It’s not unusual to become perturbed when, out of nowhere, your afternoon schedule is blown up by a mini-emergency. That happened to me last week, when, innocently flossing my teeth after eating an apple, one of my fake teeth—they’re not called that anymore, “implants” are considered more polite, but fake’s fake—fell to the bathroom floor. Swell, I thought, sat down at the desk—not even the songs that play on my new Hansel and Gretel cuckoo clock, including “Que Sera, Sera,” and “Oh, My Darling Clementine” and “My Bonnie” were cheery—and a black cloud emerged before I called the dentist to assess the damage. I hoped to put off the fake tooth’s glue-on—at least it wasn’t wooden—until this week, but no dice and soon enough I was off to Baltimore County, miserably observing the miserable architecture in miserable Towson, and finally sitting in an uncomfortable chair. While waiting for the dentist—phone silenced in my pocket—I thought about some very stupid comments I’d read about world affairs.
From Craig Calcaterra, a “baseball” blogger in desperate need of an editor, who in his Monday-Friday “Cup of Coffee” morning delivery increasingly ignores his putative subject and, in the voice of a ninth-grade girl, circa 2010, goes on and on about Trump, Musk and the other administration banditos.
He wrote: “We have very little to celebrate these days so I propose that we have a party every time we make it to Friday without America being turned into a post-apocalyptic hellscape like in "The Postman" or whatever the hell. Yeah, maybe that's a low bar, but a bunch of you have sent me messages of late in which you have voiced sincere concern about my mental health so I offer this as evidence that I am still capable of optimism.”
Still, that wasn’t a patch of spring training grass compared to this tweet from 24-year-old David Hogg, a vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee: “Fuck Donald Trump, Fuck Elon Musk and Fuck the Federalist Society judges who enable them.” A sane DNC Top Dog would’ve immediately fired the self-caricature who’ll no doubt run for Congress when he turns 25, but then again, sanity’s in short supply among Democrats, who, it must be reiterated, allowed Joe Biden to run for reelection until last July. If Hogg’s any example, the words “brand” and “on-message,” no matter how trite, haven’t yet reached Washington. Maybe those in charge are just stuffed from Chuck Schumer’s burgers or a nosh on the bird that still follows Bernie around and are in a “food coma.”
My fake tooth was re-fastened in short order and I engaged the dentist for five minutes—she’s part of an Orthodox Jewish Community in Maryland—about Trump’s rhetorically-challenged but bold proclamations about making Gaza the “Riviera of the Middle East” and his current use of Zelensky’s head as a soccer ball. This woman’s a Democrat—last October she praised Trump on Israel, but not much else and I exercised discretion and didn’t ask who she was voting for—but she’s onboard with the bullet-train speed of Trump’s first month in office (the only bullet train, by the way, here in the United States) and lamented that the Gaza gambit wasn’t likely to succeed because of Palestinian recalcitrance to relocate (who can blame them?) but was more optimistic that a reasonable, and peaceful outcome was now possible in the Russia-Ukraine stand-off because of the administration’s vocal pronouncements.
“I can accept a small amount of foreign aid for Ukraine,” she said, “but why is America shouldering the burden? Where’s Europe?” That’s common sense that’s evident in Baltimore County—even if anecdotal—but not in New York/DC where the commentariat, so accustomed to White House pandering, can’t keep up with. I hesitate to paraphrase one of Simon and Garfunkel’s worst songs (and there are many), but pundits are crying, “Slow down, you move too fast/You’ve got to make the government last.” I’m looking forward to what the Beltway mouthpieces say when Trump follows through (I hope) on USPS privatization and withdrawing from the United Nations. Thunderbolts of sanctimonious spittle, so get under a desk and duck for cover.
The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan was flummoxed last Friday, although not as unhinged as a David Frum or nearly any Atlantic “deplorable.” She wrote: “The most charitable gloss on the administration style… is that they’re simply riding high and have grown full of themselves, as opposed to clinically insane… Mr. Musk may be a freedom-loving American idealist who’s deeply grateful for what our founders created and who’d give all to protect it. But then for all I know, he could be a secret operative for a Liechtenstein-based cartel. He and his [young] underlings are political novices.”
Liechtenstein! Nice twist in an otherwise myopic column. Trump’s new administration—a machine that exposes the 2017 rag-tag team as the bad joke it was—moves so quickly that the Permanent Government apologists react immediately to any “news” and won’t pause to reflect. If I were an editor at a “serious” media organization, I’d tell the staff to refrain from comment for at least a day. It’s plain that Trump, J.D. Vance, Rubio, Musk and Bobby Jr. are throwing out proposal after proposal, hoping that a percentage of them will stick. And if the courts overturn this or that directive, no harm done, just move along. While Trump’s “Gulf of America” idea was frivolous (if he even remembers it), the continuation of “Trump’s a dictator” admonitions is even sillier. Paul Revere would blush.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023