fake and then disseminate one's own version of the alternative facts.   

It’s all so Bolsheviki.