Rubbers

(A slightly different version of this piece is up at CounterPunch)

To read and listen to the mainstream media these days you'd think that power and money haven't to this point in U.S. history been connected in even the remotest sense, and Donald Trump’s depth of corruption is unprecedented.

You might believe the U.S. hasn't any history of profiteering in the halls of Congress, or in the office of the presidency itself. Trump represents the fall, the sudden collapse of virtue, and the end of sweet, leveling democratic values as we once knew them.

What has happened to our democracy!?  It was so fine until yesterday, wasn’t it?

So goes the ingrained narrative delivered from the mainstream to Main Street in the time of Trump.

Like everything in popular culture the narrative is seized, built up, and torn down for the explicit purpose of making money.

Are we to believe that to this point the system has been kind to everyone, because the playing field was level and uncorrupted until the very moment Trump's greed and ability to manipulate the media made him electable?

Political thieves are legion and they’ve always been with us, and ethics have historically been slow on the uptick.  Ethics are like condoms; you use them when you’re concerned something bad might happen if you don’t.

That’s correct; ethics are like prophylactics.  Many politicians don’t use them until they need to. Then they’re easy to toss, if messy at times.

We know Trump is not the smartest or subtlest politician to ever seek the golden crown (or, allegedly, a golden shower), but he is far from being alone among the corrupt seeking profit from their offices. He’s just more inclined to go for it right now, transparently and in full-throttle, while most others wait for the best moment to cash in postpartum.

Let us be frank about this and not kid ourselves. Money is power. Power is money. Our so-called democracy is bought and used for the main purpose of protecting dickheads. If the rabble gets anything out of governance it’s usually of lesser value than what the dickheads get.

Some of our more obvious crooked politicians, on too-few glorious days, might end up in jail if they forget to wear their prophylactics while attempting to protect the interests of their elite friends while spewing all over the rest of us.

Even so, the justice app has always stopped short of the executive branch at the national level, where the dickheads are wrapped in the best prophylactics money can buy.

Presidents and their inner circles have historically been too big to fail, discounting Spiro Agnew under Nixon, who was such an enormous dickhead that not even the best prophylactic in the world could protect him.

The near-miss on Nixon himself wasn't good enough to break our insane habit of letting the biggest dickheads squirm away.  His prophylactic burst, but he pulled out just in time.  Before him Andrew Johnson was impeached but not convicted, because even some rudimentary prototype of the modern prophylactic worked miraculously for him.

Clinton was impeached for accepting a blow job in the Oval Office and then lying about it. With the citizenry’s sense of moral outrage sparked, Clinton was lucky to have friends in the Senate and dodged a conviction.  He took his prophylactic off at the wrong time and the truth leaked out.

Clinton was very big, way too big to fail.

But a blow job in the O.V. was small stuff compared to Clinton’s real legacy of viciously regenerating a quiet arms trade in a time of corporate need.  Bombs dropped must be repurchased, etc.; that is the only way arms manufacturers, some of the biggest protected dickheads around, can survive.

Fortunately for Clinton, bomb-making is not illegal among powerful nation-states who want to rub out other less-powerful dickheads around the world.

Corruption isn’t all about presidential politics, of course; it’s pervasive throughout the political system. Witness the number of state governors who have failed to use protection in Illinois alone!
Governors are frequently not too big to fail.  They sometimes forget to use a prophylactic when they need one the most.

A few legislators here and there have also been put up as an example of our exceptional prophylactic-like judicial system, but mainly for show evidently, because others have fallen through the cracks and escaped jail time—like the prophylactic has magical powers.

The thickest chasm of injustice happens to belong to the Bush administration, led by perhaps the most despicable war profiteer and biggest dick of them all—Dick Cheney.

He was certainly too big to fail, and also too big for his britches, like an over-sized codpiece.

The entire chorus surrounding Bush should have been jailed, but thanks to the great healer Obama, America’s best prophylactic post-Bush, what should have happened didn’t.

No justice needed, he said, because he didn’t want to harm the country, thereby harming reality instead.

The executive branch of the U.S. is one gigantic prophylactic. Scooter Libby was convicted of perjury for instance, before Bush pardoned him, which made Bush himself a condom.

Libby was fined 250K, a drop in the bucket.  Money too is a prophylactic.

Cheney is one example of what you can do if you’re smart, evil and properly protected. He used exceptionally crafted propaganda and kept his braggadocio in check, though his libido ran wild, which happens when one gets a hard on for war.  He mastered the few ethics rules that exist by creating just enough scare-smoke to obscure the view for the silent and complacent majority.

He used the threat of terrorism as a prophylactic, making his man-love of war ethical; suddenly protected, everyone felt safer and freer than ever.

With the terrorists at the gate and the WMD about to be launched at us at any minute, the Bushies needed to move pronto.  Lying and plausible deniability became super-safe prophylactics, necessary to prevent the mushroom cloud from seeding our loins.

As the lie evolved, Cheney was there to save the United States, not to take its treasure for the company, Halliburton, which had been very good to him. He carefully placed condoms around the big dickheads who made him richer than ever.

It’s a proven fact.  Hold a high office, play it right, and you will not be forgotten by those counting the beans or creating the speech-making roster in subsequent years.

This is how the Clintons finally achieved their chief goal of becoming rich.  The Clinton Foundation is a prophylactic, meeting all the ethics requirements an ex-prez and his failed wife need to live until the happy end.

We'll see what happens next in the coming months.


TS