You know America is circling the drain when a minor TV sitcom personality and D-list comedian-turned-podcast host is considered a formidable political force capable of offering a sitting president trenchant geopolitical advice.
Some of you, dear readers, may think that opening sentence, laced, admittedly, as it is with condescension, is meant to offend the legion of mostly mixed-martial-arts-addicted men who listen religiously to Joe Rogan for his trite life lessons and juvenile soliloquies about all sorts of serious matters from pandemics and global heating to presidential politics.
It is not. It is, instead, not only a statement of fact, but persuasive evidence of how stupidity has become the principal prerequisite for success in a decaying country that, long ago, abandoned the idea that governance required intelligence.
The natural consequence of the primacy of idiocy in what could charitably be called the “public discourse” is the absurd notion that Rogan is qualified to suggest that President Joe Biden – a decrepit old man who, it must be said, will be remembered mainly for being the bosom-hugging buddy of a wanted Israeli war criminal – may be courting World War III by permitting Ukraine to target Russia with US-supplied longer-range missiles.
“There should be some sort of pause for significant actions that could potentially start World War III,” Rogan recently implored Biden.
Such is the measure of Rogan’s influence, that his plea was reported by several “sober” news organisations, including the fast-fading-into-irrelevance Newsweek magazine.
As of this writing, Rogan has not been appointed by president-elect Donald Trump to his cabinet of conspiracy theorists, cable news talk show “stars”, and various charlatans, racists, Islamophobes, alleged sexual assaulters, and confirmed thugs in suits.
I suspect that Rogan was not inclined, quite sensibly, to take a hefty pay cut from his lucrative gig.
Many others have abandoned their comfortable perches on Fox News and the rancid fever pit otherwise known as the far-right-media “ecosystem” to take up the urgent call to serve their dear leader.
But rather than recoil from the spectacle of Trump’s clown car cabinet when it takes the helm early next year, I plan to dip into a well-deep bowl of popcorn and enjoy watching America implode by its own glorious hand.
Remember, almost 79 million Americans – close to 50 per cent of the voting electorate – cast their ballot for a felon who has been described by his former chief of staff, among a parade of the president-elect’s former “inner circle”, as an “idiot”, a “dope”, and a “moron”.
Whatever other conclusions can be drawn by the results of the 2024 presidential campaign, this much is clear: Most Americans have a low to near non-existent bar for high office.
Still, unlike the frothing, apoplectic members of America’s so-called “left-leaning” commentariat who appear on CNN, MSNBC or pen columns for The Washington Post or The New York Times, I am not blinded by gooey nostalgia.
As a happy result, I am not hankering for a return to the sensible old days when the unindicted war criminal and, apparently, new-found resistance leader, Dick Cheney, was the vice-president of a criminal regime that set up torture “dark sites” after having trafficked in trumped-up “intelligence” to justify the calamitous invasion of Iraq.
That is historical revisionism of the most instructive order.
Speaking of sprawling, administration-wide criminal enterprises, I suspect that if Tricky Dick Nixon were still sulking around, he would have been invited on CNN and MSNBC to join the rehabilitated Cheney in condemning Trump as posing an existential risk to the rule of law and the US Constitution.
But I digress.
I do not hold that stocking an executive branch with buttoned-down, think-tank types like the late Donald Rumsfeld or corporate executives, aka, Robert McNamara, necessarily means that America will be led by thoughtful, temperate doyens.
America’s disastrous quagmires in Southeast Asia, Central America, Southern Africa, and, of course, the Middle East are proof of that.
I am also old enough to recall when, for 13 days in October 1962, a young, Harvard-educated John F Kennedy (JFK) was prepared to launch all-out nuclear war and incinerate the planet in defence of America’s parochial strategic interests, including the staging of obsolete US-made Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy.
The Soviets had stationed nuclear weapons in Cuba in response to pretty-boy Kennedy’s resolve – at the urging of the CIA and the Pentagon – to launch the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba to “neutralise” Fidel Castro.
Oh yeah, those shining “Camelot” years were ever so peachy.
As for dangerous and legally prickly sexual liaisons, JFK had few rivals. One of the married president’s conga line of mistresses was a Mafia-linked prostitute. And the serial philanderer leveraged his position and power to “seduce” a 19-year-old intern under his charge.
The “left-leaning” commentariat’s grating revisionism is borne of an amnesia that translates, again and again, into glaring double standards that they will not acknowledge or admit.
Before his decision to recuse himself as Trump’s attorney general nominee, Matt Gaetz was excoriated for planning to sic the Department of Justice and the FBI on the president-elect’s political enemies.
The assumption at the core of these fears is that the Department of Justice and the FBI have always been models of probity whose hallowed mission statements would be sullied beyond repair by a servile attorney general bent on exacting the president-elect’s all-consuming revenge on his real or perceived adversaries.
Forgive me, but do the names Robert F Kennedy (RFK) and J. Edgar Hoover ring even a distant bell?
As attorney general, RFK was JFK’s “nepo baby”. And, with the help of the autocrat who ran the FBI for decades as his personal fiefdom, RFK spied on loyal, law-abiding Americans who, at grave risk, organised marches and sit-ins to make their home a fairer and just place.
In early October 1963, then attorney general, Robert Kennedy, authorised wiretaps on civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr. – ostensibly because two of King’s associates were considered communists.
It was a flimsy fig leaf meant to camouflage the then-head of the FBI’s determined, covert schemes to destroy King and the civil rights movement.
Just last week, the estate of Malcolm X – who was shot 26 times while delivering a speech in a Manhattan ballroom in February 1965 – filed a $100m lawsuit against the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, and the New York Police Department for their roles, the family is convinced, in the civil rights leader’s assassination.
The lawsuit alleges that, at Hoover’s direction, several arms of the US government “went beyond mere allegedly illegal surveillance of Malcolm X, actively conspiring to reduce his protection and leaving him vulnerable to an attack they knew was imminent”.
Wiretaps, assassinations, ruinous invasions and near-nuclear war – yes, I’d reluctantly say, Donald Trump’s motley cabinet is getting a bum and dumb rap..
So far, they look like a bunch of [sheet white] boy scouts and girl guides in comparison to the largely Ivy-league trained men in tailored suits who preceded them.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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