Will the GOP Hear "The Chimes at Mignight?" They be Tolling, Cupcakes.

I could never bring myself to link up with the Grand Old Party.  I am just an old school Regular Democrat, I guess.  Ever since Chuck Percy was the alabaster Illinois Face of the Republican Party, the GOP was as comfortable a fit for me as spun-glass skivvies.

Right up to and through the last GOP Illinois Senator, Marque Kirque, the GOP is the Party that blows off it's own toes, on demand, at the behest of wily Illinois Speaker Mike Madigan, or the offish Sen. Dick Durbin.

I voted for three Republicans in my life: Nixon 1972, McCain 2008, Romney 2012.  I voted for Donald Trump, but I do not believe that he is a Republican. In fact, he may be, like me, a a disgusted Regular Democrat who understands that the national game is rigged between the Progressive 1972 Democrat loonies and GOP dweebs,  like any contest between the Globetrotters and the Generals.

President Trump is one wild card in deck full of jokers.  Against Old Maids like Reince Preibus and Lindsey Graham he is the trump.   Against Aces like McCain, Collins, Schumer, and the media masters, he's a push at best.

He is a ball of confusion; that's what the world is today. Hey, hey.

• North Korea
• Trans GI's
• Tweet du jour
• CNN silly
• Russian Intrigue
• Sessions Up; Sessions Down
• Leakers - pissing out of the Big Tent
• Foul Mouthed Mooches
• White House staff shuffles
• EU weepers

But, the best rattle and hum comes from the GOP.

One of the only Washington writers who makes any sense whatsoever is A. B. Stoddard.  Ms. Stoddard is the sole of integrity and does care if CNN, Fox, of the clowns at MSNBC want to hear what she has to say.  Ms. Stoddard offers up this today,

 Trump can write this all off to his plan to disrupt the GOP establishment in Congress and do things his way, but some have warned his plate-breaking might eventually cut into his base of support. Conservative writer and commentator Charles Krauthammer wrote that not only had Trump revealed “a deeply repellent vindictiveness in the service of a pathological need to display dominance,” but that his assault on Sessions “suggests to those conservatives how cynically expedient was Trump’s adoption of Sessions’s ideas in the first place.”

Trump must be some Machiavelli, there Neighbor.

I think of him as a seedy, aging and cagey Prince Hal.  Young Prince Hal, the scapegrace Prince of Wales  who hung around with disreputable outsiders in Henry IV Parts I & II emerged as the uniter in chief and hero of Agincourt of Shakespeare's Henry V.

Prince Hal, like Trump loves to keep his enemies close and his friends comfortably numb.

Read this and think of the Swamp:

King Henry IV, Part I

ACT I SCENE II London. An apartment of the Prince's.
[Enter the PRINCE OF WALES and FALSTAFF]
FALSTAFF Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?
PRINCE HENRY Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack
and unbuttoning thee after supper and sleeping upon
benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to
demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know. 5
What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the
day? Unless hours were cups of sack and minutes
capons and clocks the tongues of bawds and dials the
signs of leaping-houses and the blessed sun himself
a fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta, I see no 10
reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand
the time of the day.
FALSTAFF Indeed, you come near me now, Hal; for we that take
purses go by the moon and the seven stars, and not
by Phoebus, he,'that wandering knight so fair.' And, 15
I prithee, sweet wag, when thou art king, as, God
save thy grace,--majesty I should say, for grace
thou wilt have none,--
PRINCE HENRY What, none?
FALSTAFF No, by my troth, not so much as will serve to 20
prologue to an egg and butter.
PRINCE HENRY Well, how then? come, roundly, roundly.
FALSTAFF Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let notus that are squires of the night's body be calledthieves of the day's beauty: let us be Diana's 25foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of themoon; and let men say we be men of good government,being governed, as the sea is, by our noble andchaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal.PRINCE HENRY Thou sayest well, and it holds well too; for the 30
fortune of us that are the moon's men doth ebb and
flow like the sea, being governed, as the sea is,
by the moon. As, for proof, now: a purse of goldmost resolutely snatched on Monday night and mostdissolutely spent on Tuesday morning; got with 35swearing 'Lay by' and spent with crying 'Bring in;'now in as low an ebb as the foot of the ladderand by and by in as high a flow as the ridge of the gallows.(emphases my own)

I see Falstaff as the GOP leadership, elected and behind the scenes, ready to lead Donald Hal up the garden path for a fleecing from the Progressives - the keepers of policy.

Yet, Hal offers warnings in his honeyed words to Fat Jack of the Swamp.  He must go before the real work begins. In Shakespeare's propaganda plays, virtue remains hidden in the likes of Mark Antony, The Bastard and Prince Hal.  These nimble players keep every one off balance.

Until the moment comes when even the most shameless and cynical rogues, like the Leader of the Senate and the three Mavericks, finally get it.

 FALSTAFF
God save thee, my sweet boy!
KING HENRY IV
My lord chief-justice, speak to that vain man.
Lord Chief-Justice Have you your wits? know you what 'tis to speak?
FALSTAFF
My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!
KING HENRY IV
I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;
But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evil:
And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,
To see perform'd the tenor of our word. Set on.

I hope that the firing of Preibus and appointment of General Kelly signals that Trump despises the the dream of the GOP being anything but a partner in the Swamp.

That would unite the nation.

I could do without an Agincourt. 

LI Bowl Super: Commentary Not So

Houston (CNN)For the first time, a Super Bowl needed overtime, and for the fifth time, the New England Patriots are Super Bowl champions.
This time, it took the biggest comeback in Super Bowl history to do it, rallying from a 25-point deficit and defeating the Atlanta Falcons 34-28 at NRG Stadium in Houston in Super Bowl LI. CNN

Fifty-One is done and it was as toxic as 2016.  Good Lord. Net-roots nonsense ozzed into sports journalism over the past decade and sucks all of the oxygen out of the planet.

Last year, it was deflate-gate.

This year Fifty-one became LI(e) for half of the nation addicted to ESPN SJWS in Anchor Jackets and group thought. They hate Tom Brady.  He now has participated in Seven (7) Superbowls and possesses Five (5) Championship Rings, at the once tender age of 39. Gotta hate that.

Football has always been a holiday game.  But, Super Bowl created a new national holiday that is entirely consumer driven, secular and until lately non-political.

NFL Football is a game played by mesomophs and Caucasian, African American and Pacific islander endomorphs wearing buzz-cuts, dred-locks, man buns and retro-mullets.

With few exceptions, football players are as beautiful, delicate and momentary as snow flakes.  They vanish from our attentions and imaginations instantly and go on to ordinary lives and too many to painful, sad and lonely deaths.

Football is a male game.  At its best, high school football is and should be a game a beauty and not a Super Bowl Lite.   Prayers to Our Lady of Victory!

Pro Football is fun to watch, but painful to listen to - thanks to the pan-pest preaching of Bob Costa Living analysts and Social Justice Warriors.

We live in nation that that is slowly recovering from eight years of willful blindness.  Half the country went blind looking for something, anything, of authentic greatness in its Chief Executive and it painfully settled for gold-leaf mediocrity.

Half of the nation, kept its mouth shut out of neighborly compassion and patient understanding, but voted to recover some our sight.

People are hurting, bubbled-up, and in safe spaces where they can loudly impune and physically moon a building sporting the Forty Fifth President's Name. That'll show that inanimate object.

The Super Bowl LI  became the last gasp, it seemed to me, of the resistance.  Tom Brady who was smeared by the national sports press for "deflategate" was now vilified as a Trump backer and so were his coach and the Patriots owner.

I watched the game with sound off and played Gustav Holtz' The Planets for sound.

I spoke with many people including family members, with whom I remain on outs for not going light-limbed over Obama,Lo these many years, and they were delighted by the first half.   I said, we shall see.

The New England Patriots, Bill Belichick, Tom Brady and owner Robert Craft were relentless.

No LI. Just football.

Gee, Valerie Jarrett Ran the Presidency for Eight Years and the New York Times Said Nothing

Love this snap!

For eight years, President Obama basked in the glow of the artificial light created by his Team of Brand Obama craftsmen and directed the affairs of the nation at the behest of Valerie Jarrett the de facto Chief Executive from January 2009-January 20, 2017.

President Obama parted with high poll numbers, no sense of obligation and a Presidential Library next door to Tiger Woods' Jackson Park Golf Mecca. The New York Times praised the commands of Valerie Jarrett:

WASHINGTON — President Obama was in a bind, and his chief of staff could not figure out how he had ended up there.
Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church were up in arms last fall over a proposal to require employers to provide health insurance that covered birth control. But caving in to the church’s demands for a broad exemption in the name of religious liberty would pit the president against a crucial constituency, women’s groups, who saw the coverage as basic preventive care.
Worried about the political and legal implications, the chief of staff, William M. Daley, reached out to the proposal’s author, Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary. How, he wondered, had the White House been put in this situation with so little presidential input? “You are way out there on a limb on this,” he recalls telling her.
“It was then made clear to me that, no, there were senior White House officials who had been involved and supported this,” said Mr. Daley, who left his post early this year.

What he did not realize was that while he was trying to put out what he considered a fire, the person fanning the flames was sitting just one flight up from him: Valerie Jarrett, the Obamas’ first friend, the proposal’s chief patron and a tenacious White House operator who would ultimately outmaneuver not only Mr. Daley but also the vice president in her effort to include the broadest possible contraception coverage in the administration’s health care overhaul.

A Chicagoan who helped Mr. Obama navigate his rise through that city’s aggressive politics, Ms. Jarrett came to Washington with no national experience. But her unmatched access to the Obamas has made her a driving force in some of the most significant domestic policy decisions of the president’s first term, her persuasive power only amplified by Mr. Obama’s insular management style.

From the first, her official job has been somewhat vague. But nearly four years on, with Mr. Obama poised to accept his party’s renomination this week, her standing is clear, to her many admirers and detractors alike. “She is the single most influential person in the Obama White House,” said one former senior White House official, who like many would speak candidly only on condition of anonymity.

“She’s there to try to promote what she understands to be what the president wants,” the former aide said. “Ultimately the president makes his own decisions. The question that is hard to get inside of, the black box, is whether she is really influencing him or merely executing decisions he’s made. That’s like asking, ‘Is the light on in the refrigerator when the door is closed?’ ”

Gee, only today the New York Times, beefed about Steve Bannon doing exactl;y what Frau Jarrett had done for eight years of thigh-tingling Obama-licious policy.

 Plenty of presidents have had prominent political advisers, and some of those advisers have been suspected of quietly setting policy behind the scenes (recall Karl Rove or, if your memory stretches back far enough, Dick Morris). But we’ve never witnessed a political aide move as brazenly to consolidate power as Stephen Bannon — nor have we seen one do quite so much damage so quickly to his putative boss’s popular standing or pretenses of competence.
Mr. Bannon supercharged Breitbart News as a platform for inciting the alt-right, did the same with the Trump campaign and is now repeating the act with the Trump White House itself. That was perhaps to be expected, though the speed with which President Trump has moved to alienate Mexicans (by declaring they would pay for a border wall), Jews (by disregarding their unique experience of the Holocaust) and Muslims (the ban) has been impressive. Mr. Trump never showed much inclination to reach beyond the minority base of voters that delivered his Electoral College victory, and Mr. Bannon, whose fingerprints were on each of those initiatives, is helping make sure he doesn’t.
But a new executive order, politicizing the process for national security decisions, suggests Mr. Bannon is positioning himself not merely as a Svengali but as the de facto president.

Yeah, what are you gonna do?

Me?  Steve Bannon is not a slum Lord; nor is he friendly with the mullahs in Tehran.

Not bothered.