kakistocracy (kak-uh–stok-ruh-see) noun. Government by the worst persons. — Dictionary.com
Government’s canniest liar, hands down, is Kellyanne Conway.
She has slink, snarf, snark, beans up her nose, and an annihilating fake-left-go-right parry against any reporter.
Oh, and sex appeal – of a Jersey kind. “Mood Indigo” eyeshadow, biggish bleachy do, and as many gaudy Barbie dirndls as Imelda Marcos had schlock heels, representing important non-values young girls should emulate.
Kellyanne’s deceit technique is classic. Cornered, she seizes on a questioner’s phrase she thinks will link, in listeners’ minds, to her desired conclusion, then aggressively warps her argument toward it. The PR maestra cedes to no one else’s interviewing conventions. She’s a scimitar-sharp phony.
The Capital’s second most effective falsifier, Rep. Doug Collins, the shoutingest, rat-a-tat Republican lawyer, is facile at pretending to misunderstand “bribery,” willful ignorance being willful even if the ignorance part is unconcealable.
Collins, a Baptist minister, refused to measure Trump’s amorality. The emissary of Jesus nonetheless condemned Democrats for theirs. Deposit 30 silvers in his offering tray.
Dwight Eisenhower, Margaret Chase Smith, Ronald Reagan, William Cohen, John McCain, Jeff Flake, etc., cringed when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, No. 3 D.C. double-crosser, boasted he’d not treat the Trump trial impartially.
When Chief Justice Roberts swore him in, McConnell could at least have screwed the process honorably: by pocketing his right hand, uttering no pledge, and scribbling an alias in the oath book – freer, by his elastic ethics, to inflict on the Constitution whatever damage he intends and be not sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.
Mitch means to extend his Senate sinecure to 42 years (42!), fossilizing in place (Strom Thurmond redux), with his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, co-mummifying in Trump’s Cabinet. Nepotism solidifies families.
D.C.’s hypocrite No. 4, Rep. Jim Jordan, is hyperbolist cum laude of pseudo-legal can’t – someone hollower, even, than Maine’s immediate past governor. Ex-wrestler Jordan flopped when haranguing witnesses of cool equanimity. His faux-constitutionalists lost debate points because non-sequiturs are by definition off-point. Follow, Jim?
Charlatan No. 5, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was dumbest-ever D.C. poseur after Sean Spicer flamed out. Sarah’s junkyard boss discards women as if they were, well, women, and stranded her at the microphone even as she parroted his guff.
She exited her 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. job, thank God, but might seek office, heaven forfend. Being dim doesn’t forgive her dishonesty, garbed or not in saccharine piety.
Numerically, our American president is the globe-bestriding colossus of fraudulent statements. Quantity is not quality, however, and the fellow is maladroit of tongue and mind. In the art of lying plausibly, he ranks sixth, a notch above the numbest D.C. imposter.
That fact-checkers can document Trump’s every fiction – 15,000-plus from inauguration to Dec. 10, 2019, according to The Washington Post – reveals a jackass stupid sumbitch. (Simpler to enumerate his verities; it’s like finding a fistful of Hershey’s Kisses in a manure mound.)
None but His Gasbagness would try gaslighting a public that watched him deface the Constitution like a Queens snot spray-painting an Amtrak car.
No one but a five-star chump would volunteer as Vladimir Putin’s pocketbook Chihuahua.
Nobody but an ambulance chaser would make lawsuits a lifestyle – 4,095 cases, according to The New York Times last December.
Only a “You’re fired!” TV blockhead would peacock himself into an international TV trial aimed at sacking a TV blockhead.
The swell with the cantilevered coif and beneath it no there there, the fop of the garish necktie down-to-the-zipper (naturally), needs trickster tutorials from Kellyanne.
Overshadowing Trump’s inept mendacity is that of America’s strangest “public servant,” Congress’s most empty-headed mythologist, the benthic-dwelling Rep. Devin Nunes, who declared the impeachment hearings a circus – i.e., fun – but produced no gaiety. His cerebrally slight posse vomitatus of witness lynchers handled their gala neither with giggles nor solemnly.
Nunes, a California dairy farmer, flips a fair cow patty in home pastures. Televised, he lied ham-fistedly, failing at irony, sneering level-lipped for cameras. Congressman Clouseau now faces allegations of junketeering, on our nickel, to excavate Ukraine bile on Joe you-know-who and is suing CNN for $435 million for “a false hit piece” and Twitter for $250 million over a bovine meme.
Moo.
Nunes, Jordan, Castor, Stefanik and team scrummed after the majority ground-truthed their equivocations, misinterpretations of evidence, and faithlessness to whatever their prior principles. They were conjuring how to keep 63 million Trump voters safely grazing until November 2020.
Meanwhile, if Senate Democrats and, say, 10 self-possessed GOP demanded the impeachment ballot be secret, a few remaining Trump abettors – answerable to conscience or Creator only – could help off-load the contemptible self-dealer who diminished them to ethical nullities, made “Republican” an outhouse punch line, consigned authentic conservativism to the spittoon, alongside the Gospels, and converted the Oval Office into a moral sump hole.
Senators showing profiles in courage could afterward publicize their decisions.
For his part, Trump, the keenest appreciator of Emma Lazarus’s Statue of Liberty words, has a favor to ask, though, of invertebrate senators regarding the trial: “Give me your liars, your whores, your huddled asses …”
Ken Olson observes politics, the natural scene and other subjects from Southwest Harbor.
