You know, so much of what passes for news today is so completely ridiculous on the face of it, that it’s easy to miss just how serious this shit really is. Y’all know me, and I consider it my job to make the sometimes Byzantine and complex clear and simple instead. And to do that tonight, I would like to ask you to put yourself in the mindset of a Hollywood producer, and I am a young writer trying to pitch a script. You ready to give it a try?
OK, here we go. Thanks for meeting with me today. My idea is for a political comedy. It starts out with a caricature of the dumbest, most corrupt, incompetent President that you can imagine. I’m thinking in terms of Mel Brooks’ character of the Honorable Governor William J LePetomaine in Blazing Saddles.
Through a series of comedic twists, including his own blatant racism and sexism, played up for laughs, and the unlikely interference of a foreign power, he becomes the President. But it turns out that once he gets into the Oval Office, the guy is a total, national nightmare. He actually tries to pull off all of the sexist, racist shit he espoused, and he even doubles down. And in doing so, he enraged a critical part of his base, white suburban women, and the midterm elections were a bloodbath for his party giving the majority in the House back to the Democrats. And worse yet, he let a deadly global pandemic loose on our shores, and tried to whitewash it as nothing more than a bad case of the flu.
Going into his reelection cycle, he knew that he had about as much chance of success as a snowflake that lands on a cactus. So, he started pissing in the punch bowl early. Knowing that the pandemic would lead to a record number of mail in ballots, months before the election was held, he condemned all mail in ballots as a Democratic hoax, rigged to steal the election. And he continued to insist that any result that showed him losing was evidence of a fraudulent election. And he lost in a landslide.
And then he turned the denial machine up to puree. He sent lawyers into court for more than 60 frivolous lawsuits, none of which managed to survive their initial hearings in court, by claiming massive voter fraud, without ever actually alleging massive voter fraud under oath in court.Â
And when that failed, he turned his attention to what he presumed were “friendly” state legislatures, to overturn the election results, and name slates of electors that were politically for him. And while there was absolutely no legal reason for them to do so, he petitioned them to overturn the legal results of the election. The pinnacle of this was in Georgia, where he resorted to naked threats to try to force them to fraudulently change their results. And because he is the real life equivalent of the Mel Brooks Governor, wandering around the Oval Office with his pants around his ankles, he got caught doing it on tape.
And when that failed, he spent weeks calling his far right, neo Nazi, white supremacist flunkies to converge on Washington Dc on January 6th, the day that congress would certify the results of the electoral college, promising them that It will be wild! And then he gave them an inflammatory speech from the grounds of the White House, with other butt boys making speeches as well, and sent them off to the Capitol to Stop the count!
Hey, don’t look at me, I’m just the dumb ass writer, you guys are the high falutin’ Hollywood producers. Would a single one of you put die one into a project like this? Hell, would a single one of you even have taken this goddamned meeting?
I purposely put this piece in highly satirical terms just to show how absurdly ridiculous the entire thing was. And yet there is nothing satirical about it. All of this shit actually happened, and we all lived through it. But somehow it just didn’t seem quite so ridiculous when it unfolded in real time. This is how fragile out democracy is. This is how close we came to extinguishing that flame. And this is why we can never forget, and must maintain constant vigilance.
If you enjoyed this article, you might also like to check out President Evil, and the sequel, President Evil II, A Clodwork Orange . They comprise a pretty much daily report from the front of the 2016 GOP primaries, as well as the general election
Follow me on Twitter at @RealMurfster35
when you put it as plainly as that, it does seem a little ‘overwritten’.
But the plot does seem to be settling for a satisfying ending.
Reality always works out to be stranger than fiction. By the way joe, in case u hadnt reviewed my response to the sarcastic ending of me saying ” i have God on my side”…as a religion major, studying them all, i would be the last person to be that arrogant. Refer to Lennon’s song about God, which got him shot, Dylans sardonically pointing out the BS in his song about God on our side, jethro tull’s song, or Bruce Cockburn'( spelling?), song ‘Gospel of Bondage’, that ends ” God won’t be reduced to an ideology”. Just to be clear. If you use sarcasm, so can we all.