Holiday of Shame

It's going to be like this.  Each annual event in Washington, in addition to every hour's news, is going to remind us what a travesty and a tragedy we're living through, thanks to the results of the 2016 presidential election.

Now we've got President's Day, and apart from honoring the best that have held that office, we're faced with the present incumbent, and his moral corruption, incompetence and the daily dishonor he does to the office and the country, so extreme (as I foretold you) that it's unlikely either will ever be the same.  So this is our first holiday of shame.

“The job of being President of the United States is one of the most difficult, the most nearly impossible, ever devised by the ingenuity of man," H.G. Wells wrote in 1935. "A politician is elected and he is expected to become a divinity.”

No one who has held the office has been perfect, and even the best made morally questionable decisions and backed morally troublesome policies.  But on balance, many served honorably, and we owe our country's survival and freedoms to several.  The top 3 in the latest survey of 91 presidential historians fit the bill: Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

(By the way, President Barack Obama ranks as the 12th best in his first appearance in the survey, and would have ranked higher except for bad grades on his "relationship" with the absolute opposition of Congress.)

But now we are barely a month into the regime of Homegrown Hitler, whose recent statement that the press are "enemies of the people" marks him (again) as a dangerous apprentice dictator, according to those raving leftists, Senator John McCain and Fox News' Chris Wallace.  While his regime busily dismantles federal programs and protections to benefit the uber-wealthy, federal spending has ballooned so large to support him and his family in their corrupt style that the usual system can't keep up.

But it's not only this shameful incumbent that makes this a holiday of shame.  It's the voters who put him there by not voting.  In the first election in this century, complacency and blithe misunderstanding of consequences put Bush-CHENEY in the White House (with the material assistance of the Supreme Court in a travesty of democracy), and eight long years of horror and near bankruptcy ensued.

 But in 2016 potential voters didn't learn, they didn't heed the warnings.  They did not have the maturity to understand the need to vote regardless of their small feelings and tastes, their micro-grievances and political fantasies.  Or impelled by aspects of their inner darkness they cannot admit.  They didn't vote, or voted for third party candidates.  And they got what they deserve.

Though the price will be paid by many, including many yet unborn. As for those who welcome the Apprentice Dictator because it encourages a political revolution, they seem among the least likely to be among the many hurt by what the Homegrown Hitler regime does.

There are multiple protests every week (including one mockingly mourning the death of the presidency.)  Did all of those people vote?  Maybe.  People voted for the apprentice emperor because they were "angry," it's said.  Well now, reports of town halls for officeholders of both parties show that everybody is angry.  The anger has at least doubled.

A disturbing piece in the New York Review of Books, on the World Trade Center buildings to replace the towers felled on 9/11 says this:

As the latest studies make abundantly clear, the transformation of the World Trade Center site was hampered to a shameful degree by the intransigent self-interest of both individuals and institutions. As a result, an effort ostensibly meant to display our country’s unified spirit in response to an unprecedented calamity instead revealed that communal altruism of the sort that helped America to survive the Great Depression and triumph in World War II had largely become a thing of the past. Although all major construction schemes face tremendous problems, the World Trade Center rebuilding encapsulates everything that is wrong with urban development in a period when, as in so many other aspects of our public life, the good of the many is sacrificed to the gain of the few."

So anger at the bottom, greed at the top, and we not only don't appear to have an actual President, we may find that the coherent, semi-cohesive country being governed is also slipping away.

Maybe the place to start is to admit the shame, and feel it.  This weekend throws it in our faces.

Update: FYI Not My President Day across US.