The Blue Damn-You Waltz, and other looney toons

Before you proceed with this post, be it known that you'll glean a more pleasurable reading experience if first you set the needle on the vinyl below and let the soft, soothing sounds of Johann Strauss the Younger's "An der schönen blauen Donau" waft in, over and throughout your brain — strongly recommended as a musical vaccine safeguarding you from the mind-numbing, sangfroid-eviscerating stupidity of the dictatorship of officialdom's aspiring mediocrities.

I've grown so accustomed to Trump Inc.'s incompetence, the intense blowup over the Goldberg Affair caught me off guard. Yes I wrote about it, suggesting the debacle was but another story that serves to distract from the central theme of this nation's "leadership" of autocratic thuggishness which elected Democrats, journalists and other observers bewilderingly persist in calling a presidential administration. Never before has a U.S. presidency so brazenly conducted itself as the law, rather than the head of one branch of government subject to the law. For sure, America has had its really tricky Dick Nixons who engaged in wanton criminality and its Warren Hardings too slow-witted to recognize and remove the criminals around them. What America had not had since 1789 is a self-declared führer who harbors and advertises his very own, Hitlerite Enabling Act, economically worded as "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law." Indeed such a pioneer in American fascism can't violate the law, for he is the law.

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It is that — the USA! USA! authoritarianism now in place — which has consumed my thoughts since the nation's darkest days of 5 November, 20 January and 15 February, a sickened obsession that has elbowed thoughts of Trumpism's lesser offenses off my playing court of neurotic opinionating, where all else is in fact and reality of lesser offense. I gave little attention and space to, for instance, Trump's profoundly unqualified and utterly inept cabinet nominees, for what others would he nominate than the profoundly unqualified and utterly inept? The public farce of the Republican Senate's confirmation hearings had virtually nothing to do with the nominees themselves and everything to do with rather needlessly confirming that Trump was determined to surround himself with the cheapest prostitutes of the greatest ignorance since they were the worst and the dumbest most capable of shattering the federal government and corrupting the soul of America, both of which he loathes with a Beezelbubblehead passion.

In view of what's commonly called the broader, or in the case of despotic Trumpism, the broadest scheme of things, the Goldberg Affair is a distraction from it; a boiling incompentence soon calming to a simmer, then taking its quiet place among the mushrooming crowd of lesser offenses. Still, I concede that the scandal du jour is of a set piece; that while the whole stinking business of America's creeping totalitarianism is vastly greater than even the infinite sum of its lesser offensive parts, this debacle and its many relations are inextricable from the depths of Trumpian evil — and therefore an essential distraction. It fits perfectly with such jaw-droppers of ineptitude as National Security Adviser Mike Waltz sputtering that his "impression" was that using a nonsecure commercial messaging app to chat about war plans wouldn't imperil the lives of American pilots, or the "shocking recklessness," as The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg described it, of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posting "operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing."

And then there's the regime-protected lawlessness of the "security" group's exposure of classified information in violation of the 1917 Espionage Act; Waltz's message-deleting disregard of the Presidential Records Act; the plain fact that the Signal app is disallowed by the government for use involving classified information; CIA Director John Ratcliffe, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, Hegseth and Trump's absurd denial that any classified material was revealed despite former national security officials' unshakable disbelief; plus the White House's refusal to answer questions about the material's content; and a corrupt Justice Department that would take no prosecutorial action against any crimes ever committed by authoritarianism's loyalists and certainly the authoritarian himself.

Who will the regime go after? The "sleazebag" who honorably "chose not to share the most specific information about strike plans and battle-damage assessments that could be used to harm American military and intelligence personnel."

Finally, for a comic touch, Republican senators who enabled Trump's underlings of corrupt incompentence will always have Hillary.