This Time, I Think It Was Personal. Kinda

I’ve got friends in low places   Garth Brooks

You know, when it comes to most people, you tend to think of them as good and bad, pluses and minuses. But when it comes to people like Charlie Manson, Jim Jones, and Steve Bannon, it’s pretty much cut and dried. No positives, only deficits.

Steve Bannon is a self centered, arrogant, self indulgent slob, the kind who used to wander villages convinced of his own brilliance while everybody snickered at him. It wasn’t so bad when Bannon was running Breitbart, there he was only a pain in the ass to his employees and advertisers. And then that nitwit Mercer tied him to Trump’s campaign, and he became a national pain in the ass.

The national platform was Bannon’s dream come true. Bannon likes to be an up close and personal pain in the ass, he likes his obnoxiousness right in your face. And now he had television cameras to piss us all off. But Bannon was also incredibly dangerous, since he is at heart a nihilist, hell bent on deconstructing the federal government. But in Trump, he had a man in charge with the IQ of silly putty to manipulate.

The world cheered when His Lowness gave Bannon the Denver Boot. Bannon made lemonade out of lemons, bragging that he was going back to Breitbart, with all of his weapons locked and loaded. But nobody but his dim witted podcast listeners paid any attention to him anymore, and for the most part, neither did Trump.

It amazed nobody who knew Bannon, a natural grifter, when, late in the Trump presidency he was indicted and arrested for running an online scam to get equally dim witted Trump supporters to donate to a fund to privately build the wall, and then absconding with large sums of the cash for personal use. But it brought a warm glow to the heart to know that he was about to get his comeuppance, until Trump pardoned the little shit.

Which brings us to the nut of this story. Since his ouster by Trump, Bannon has been little more than a peripheral figure. But nobody knows better how to elevate a peripheral role in the media like Bannon. And Trump did resume some personal communications with him, especially after his defeat last November. But Bannon played the whole thing up as if he was the mastermind of Trump’s post defeat response.

And so, Bannon was an easy and natural target for the 1/6 committee to subpoena for documents and testimony. But before the ink was even dry on the subpoena, the committee already knew that it was pissing into a fan. Like Trump, Bannon is a professional victim, being hounded by authority. There was no way he was going to cooperate. And he didn’t, he flipped the committee double barrel birds.

Which, to my mind, was the point. Bannon was a natural target. As a private citizen, not in the Trump administration, Bannon had no legitimate claim to executive privilege, which he nonetheless claimed. And Bannon is a die hard revolutionary. If he is convicted, and sentenced to prison, I honestly believe he would walk through the prison doors whistling, ready to spend two years penning his personal Mein Kampf.

And I’m not at all sure that this wasn’t the undeclared intent all along. It’s hard to see Bannon as a major figure in the lead up to the Capitol riot, he was too far out of the loop. But Bannon is enough of a martyr to gladly plunk his dumb, then 68 year old ass into prison for two years. And while it might not be my preferred 15-20 for massive mail and wire fraud, I can live with it. Yes, I’m that shallow and vindictive.