Sunday, December 29, 2024
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"In
my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles
in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye
and say, "And
we shall overcome." I saw Richard Nixon resign, and Gerald Ford tell
the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy
Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on
a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc,
and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in
Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on
September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing 'Amazing Grace' in the
wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South
Carolina.
"These
were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They
were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But
they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the
gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at
least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their
grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the
attempt, but they tried nonetheless.
"And
comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally
hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport
of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the
laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal,
with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can
put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while
occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public
trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.
"The
scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of
which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the
worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully
besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as
currently occupies the office. We never have had a president* so
completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office, that it
almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite
contempt.
"Watch
how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing
but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the
decency simply to shut up, even when it is in his best interest to do so.
Presidents don't have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just
have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that
their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too.
Watch
him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn't he a
funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the
assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now."
- Charles Pierce
Friday, December 27, 2024
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