The death of "The Manchurian Candidate"

As long as I’m backpedaling on things I’ve said here, I may as well flirt with my “I told ya so!” moment regarding the current presidency. That exact moment when I’ll officially say it hasn’t arrived quite yet, but it’s drawing closer with every golfing vacation our Supreme Leader takes when crisis threatens.

I'm retracting everything I ever said about Bobama being some kind of sinister Muslim sleeper agent, or a Hitlerian megalomaniac. He doesn't have the chops to be either. He's a cheap "Huggy Bear" pimp wannabe who is so incompetent he couldn't seduce a 14-year-old runaway in a bus station. I will no longer refer to him as "The Manchurian Candidate," because the Muslims wouldn't have any use for anyone as inept as he is. He wouldn't know a conspiracy if it bit him in the ass; much less have the wherewithal to be a party to one. He is even more intractable than Hitler when it comes to hidebound ideology and idiotic ideas, and his grandiose notions are pretty much limited to flying around on the world's finest "corporate jet", indulging in rock-star “Rolling Plunder” bus tours—disguising campaign speeches on the taxpayer’s dime as empathetic photo-ops with “the little people”—and hanging out in “De Big House” with the rich white folks and the celebrities of the moment. He's a reality-TV star-in-the-making, with a record of achievement less than that of Ozzy Osbourne, Anna Nichole, or Snooki. He's "The Situation" without the six-pack abs. (I almost puked the other day when some party hack called him a "brilliant Constitutional scholar." If he ever read it in high school, his policies indicate a total lack of recall or a willful disregard that borders on impeachable conduct.)

I feel positively prescient these days. First, my obsession with "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" paid off, when I learned that Kathryn "Hurt Locker" Bigelow is directing some action/adventure propaganda flick that will open in October of next year, just before the election. So, we’ll all be reminded that Bobama did one presidential thing in four years; giving the okey-doke to trained professionals to kill the most loathed man of the 21st century. Then, last week, a stench started to arise when my speculation was confirmed that the Pakis let the Chinese reverse-engineer whatever was left of that stealthy Blackhawk helicopter SEAL Team 6 had to ditch at "the compound" where Osama bin Laden was allegedly killed. (I won’t believe it until I see a death photo; far as I’m concerned, he’s playing backgammon in Area 51 with Elvis and the Roswell aliens.) Now, some people are having a come-to-Jesus moment about Jughead’s birth certificate and what I told them; the CIA has the best forgers in the world. Convince me it was a coincidence that DCI Panetta got a bump upstairs almost the same day the mysterious "long-form" document miraculously appeared. Can you say "quid pro quo"?

Honest to God, I should rent a cheap storefront in town, buy a deck of Tarot cards, some bleached chicken bones with runes engraved on them, and start telling fortunes. As it is, I'm just a broken-down nobody who's turned into an online crackpot with wild predictions, crazy notions, and juvenile cynicism. But, even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while. I'm not going to scan my i.d. cards into HAL-9000 and publish them online to establish bona fides, but if I tell you a frog can pull a boxcar, you only have to ask "How far?"

I retired in 2004, but the bizarre institutional intuition that carried me through 30 years of insubordinate hijinks hasn't stopped working.

There are plenty of rational, good-hearted people in this country who only desire the freedom to be left alone to make their own decisions about how best to live their lives. If asked directly whether they would prefer an authoritarian regime that dictates every aspect of their lives, or an un-intrusive government that provides minimal oversight for obvious predations, the overwhelming majority would vote for a government that—as we say in the South—hides and watches. As Gerald Ford said: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have.” (He might’ve been somewhat clumsy, but he wasn’t so dumb after all, was he?)

What was it P.T. Barnum said about fooling some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time?

I said it when the bad pony I now call “Jughead” charged out of the gate in 2009: You—the people—have been hoodwinked. Does anyone still believe the rhetoric, empty promises, and childish blame-casting of the most failed president in American history?

(I keep hearing The Who echoing in what’s left of my mind: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” and “We won’t get fooled again…”)

To be fair, we owe Bobama a small debt of gratitude. He is the catalyst for a second American revolution; one that is long overdue. He isn't the root or sole source of the problems that beset us today, but he is the culmination of one hundred years of their formation. As the capstone of incompetence and failure of leadership in the United States, he may galvanize enough of the apathetic that some kind of radical change will take place next year. Adding to my "I told ya so!" remonstrations, Congress is where the laws are made, not in the star chambers of the King of America. If we rid ourselves of those careerist, do-nothing, power-mongering legislators whose only concern is re-election, we might get a return to a basic Constitutional government where the CEO in the White House is only a part of the equation, not the be-all-end-all of the national concept. The Tea Party's a good start, and if my dire predictions about class warfare, chaos and anarchy in the streets come true, then maybe those apathetic souls drowning in hopeless despair will rise and reclaim the principles this country was founded on.