Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair
Published on http://www.counterpunch.org
All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed,
Do What Thou Wilt.
– Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
“No reasonable reader can come away from the report with anything but the conclusion that the president repeatedly sought to obstruct an investigation into one of the most significant breaches of our sovereignty in generations, in order to avoid disclosure of embarrassing and illegal conduct by himself and his associates.”
– David Cole, “An Indictment in All But Name,” New York Review of Books, May 23, 2019
“The Democrats may succeed in avoiding a tumultuous, divisive fight over impeachment now. But if they choose to ignore clear abuses of the Constitution, they’ll also turn a blind eye to the precedent they’re setting and how feckless they’ll look in history.”
– Elizabeth Drew, “The Danger in Not Impeaching Trump,” The New York Times, April 25, 2019
I am totally convinced by the arguments David Cole and Elizabeth Drew make in the above quotations, as well as by Elijah Cumming’s remark that if the Congress failed to do its checks and balances Constitutional role, they might as well close up and go home.
The President’s continued unflagging support, however, regardless of what sense and reasoning is presented tells us that he, his supporters and the entire American culture is deep within a “Do What Thou Wilt” mindset, more a mass delusion than anything to do with mind. What happens when you are dealing with an autocrat “wannabe” is that the “thou” is translated as “Do What I Will.”
The President doesn’t mock rational and empirical ways of knowing alone; none of this post-truth attitude is original with him. It has long settled into the American cultural imaginary and so his assertion of his own will in the face of any and all opposition and contradiction is an heroic act, one that, judging by the way unyielding ignorance and idiocy cries out on social media, multitudes are striving for in their own lives.
I propose that we let this string run its willful course and see where we wind up.
I propose that we allow the President to have his own way at every turn, for Congress, coastal Elites, Liberal members of all courts, “fake news” of the Liberal media, House investigations, and all other impediments and obstructions to his will to get out of his way.
“Lock her up!” might be a start, or at very least put Hillary under house arrest. We should respect the perspicacity of the President, who is an “extremely stable genius” when he tells us that Speaker Pelosi, “Crazy Nancy,” had “lost it.” So, she also, needs to be locked up after an intervention is made on her behalf.
The President’s priority in regard to investigating Russian tampering with the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and any obstruction of this investigating is to investigate those who began such an investigation and who were mounting obstruction of justice charges against him.
You might think this is like allowing defendants in a court of law to bring charges against the police, the prosecutor and the judge for bringing them to trial. Arresting officers would be arrested for arresting you. However, the President’s tweets against the “Deep State” assure us that the criminal and justice system in the U.S.is stacked against him and they are doing so because he is fighting for real justice and truth on our behalf.
Turn the justice system around and indict the President’s accusers.
Thus, we should, as Kelly Anne Conway, a terribly dissed champion of the President, whose views are unappreciated by her husband, whom the President labels “a total loser, compel House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Adam Schiff, to resign. Schiff should “put up or shut up” regarding evidence of collusion he says he has, evidence that can find its way in the Court of Twitter.
It’s clear that the President could go on with the task of making America great again if every Congressional investigatory committee would just shut up and go home. As the President tweeted: “There was insufficient evidence and therefore, in our Country, a person is innocent. The case is closed. Thank you!”
A cabal of Democrats is running the House of Representatives, their committees not pursuing any Constitutional mandate but merely the “take Trump down at any cost” tactics of the Democratic Party. We need to get the Democratic Party out of the President’s way.
Not only corrupt and phony investigations by Democrats should be shut down but also their intent to raise taxes, impose regulations on the businesses that provide jobs for everyday Americans, spend the money of earners on those who choose not to earn, and put unsubstantiated fear of flood and heat in the heart of everyday Americans.
The President’s denial of a human caused global warming, a denial keeping the fossil fuel industries humming and thousands employed, is obstructed by those prophets of doom who want to cripple our economy. Not only are there too many variables in regard to climate changes for us to sort out what’s really going on but the President will not be around to face disaster if the prophets of doom turn out to be correct.
Such a personal transactional politics reminds every American presently enjoying life that things can only go bad if they’re alive to experience the event.
And almost all of those making key decisions now regarding global warming won’t be around to boast or regret their decisions. Rather than cripple our economy now, doing nothing about global warming spurs economic growth, especially technological innovation that may soon put us in charge of climate in ways advantageous to economic growth. The politics of mitigation are a loser’s politics, a defeat in the face of challenge, and at heart anti-capitalist. Climate change cannot obstruct economic growth but the prophets of doom can.
The President has mounted a personal obstruction to that obstruction. We should do as he does: take a comical view of global warming. “In the beautiful Midwest, wind chill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Warming? Please come back fast, we need you!”
The only way to shut down the movement of Progressive and Liberals toward socialism is to bring back a new millennium version of the McCarthy hearings, which now would amount to no more than the President exposing on Twitter “the enemy within.”
The socialist Green New Deal offers “economic security for those unable or unwilling to work,” a travesty of our meritocratic, competitive free enterprise system. This is yet another obstruction to making America great again that the President ridicules: “I think it is very important for the Democrats to press forward with their Green New Deal. It would be great for the so-called ‘Carbon Footprint’ to permanently eliminate all Planes, Cars, Cows, Oil, Gas & the Military – even if no other country would do the same. Brilliant!”
Besides the press being the enemy of the People, there are international organizations and alliances that do not put America first and from which we should withdraw. Such global alliances obstruct the President’s efforts to put America first and make America great again.
If we allow the President to pursue the art of the deal in his personal style, we must free him from long standing entanglements that may get in his way. After all, we take the President at this word: he knows more about everything than anybody, especially foreigners.
The President has shown us that much of the conventional trappings of our political system are obstacles to great leadership put in place by The Deep State, forces seeking to “brown and gay” the U.S., serve the economic and defense needs of countries that are bilking us in trade, upend private enterprise and replace it with government control of our work and our lives, allow “made in America” to become “made by the Chinese,” allow taxation which penalizes merit and rewards government dependency, push a Christian country with Christian morals toward Coastal degeneracy and Liberal atheism, take guns away from the lawful and allow the growing number of criminals, many coming in from Latin America, to find amnesty here.
These are obstacles crippling the stable genius of the President and we should tweet strenuously against them.
Convention, protocol, and tradition, all established by habit and not law, do not prevent the President from ignoring the conclusions of his own intelligence community, daily national security briefings, State Department reports, or the counsel of a Secretary of Defense. This president as Final Decider takes the role seriously and does not allow the decisions of, say, a four star general regarding warfare to trump his own gut inspired knowledge of warfare.
When President Xi became President for life in China, the President tweeted: “No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”
The only obstacle to the President becoming president for life is the 25th Amendment which holds the presidency to two terms. We can get that out of the President’s way easily once the power of the Congress is checked at all turns by executive privilege. Once the President’s own Justice Department and Attorney General are in place, the country will be able to leave the matter of justice to the will and whim of the “extremely stable genius” who is our duly elected President.
Replacing the conventional politics of negotiation and diplomacy with personal responses from the gut, in this case the gut of an “extremely stable genius,” means, for example, that though Japan’s Prime Minister Abe fears that North Korea’s missiles are a danger to his country, the President is not personally troubled by this. This sort of response puts America first by putting the President’s feelings first.
On a deeper level we can see that the President is obstructed by both ethics and epistemology.
He is, in fact, obstructed by the whole tradition of Western rationality and realism. We must get these out of his way, something we have already begun doing.
The American work ethic has been eroded by Liberal laws of handouts that have led to a moral decline and a loss of incentive and the will to win. The President tells us that “the losers all want what you have, don’t give it to them. Be strong & prosper, be weak & die! Stay true.”
Philippine President Duarte did not let a Liberal moral sense stop him from extra-judicial killing of drug suspects, actions for which the President congratulated him. The President does not allow the declarations of the Human Rights Watch to override his own personal relationship with political leaders. Human Rights watch calls the new presidential system President Erdogan has imposed in Turkey “a setback for human rights and the rule of law” but the President holds his “great friendship” with Erdogan as what’s really important.
A moral sense imposed by a Liberal mindset stands in the way of power dealing with power. Moral censure is replaced by the President with a recognition and respect for power well played. In turn, when strongmen mock the weak, all strongmen join in the mocking. “I think I agree with him on that,” the President tells reporters in response to Kim Jong Un’s assessment of Joe Biden “as a low-IQ individual.”
The way power responds to weakness is to point it out without fear of breaking rules and standards established by the weak. Those who insist that the President’s approach is debasing the country have already allowed the country to be debased by a politics of conciliation, appeasement, and generosity toward the undeserving.
Joe Biden is “another low IQ individual,” Bernie Sanders is crazy, Elizabeth Warren is an angry person, Pete Boot-Edge-Edge is wasting air time, de Blasio is a joke, Kamala Harris is “a new, nasty woman,” Jeff Sessions is a “dumb Southerner.” What we are witnessing is not a debasement of political discourse and acceptable human interaction but a reconsideration of offensiveness in which truth telling does not withdraw from such charges, charges made by those exposed by such truth telling.
“Why do we want all these people from ‘shithole countries’ coming here?” the President asks, directly urging us to replace these words:” Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” with “Give us those who have the cash to stay at the Trump Tower hotels and join the Ma ra Lago country club.”
The President’s way of knowing has liberated us from the obstacles and obstructions of what “the Deep State” imposes upon us as rational ways of knowing.
Skepticism is the ruling principle of the day, one in which we interrogate the source of all “facts,” noting bias, political agendas and an absence of transparency, and in so doing put forth “alternative facts.”
So-called Fact Checking Networks are not exempted because we must ask who are the “fact-checkers”? What is their agenda? The President operates daily in such a questioning mode, never bowing to any credentialed authority but passing the judgments of the same through a personal review. And as an “extremely stable genius” who is a “young, vibrant man” the President is best endowed to establish the nature of truth and reality.
If we get all these obstacles out of the way, the President will be able in 2020 to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and he wouldn’t lose any voters
In conclusion, I quote Jonathan Swift’s remarkable conclusion to “A Modest Proposal” “I Profess in the sincerity of my Heart that I have not the least personal Interest in endeavouring to promote this necessary Work having no other Motive than the publick Good of my Country.”
