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When Empires Die

When empires begin to die, their public acts–in sharp contrast to the ponderous, stately sobriety of their behavior while ascendant–tend to be marked by queer and pathetic eruptions of idiocy, bathos, and mania.

Though it can’t be known when our last Imperial Clown will douse the last lights of The Exceptional Empire and drop the keys in the mailbox for the last failed bank–America is showing clear signs of approaching meltdown.

In Rome, one dingy Caesar burlesqued as a gladiator, then went on stage in drag to warble of nymphs and fauns, and made his horse a senator.

At Tsarist Russia’s end, the Imperials ran their bloody circus on the whims of a drunken, deranged sociopath repeatedly arrested for public indecency.

Hitler egomaniacally wasted his mighty wehrmacht against Russian winter, then as his Reich exploded and burnt around him, had his gofer shoot him.

The American Empire, enmeshed and floundering in a smothering net of contradictions, deceptions, and disastrous choices, is now playing out a pathetic absurdist farce before a fascinated and astonished world.

The essence of it is this.  Due to prolonged betrayal of working people by the Democratic Party over many decades, the blatantly falsity and obvious deception it peddled so hard and so long to keep them in thrall have at last lost their grip.  The result was loss of the Presidential election in 2016.

Stunned and unable to swallow the undeniable reason for it, the desperate party leadership concocted a preposterous, threadbare fantasy narrative to deny responsibility and direct shame, blame and disgrace away from itself.

The obvious best target was Trump, since so many good people detest him for so many good reasons.  It would not suffice, though, to attack him as a legitimate opponent because that would mean the electorate, left to itself, had made this awful choice.  Unthinkable, even for the half of it Hillary had deplored.  No, there had to be a nefarious agent that hoodwinked naive voters and diabolically stage-managed this vile and treasonous outcome.

Since the entrenched, master apparatus of America–the Deep State–has, as its main object, the care and feeding of its Militarist, Imperialist agenda, and since the Democratic Party has become its official voice, it was clear long before the election that Russia and Putin were the enemy of choice.

When Wikileaks released communications proving collusion of the DNC and Clinton campaign to torpedo Sanders, it was immediately and loudly proclaimed to be the work of Russian hackers bent not on exposing the DNC’s dirt to the public, but on wickedly subverting American democracy.

Putting aside the fact that America has no democracy, and never has had, the DNC honchos finessed their treachery while raging at their putative hijacking by enemies of America.  In other words, the crime was not the fact of gross DNC misfeasance, but the horror that it was exposed by evildoers.

Once an executive decision was made by the Democratic Politburo that Russia and demonized Putin were behind this “hack”–subsequently proven technically impossible; only doable in-house by physically copying the files–a giant cloud of disinformation had to be generated to support the lie.

It was done.  Yet, for all the intemperate rhetoric grounded in supposition, inference, and innuendo, supercharged with Pearl Harbor comparisons and amplified endlessly by the establishment press their effort has not, in over a year, produced a scintilla of evidence of Trump/Russia collusion for political ends, and has failed utterly to crucify him as Putin’s crony, pawn and agent.

Financial corruption?  Why, yes, plenty, by Trump unsavories, but that was never the issue.  The Dems rap was treasonous collusion and that, we are asked to believe, was to be accomplished by a bumbling gaggle of half-assed, amateur, cheapo, free-lancing Russian troll shops who bought some squirelly ads on Facebook.  This was the great Trump/Putin plan to subvert our state?  God help us!  And yet it’s the basis of the Mueller indictments that James Kunstler called “13 Russians and a Ham Sandwich”.

The lunacy of this futile and fatuous greased pig chase is only equaled by the determination of the Democratic Party to continue to inflict it on itself.