Parliament of Thieves

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

We can see the outline of how the next four years are going to play. Someone will criticize Trump and thin-skinned, small-hands Donald will take to Twitter to attack them, and in doing so he will either distort the truth, ignore the truth or tell an outright lie. Trump’s tweet will drive coverage by the lapdog corporate media.

Actors and artists are also citizens, and some actors and artists are well informed, engaged, and eloquent: George Clooney, Mark Ruffalo, Rosario Dawson, Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep come to mind. Trump took aim at Streep over remarks she made at the Golden Globe awards about Trump’s mocking of a reporter who suffers from a physical disability. Naturally, Trump denied that he ever mocked the reporter, even though video tape evidence of him doing just that exists. Here we step into Trump’s Orwellian world, where up is down, black is white, war is peace, ignorance is knowledge, and The Donald is infallible.

Trump called Streep “overrated.” Let’s correct the record. Streep has been nominated for Academy Awards nineteen times, with fifteen of those nominations for Best Actress, an unparalleled feat. Streep has won three Oscars and eight Golden Globe awards. Streep is the Michael Jordan of Hollywood. Donald Trump is an idiot.

January 20 is the day America plunges into the abyss. Yeah, when Trump raises his tiny hand and swears to uphold the Constitution, a document he’s hardly familiar with and has little respect for, it’s over the edge and into the black. And I’m only going to say this once: if Big Bad Vladimir Putin somehow -- and I think this is a shibboleth concocted by the CIA or the NSA -- tipped the election to Trump, then it’s just payback for the many elections the United States has disrupted in countries from Chile to Iran. The US dollar is still the world’s reserve currency, and the US has the largest, most sophisticated military ever assembled, but we also lead the world -- by a wide margin -- in pure hypocrisy. We subvert democratic outcomes in sovereign nations all the time; we spy on allies and enemies alike; we prop up dictators and murderers when it suits our purpose; we ignore national borders; we kidnap and torture; and we lie, distort, and dissemble.  

But how we hate it when the Lazy Susan spins and we are on the receiving end of dirty political tricks! The outrage that surges through our body politic! We forget our own crimes, the misery we have caused, the hordes of people we have killed; our self-righteousness and indignation caroms off the charts.

The American republic is still an experiment that can fail; progress is never guaranteed, a concept we will learn over the next four terrible years, as Trump and his band of thieves dismantle and dismember what remains of the New Deal and Great Society. Forget ethics, forget the rule of law, forget moderation, forget compassion, forget justice.

Welcome to the Parliament of Thieves.