Outrage overload

My spiritual guide, Walter Matthau, in “Hopscotch” writing his CIA memoir

Which one of them did it for you? There was Matt Gaetz, of course. He was almost too perfect as a Trump appointee: Captain of the containership SS Sex Pervert as chief law enforcement official of the land was more than we could have ever hoped for. Was his rapid withdrawal from consideration the disappointment for you that it was for me? Tracy and I had just sent away for a brand new Pop-Perfect popcorn maker as a Christmas present to ourselves to make sure we were ready for the greasy revelations that were sure to be revealed by the inevitable release of the House Ethics Committee report on Gaetz and confirmation hearings that were due after the New Year. Now we’re going to have to find a shelf to store the thing in the basement.

But how about the rest of them? Tulsi Gabbard, Vladimir Putin’s favorite ex-Congresswoman and apologist for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as Director of National Intelligence. She’s probably got a staff of assistants traveling the country buying burner phones at truck stops and 7-11’s that can’t be traced to her, so she can stay in touch with her friend Assad as he makes plans to drop gas on the Syrian rebels who have once again taken Aleppo and any other thieving, murdering dictators we don’t know about that she has been in touch with. Giving Gabbard the keys to the secrets lockers at the CIA, NSA, FBI, DIA and the other dozen or so smaller intelligence agencies she will oversee will be like turning a swarm of locusts loose on a crop of alfalfa just before harvest.

How about that Pete Hegseth, huh? How long do you think it will take for him to fly on one of the Pentagon military Gulfstreams over to Israel so newly-appointed Ambassador Mike Huckabee can show him the plans to build the Third Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, inconveniently occupied right now by the third holiest site in Islam, the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Huckabee, of course, is of the fundamentalist Christian persuasion that the Rapture will lift up all believers to heaven after all Palestinians have been banished from the land of Israel and the Third Temple has been rebuilt in Jerusalem and there has been a terrible war called Armageddon that will kill all non-believers and Rapture True Christians into heaven. Again inconveniently, the death of all the non-believers would include the Jews, unless they, at the last minute, convert to the One True Faith, Christianity.

Hegseth is fully on board. Here is Hegseth, the accused rapist, speaking in Jerusalem a few years ago: “There's no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible.” Here is a drunken Hegseth in a bar in Ohio on a trip for the veterans organization he chaired, Concerned Veterans of America, quoted in Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article just out yesterday: “Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!”

We hardly need speak of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick as Health Secretary, who among other things, believes that AIDS isn’t caused by HIV, but by bad lifestyle choices, vaccines cause autism, and Ivermectin is a good choice as a cure for COVID. He also wants everyone to have access to raw milk, which was recently found to be a vector in the spread of Bird Flu. Kennedy has said he will fire 600 of the workers in the National Institutes of Health, telling an anti-vaccine conference in Georgia in 2023, “I’m going to say to N.I.H. scientists, God bless you all. Thank you for your service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”

Yes, folks. We’re going to have a Secretary of Health and Human Services who ran his own anti-vaccine organization and attended conspiracy-fueled anti-vax conferences, running the nation’s healthcare.

Lee Zeldin, the odious former Congressman from Eastern Long Island, will be our next EPA administrator. Of course he will. According to the League of Conservation Voters, Zeldin voted against clean water legislation at least twelve times in Congress, and against clean air legislation a half-dozen times. Because, you know, the EPA was established by Richard Nixon, no less, to ensure that rivers are slick with pollution and smokestacks are free to belch carcinogens into the air, so RFK Jr. and the CDC and the FDA can ignore the coughing and choking of downwind children and the elderly.

Linda McMahon’s qualifications for Secretary of Education are that she contributed millions to Trump’s campaign committees and was a partner with her husband in running the World Wrestling Federation, currently being sued by multiple women for being a corporation that turned a blind eye to a “culture” of sexual assault and harassment.

I could go on. You’ve watched the same zone-flooding release of Trump Cabinet picks that I have. There is just over a month until Trump takes office, when we know the real shitstorm will hit, and already we’re suffering from the Assault of the Smalltime Shitstains, this list of lackeys and yes-men and yes-women who are scheduled to run the government departments and agencies. They’re supposed to make sure that underprivileged children have enough to eat at school, that the food we eat isn’t contaminated with deadly bacteria, that the drugs we are prescribed are safe and effective, even that passports will be available when we want to apply for or renew them. The stuff of everyday life as an American citizen, in other words.

Some of what they want to “accomplish,” if that is the word for it, will be challenged in court and struck down by judges who can read the language of laws that are already on the books. Some of Trump’s Cabinet picks will crash under the weight of bureaucracies that are too large and too complex and too spread out and too expert at dealing with right-wing crazies that happen along with big ideas and small brains. The agencies and departments of the Executive Branch have four years of Trump under their belts already, remember, and bureaucracies have lo-o-o-ng memories.

Tracy and I have spent sleepless nights and grim dinners contemplating the future that lies ahead of us, and all we can think of doing about it is getting ready and digging in and keeping alive the sense of humor we share. I’m going to re-read Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop” and Charles Portis’ “Dog of the South” as soon as I finish re-reading Brian Garfield’s “Hopscotch,” which was made into a movie starring Walter Matthau. I highly recommend both movie and book. “Hopscotch” tells a story about an ex-CIA agent, who after being forcibly retired, undertakes a campaign to drive insane the agency lackeys who made his life miserable by writing a memoir exposing the CIA’s many foibles and mailing the book, chapter by chapter, to publishing houses in New York as he stays ahead of agents pursuing him by using all the tricks of the trade he learned while he worked for the agency. It’s as if Hitchcock decided to tell stories about ignorant fools rather than murderers and detectives who catch them.

All three books share the happy quality of being laugh-out-loud funny. We’re going to need a lot of laughter in the coming months and years. I’m going to do my best to play “hopscotch” with every jackass ninnyhammer scum-sucker Trump puts into government service. Damn the torpedoes. Full steam ahead!