Procrastinating on May 18, 2016

Live from the New York Times Journamalists' Self-Made Gehenna: Arthur Goldhammer: Metamorphosis: "Grotesque things are happening everywhere, yet consciousness seems incapable of registering the magnitude of the change...

..The disparity between the appalling metamorphosis of our political condition and the petty conventionality of the response is apt to provoke terror and laughter in equal and disconcerting measure.... The Republican Party has succumbed to a brazen putsch [by a confabulating narcissist who impersonated his own publicist in order to feed the tabloids with the myth of his sexual allure and then made a campaign issue of his genital endowment has taken over the party of Lincoln.... ‘Trumpeters’—to borrow the name proposed by the former governor of Alaska, Trump’s jazz-tongued and quasi-unhinged predecessor in the politics of impudent farce—rallied round the Leader, whipped to frenzy by promises of impunity if they beat protesters to a pulp, as he assured them patriots used to do back when the country was ‘great.’ To make it great again the party’s ‘presumptive nominee’ promised to build a wall to ensure that ‘real Americans’ would enjoy prosperity undisturbed by the ‘huddled masses yearning to be free’ whom we once welcomed with Liberty’s beacon but now denounce as ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists.’ What’s more, Mexico would be forced to pay for its own incarceration, to keep her suspect population in, and if it refused, the wall would be raised higher still. No longer would China be allowed to ‘rob’ Americans by selling us televisions, computers, and mobile phones for less than we would otherwise pay.... Yet the party that produced this cockroach of a candidate seems as incapable as Gregor Samsa of recognizing the change that has come over it....

The New York Times, Gray Lady that she is, has also chosen to avert her chaste eyes from the Republican metamorphosis. Instead of pointing out that Trump’s policy proposals stand, like the monstrous body that Gregor Samsa became, on risibly thin, unsteady legs, the paper discusses ‘the three pillars’ of his campaign as if they were as substantial as reinforced concrete.... Many of Trump’s followers share the qualities that make the ‘monstrous insect’ so hideous to behold: his latent violence, his crude misogyny, his ignorance of world affairs, his devotion to false idols, his bullying ways, his contempt for liberal values.... There are many things about which one can feel rightly aggrieved. But even the aggrieved have an obligation to reject a candidate who threatens to pervert the judicial process in order to persecute those who opposed him and who appears not to comprehend the constitutional limitations on the powers of the presidency...

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