When Fuckupery Flails

The Icebergs Get Their Say.

Remains of a Geran-2, Shahed-style, Russian-made attack drone, currently being used in both Ukraine and the Middle East. (The UAE claims at least 1,514 drones have been launched at it since the start of the Iran war (photo, courtesy Ukrainian National Police).

At night, Baby Huey pads around the White House, lost in his ‘terrible twos’ stage of arrested emotional development. The war has exposed what for some has been obvious for years: this sniveling brat has no ideology, no belief system, no core principles. Whatever he thinks might be expedient today — is what he stands for. Tomorrow, he’ll be for something else. “Those are my principles. If you don’t like them…well, I have others” — but without Groucho’s trademark cigar, the funny glasses, rapacious wit or self-effacing charm. Yesterday, it was I demand you help me unfuck myself. Today, it’s I never needed your help to begin with, scumbags. I hate you because you didn’t grovel after I spent the past year attacking you. Tomorrow?

The most recent intelligence reports now leaking out of this Swiss Cheese Administration simply repeat what they said one week before the war began — a joint Israeli-American war will not lead to regime change. It may end up doing the precise opposite, strengthening the hardest of the hard-liners in Iran with even less to lose by attacking American sites (courtesy of Russian drone assistance) and making their own miserable people suffer even more.

Today, the continued down-is-really-up twisted logic proved too much for Joe Kent, Director of the National Counterintelligence Center. A dyed-in-the-wool MAGA bro, veins still coursing with the purple kool-aid of 2020 election denialism, acolyte of the brain-dead Tulsi Gabbard, somehow found his own sticking point, and said enough is enough. He flung down his drinking cup, hitched up his toga and beat a hasty retreat out of Pompeii as Vesuvius continued to spew ash, the pyroclastic flow approaching.

This guy is no hero. He was another abductee from the true-believer crowd who fell for the delusion that Trump stood for something or somebody other than Trump. He swore his loyalty on a stack of fundamentalist, fright-wing Bibles, right up until the moment he didn’t. Nobody’s heart should bleed for this disappointed man-child. Nobody ordered him to self-lobotomize years before. He voluntarily wielded skull-saw and scalpel all by his little self. But his departure illustrates something much larger than he is, something important to note, right this very minute.

Visualizing the Hay-Wired Scenario for an anticipated 7.0 earthquake along the Hayward Fault, California (courtesy, US Geological Survey (April 2017).

MAGA is cracking. In bits and bobs, blips and blobs, the coalition of loonies and lemmings is flailing. Roads once thought of as conduits to victory may soon become impassable cul-de-sacs. In maritime metaphor, the hull of their ship is breaching in multiple places. The compartments are filling up with seawater. The moment of truth is coming soon, not just to a theater near you, but in real time.

It’s been said before, and bears repeating: as much as we fantasize about dislodging the Mango Miasma and the slithering scalawags and vicious wormtongues around him all by ourselves, we probably can’t. We need allies — breakaways from his circle of lifeboats who are beginning to choose — finally — to desert the Sinking Rat.

So pay attention, focus your energies, donate your time and money wisely, welcome fleeing refugees from Vesuvius but don’t let your guard down, hold your nose, and prepare for a giant sucking sound coming from below. It will still try to pull you down right alongside that sinking maelstrom. Swim harder. Wait for it…..“There’s a boat, Jack.”

At 2° centigrade, high-sulfur, low-manganese galvanized steel actually undergoes a transformation, changing from a ductile (bendable) material to a brittle (shatterable) one — especially when the forces operating against it are powerful enough. [From James Cameron, Titanic, 1997].