WAITING FOR LEFTY – by Jim Kent

Well, the hits just keep on coming:

• Freely elected Republican President Littlefingers has told the Norwegian government that he is not obligated to seek peace any more since “your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS.” Of course he has done no such thing, and anyway the Norwegian government doesn’t pick the Nobel winners, but never mind. Anyway, he already had that Cracker Jack prize from the football club, and now he has a real medal on account of a heroic display of posterior osculation from María Corina Machado. (My personal guess is it’s a replica, since she can’t transfer the actual win and he won’t know the difference as along it looks golden and shiny.)

• In case you were wondering about how the Supremes’ okaying of racial profiling is faring, leaders of the Oglala Sioux and the Red Lake Ojibwe report that ICE thugs have roughed up and detained some of their members, presumably because real Americans are white or at least rich. If you’re not one or both of those, you must be an illegal immigrant. If this were funny, it would be real funny or at least ironic.

• President Jabba wants Fed Chair Powell arrested because he spent too much money on some renovations. Perhaps they could get together in the East Wing ballroom to discuss this further

• He has graciously offered to take over Venezuela after kidnapping its admittedly awful ig Kahuna. At the meeting where he expected fawning posterior osculation, the re dent of Exxon pointed out several excellent reasons why no company in its right mind would invest in Venezuela just now. The freely elected Republican Leader Of The Free World thinks he will therefore cut Exxon out of the bidding, a “please don’t throw me in the briar patch” moment for sure.

• The Prince of Orange asserts that he has “done more for Nato than anyone else since f and now NATO should do something for the United States.” This is on its face a preposterous claim, and his idea of what NATO should do is facilitate a US takeover of Greenland, failing which he implies a military solution is in view. (If I were Denmark, by the way, I would declare almost every US official persona non grata. No state is required to countenance the presence of outsiders who are overtly dedicated to stealing its territory. Kick ‘em out. Full disclosure: I am not Denmark.)

As his collection of resentments grows and his mental impairment accelerates, we can expect more of this for the next several years. This is not good news, but we are not as helpless as too many people believe. Believing yourself helpless is a practically peerless way to become that way, so let’s see what might keep a glimmer of hope going.

First, of course, is to stop tiptoeing around two obvious and significant facts: He is misplacing

his marbles at a rapid rate, and he has powerful enablers who can be dealt with if everyone

keeps eyes on the prize.

Stop pretending to believe he has a plan, or could formulate or understand or execute a plan. Or an idea. Or a philosophy. Or a memory. He was never good at any of that stuff, and he’s deteriorating rapidly. Some of those around him can meet those criteria, but they also suffer the delusion that they can manage him. They can’t. He only has impulses, and whatever he hears himself saying instantly becomes truth for him until he hears himself say something else.

To guess out what he will do next, pretend that a thoroughly spoiled fourth-grade boy has

become president. The Old Lame Duck will do what that boy would do. One way to gauge his decline is to remember that in his first term, he emulated a thoroughly spoiled eighth-grade boy: He had a modicum of impulse control and a slightly larger vocabulary, along with the ability to hold a thought for maybe an entire minute. All that is gone now. Think Caliban with the financial resources and attention span of George IV. Will Rogers is credited with saying, “You can’t broaden a man’s horizons if he wasn’t born with any.”

Anyway, even if you could predict what he’ll do next, there will be little you can do about it

because of. . .

. . . the Republican party, almost of all of whom remain besotted with him or paralyzed with

fear of him, or both. They may no longer be educable, but most of them are still trainable, and they’re virtually all biddable. If President Oompa-Loompa can be rendered irrelevant or even damaging in the electoral realm, they are likely to shake off their zomboid slumber and look around for something else to do.

Remember 1930, boys and girls? It was printed in all the newspapers, right up at the top of the page. In that election the Democrats picked up about 50 House seats, and became a majority when several of the Republican elect died shortly thereafter. Then in ’32, they picked up around a hundred seats in the House and a dozen in the Senate, along with the White House.

So the trick is to start the housecleaning with next year’s Congressional elections. If you are the Democrats, you do this by tying the Republicans firmly to Trump. Every time he or his minions screw up, remember that this was done by Republican President, the Republican Congress, the Republican Secretary of Whatever. Practice saying “the Republican inflation” and such. The objective is to make the Republican label toxic to the voters and thus to the R officeholders.

If this is done properly and thoroughly, many of them will decide to spend more time with their families. In the meantime, everyone who can stand it should change their registration to

Republican so they can vote for grownups in the primaries. This costs nothing, and they can’t kick you out. Just remember to identify and oppose any lurking MAGAtes on the primary ballot. You can do this by showing up at public forums and asking them very specific questions.

And build up the bench. Run, or get others to run, for school boards, municipal and county

offices, state legislatures, and even professional associations. Do not run against Trump in

these campaigns, or even against Republicans. And don’t run on abstractions like democracy or equality or the rule of law. Voters in most democracies may embrace those terms but have no more idea what they mean or how they apply to real life than pew-sitters in most religions have about the tenets they claim to honour and adhere to.

Don’t try to tell your story with statistics or complex narratives. In a democracy, very few

people understand the former or will sit through the latter. In almost all democracies almost all the time, you win elections by either by eliciting hope or by instilling fear. Anecdotes work and seminars don’t. The Fear Squad have had their innings, and I think US voters are ready for hope. Don’t confuse happytalk with hope, though; that was one of the many things the former VP got wrong in her ill-starred campaign.

So get the Congress back, starting with any office within reach. In our next thrilling episode

we’ll cough up some rough ideas about what to do after that.