Another Modest Propoal, but a Good One

Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) - nbcnews.com

I feel bad for Bill Cassidy who, if you were casting a movie, looks exactly right for the part of the honorable senator who stands up for principle against a powerful bully, and who knows that the president’s personal lawyer who maintains that the 2020 quite possibly was rigged should not be Attorney General — I’m not sure anyone named Blanche should be. But Senator Cassidy is a Louisianan, he’d like to attend football games and go to church and shop at Kroger without someone taking a swing at him, and if he voted Blanche down, he might have to find an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where Republicans are rare as ospreys. It was a tough call for him and he called it wrong.

He voted to confirm the guy because, he said, he thought the next nominee might be worse, by which logic you’d accept fried weasel for lunch because the alternative might be fried rat.

The 2020 election wasn’t rigged, Obama wasn’t born in Kenya, the war against Iran isn’t won, but we live in an era that is loose with facts, thanks to the thousands of influencers, guiders, effecters, impressers, swayers, impacters, compellers, and prompters who hire out to obscure evidence and exonerate the guilty, and the enormous consulting industry, a vast reservoir of stupidity. Some of the worst managers I ever encountered went into consulting, having learned a few hundred words of jargon to toss into salads, who charge ridiculous fees to attach themselves like fungus to an organization and flatter the people who hired them. None of these people is able to advise Cassidy so well as his own grandkid could: do the right thing, tell the truth. Send Blanche back to the ranch. Turning the DOJ into the DOT is not in the public interest. But he didn’t see it that way.

Meanwhile, over in my corner in the Radical Communist Party, the progressive radicals are celebrating having won some primaries to gain the Communist nomination, whereas we moderate Radicals are reminding them that the aim is to win elections, not nominations. No doubt it’s a thrill to defeat us middle-of-the-road Marxists and lackadaisical Leninists, to make you feel good about yourself, but when you elect the Roy Cohn Party in the process, you make a fool of yourself.

Voter turnout in primaries is around 20% and in a midterm around 48%, which means it’s quite possible to turn out 12% to choose a nominee who cannot triple his vote to win the office. In the historic 2008 election that sent the Kenyan illegally to the White House, the turnout was 61%, probably due to rigged machines and mailed-in-ballots from illegal immigrants.

How things have changed in twenty-five years. Nobody worried about creating immunity from prosecution for the Bushes because nobody imagined them as committing corrupt acts on a wholesale basis, but the Supremes saw a need in Trump v. United States (what an appropriate name for a case) and now we have an Attorney General in place to hunt down Commies and turn a blind eye toward self-aggrandizement.

War crimes are another matter, assuming there still is such a thing, and the deaths of 156 civilians including 120 schoolgirls caused by U.S. missiles hitting the Minab school in Iran might be taken up someday, who knows?

The popularity of the current regime in Washington, which holds steady at 33% despite corruption and gross incompetence, suggests to me that America wants a monarchy, that the Founders made a mistake in pulling out of the Empire and forming a republic. But the people enjoy a show and it makes sense to have popular powerless hereditary figures portray the grandeur of the state and leave it to bureaucrats rising through the legislative ranks to run the business. The obvious choice for King is Barack Obama, our most popular living president, who has the chops to be stately and apolitical, and then let’s outlaw the Democratic and Republican parties, both outmoded, deeply unpopular, and open the field for five, seven, ten parties of pure idealists who will then need to form coalitions to gain power. That’s how it’s done in other countries.

I hereby resign from the Radical Communist Party and I form the Humanist Gospel Party and we will serve the poor, the suffering, the children, and you can form the Free Weed and the Cultural Defense and the Confederate and the Manly Male parties and let’s get back on the track.

Garrison Keillor © 08.17.26