Competence

So many excellent turns of phrase in the latest David Roth rundown, all pointing to the same indisputable conclusion -- Fuckface Von Clownstick is a lazy, incompetent dirtbag. He's content to float the same raft of drunk-uncle email tales of third-hand mayhem, random factoids that even his own minions cannot support factually, put forth in order to bolster a fake policy that consists of a non-solution to a non-crisis.

He lies instrumentally -- that is, on an ad-hoc basis to achieve whatever immediate need happens to be in front of him at any given moment. If a clinical narcissistic personality can be said to have any inner world apart from filling the base primal need for adulation, this is it, just lying and continuing to lie, and denying the previous lies with more lies. This is all Clownstick's life has ever been, this is all his tenure as chief executive has been so far, and it's all he and it will ever be. He's incapable of anything else.

The one thing he knows is what every cult leader knows, which is that the flock cannot see the leader as weak, but that they will -- they need to -- believe the constantly shifting explanations. The lies are much tastier than the truth, and so they gorge on the lies, and he has an endless supply of them.

But what they won't be able to get around is the fact that he's not getting the fucking wall. Period, end of sentence, full stop. He failed, and he knows it, and they know it. He bought himself three weeks to find some bullshit excuse, and come February 15th, there still won't be a fucking wall.

Already he's backpedaling, spouting mealy-mouthed bullshit about it's not like he meant a full 2,000-mile wall, guys. Uh-huh. Okay, then, Grampa Walnuts. Whatever you say. Until you say you didn't say that, as if we don't have years of video.

This is the desperate flailing of a doddering con-man who never knew nor cared about the actual mechanics of governance, the processes and procedures that make the machine hum. His balls are parked in I Call Her Nancy's purse not because she's a brilliant supergenius, though obviously she is extremely knowledgeable about what she does and how things get done. It's because, after all the trash talk and cheap shots about the wet bag of oatmeal that passes for his brain, all you have to do is listen to him for about two minutes on any given subject, and realize that he really is a fucking idiot.

And all but his most devoted cultists have to start seeing that, little by little, that he is very bad at this presidentin' thang, even by Outsider Draining Elitist Swamp bog-standard cult dogma. Just using his own rational political self-interest as a metric here, and nothing else, he would have been much better off if he had done nothing at all, and let outgoing shithead Paul Ryan push through the continuing resolution to keep the gubmint funded.

Instead, his opening gambit was a filmed encounter with Pelosi and Schumer in the Oval Office, where he opened negotiations by conceding in video that a shutdown would be on him. That devolved into a spate of surreal episodes, such as the staged visit to McAllen that Roth mentions, cartoon plutocrat Wilbur Ross trying out various let 'em eat shit lines that even rich assholes usually know better than to say out loud, Trump himself spouting bizarre shit about federal workers running up tabs with understanding grocers and supermarkets, culminating in the head of the flight attendants' union calling for a general airport-worker strike a week before the Super Bowl, with a one-hour FAA shutdown at LaGuardia as a taste of what was to come.

Net result:  a five-to-ten-percent approval drop, permanent loathing from the entire federal workforce, scorn from a significant portion of the cult base. When you lose Coulter and Breitbart, you're in trouble. This is neither art nor deal, and even the dopey maroons out in the haunted Pennsyltucky diners can see that. This is what incompetence looks like; this is how a complete dipshit runs a business and negotiates. People who have haggled five percent off a used car at a lot have better skills than this fucking asshole, and they know it.

This all could have been avoided, you know. No, really. There was a path where even a cartoon clown like Donald Trump could have succeeded at the job of president. All he had to was act like a normal human being -- listen to people who know things; throw opponents a bone once in a while; read a fucking book now and again; watch something on teevee other than base propaganda. But that would require humility, skill, competence, an understanding of one's own limitations and mortality.

Obviously he's incapable of any of those things, so of course it's a fuckin' dumpster fire. But it's important to note along the way that it didn't have to be this way. But this is the path he's chosen, and he's sticking to it, so deeper into the desert he goes. We'll see who he takes with him, hopefully McConnell and Cornyn and Graham and Cruz, and the rest of that miserable lot. It's no exaggeration to say that their thoughts and actions have made this country a worse place. History will not remember them well, and Americans will and should defecate on their graves after they're gone. Hell, go take a fucking dump on their lawn right now.

It's about to get a lot worse for the cultists, you know. Junior is going to be indicted soon, and Mueller will have more evidence to drop, and we'll all be subjected to their widening gyres and contortions, anything not to believe what's been right in front of them since the Eighties. You thought it was weird already, it's about to get weird.

I have to say this for him, if nothing else:  as despicable as Trump is and has always been as a human being and a businessman, as much of a shit sandwich as this rotten cloaca of an administration is, it's been entertaining. Never a dull moment with these dismal fuckers.

I don't know if we ever get back to boring, not for a while. But it's a worthwhile goal.