You may have to squint to see it, but there is some good news. The long, uncertain, and potentially violent struggle which we had anticipated, over who would next occupy the White House, has been abruptly cancelled.
The good news pales, next to the bad. D.J. “Felonius” Trump, spared the trouble of finagling a return to the scene of the crime, will soon be ushered right back in with all of the usual pomp and ceremony. Grab your popcorn, people. Here comes “American Carnage, Part Duh.” The tagline: “Don’t bother trying to prepare. Nobody knows what’ll happen next—least of all him!”
Lest we forget, let us now congratulate John Roberts. His place in infamy is already secure, for having helped convert the Presidency into a monarchy. Soon he may add the distinction of being the first to administer the Presidential oath to a full-blown t_____r.*
Though our next Chief Executive has yet to be inaugurated, his second term is already a success. With the separation between church and state now a dead letter—languishing, no doubt, in some drawer in Louis DeJoy’s office—heathens across the nation have found religion. Agnostics and even full-blown atheists are praying that the incoming administrations’s malevolence will be once again tempered by its ineptitude.
Some pundits are suggesting that this election may represent a realignment. They may be right. Republicans who formerly claimed to respect tradition are now gleefully throwing the old ways right through the Overton window. On the Monday before the election, their candidate said he shouldn’t have left the White House, adding that he’d be OK if someone started shooting the press. Coming soon: a dress code for the media, targets required.
Now it’s Democrats who cling to their traditions, no matter how unsuccessful. Their candidate’s biggest selling point was that she was not her opponent. Their inability to adapt to new conditions is revealed by President Biden’s failure to use the powers recently granted to him by the Supreme Court. He’s got a green light to send Seal Team Six after his successor, but Las Vegas oddsmakers’ phones aren’t ringing on that one.
Ever since George McGovern lost in 1972, the Democratic Party’s go-to move has been the supposedly-strategic retreat. By the middle of the Reagan Revolution, when Koch, Chevron, Merck, and DuPont helped fund the creation of the Democratic Leadership Committee, it was enshrined as dogma.
Now, with the lunatic wing of the GOP about to take control of the whole shebang, Biden appointees have already begun making pre-emptive concessions. Esquires’s esteemed Charlie Pierce, kindly quoting from a paywalled Wall Street Journal exclusive, recently highlighted a real heart breaker.
“U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan and her top advisers at the National Archives and Records Administration, which operates a popular museum on the National Mall, have sought to de-emphasize negative parts of U.S. history. She has ordered the removal of prominent references to such landmark events as the government’s displacement of indigenous tribes and the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II from planned exhibits.
“Visitors shouldn’t feel confronted, a senior official told employees, they should feel welcomed. Shogan and her senior advisers also have raised concerns that planned exhibits and educational displays expected to open next year might anger Republican lawmakers—who share control of the agency’s budget—or a potential Trump administration.”
So, those who preserve the parchments on which our Declaration of Independence and Constitution were written, are negating them by turning our National Archives into George Orwell’s Memory Hole.
We deeply regret the necessity of bringing this terrible news to our readers. By way of encouragement, we would add this: we are too old, and too cranky, to knuckle under now to this lot of knuckleheads.
Nor will we despair. In 1772, as he formed the Committees of Correspondence, Samuel Adams chastized James Warren, writing, “I am very sorry to find anything in your letter that discovers the least approach towards despair. “Nil desperandum,—Never Despair. That is a motto for you and me. All are not dead; and where there is a spark of patriotic fire, we will rekindle it.”
A memento on our pressroom wall reminds us to keep faith. For our readers, we offer a photo of it, below.
* Congressional inaction notwithstanding—not to mention judiciary failures—we saw what we saw on January 6th, 2021. As for the underscores, at the time of our founding, placeholder characters such as these were commonly used in place of letters under certain circumstances. They were a mode of pre-emptive self-defense against charges of libel or slander, at a time when arbitrary authorities were wont to throw obstreperous printers—our Founder, Daniel Fowle, among them—into prison without due process.