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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
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Op-Ed

My Confession

December 9, 2016

Donald Trump was elected on a platform of vicious, ignorant, dangerous and inflammatory rubbish. He was elected because he made promises as vague as they are cocksure: an irresistible combination for morons.

Robert Kahn

By Robert Kahn

Deputy editor emeritus, Courthouse News

Robert Kahn

Donald Trump was elected on a platform of vicious, ignorant, dangerous and inflammatory rubbish. He was elected because he made promises as vague as they are cocksure: an irresistible combination for morons.

He plagiarized sermons that Kansans and Alabamans have snoozed through for decades: vermicular opinions that have been repeated thousands of times and were not worth listening to even once.

But Trump did it with pizzazz — and threats. And who in Kansas, Texas or Alabama could ever resist the allure of a lynching — except the poor souls who might be lynched?

Politics has become a refuge for people who are unemployable anywhere else.

That was a key plank of Trump’s platform, was it not?

He’s proved it with his Cabinet and White House appointments of half-educated fundamentalist numbskulls so full of bilge they surely will clog the arteries of our nation with bile until they burst what used to be known as our heart.

After Trump’s national security adviser-in-waiting, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, told his 106,000 Twitter followers that Hillary Clinton runs a child sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., one of the perverted patriots who admires Flynn, and Trump, drove across state lines to shoot up the place.

So: Our national security requires giving idiots high-powered weapons.

Donald Trump is an insane spoiled brat. He has surrounded himself with people who are mentally ill. Their idea of thought is a rubber stamp. They are imbeciles who do not even pretend to be qualified for the positions they are about to assume.

None of them is interested in public service or the welfare of the republic. They are interested, in this order, in making money and making a noise.

The only thing more dangerous than their ignorance of the Constitution is what they think they know about religion.

They are ignorant of the Constitution because none of them care about it any more than a streptococcus could care about the Institutes of Justinian.

Were all these people deported to Russia, where their ideas originated, they would goose-step across the tundra in whatever direction their Leader points them, over whomever they are told might be in their Leader’s way. As they will do here.

Trump and the human ticks who feed upon him have demonstrated appalling ignorance of what once was known as human civilization, which is to say, common decency.

I doubt that our president-elect, or any of his obedient insects, could tell us what a fugue is, or recognize one, or give a rational account of the difference between a Gothic cathedral and a Sunoco gas station.

Is that important? Of course it is. These corn-fed, carnivorous sheep soon will reign over hundreds of millions of human beings, in our country and around the world.

The human species survived and evolved for millions of years before there was such a thing as a “profit motive.” We are human beings; we are not just sources of profit.

The profit motive is not God, or Our Sole Source of Light. Is it?

OK, the column is over. Here’s the confession.

I set a collection of essays by H.L. Mencken on my desk, copied a phrase that grabbed my attention, then leafed through the book until I found another one. Then I linked them with a few words, turned the page and stole another one.

I ginned this up by theft — and I’ll charge my boss for it, too, with a clear conscience.

Notice that I never disagree with Mencken. I never question whether what he said 100 years ago was true then or is true today. I just stole some words that sounded good and strung them together.

Is that dishonest? I don’t know. But get used to it. It’s the way the White House and Congress will form our domestic and foreign policies for the next four years.

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