It's Flag Day, Not His Birthday

      I'm probably taking tomorrow off. I'm a political blogger. I don't write running commentaries on right wing meatheads pounding each other senseless in metal octagons.

      But Donald Trump is going to force much of the nation to witness this spectacle that's literally Idiocracy on anabolic steroids. It will take place tomorrow on Flag Day but anyone with a working eye and a few functioning synapses can see that it has absolutely nothing to do with our 250th anniversary as a nation but to celebrate Trump's birthday. If he really cared for this country as much as he does Russia, he'd have his pathetic spectacle on the fourth of July, not his birthday.

     And it'll take place in a weird state of transition. Down the street from this 90 foot-tall monstrosity nicknamed "the Claw", the Kennedy Center is currently removing Trump's name off the building's facade. Federal judges all over the country are a striking down Trump's agendas on a near-daily basis. Trump is settling into the phase of being a lame duck "president". While still appearing to call the shots, hiss toxic influence is already beginning to fade from Washington, DC. Despite hints of making the Claw a permanent fixture of the White House (Heaven forfend), this, too, shall pass.

     And holding this idiotic event, from which he will benefit to the tune of millions of dollars, Trump is giving people the impression of a nursing home resident clapping together action figures, only using real, live human bodies. And, in a way, it's perfectly consistent and even understandable that Trump's megalomania has ballooned to such cartoonish proportions that he's literally supplanting the 250th anniversary of our nation's independence for a gaudy celebration of his 80th birthday with the lowest of low brow entertainment this planet can offer.

     And that's the problem and the danger. That we're willing to write this off as Trump just being Trump but without any meaningful followup. That we're willing to accept that, yes, of course, Trump is doing this, that it's all very understandable and consistent. We've almost assuaged ourselves that its comforting that, with Trump, some things never change and it's business as usual.

     We've literally lost the forest for the trees. We've lost our sense for the absurd, like Trump putting his name before President John F. Kennedy's on the Kennedy Center, like repainting the Reflecting Pool so it immediately looks a sickly shade of green, like putting up a $1.4 billion ballroom that will be done, if it ever is, just before he leaves office, after tearing down the East Wing.

     Business as usual.

     Yet we've lost the capacity to even appreciate the sheer scale of his corruption that even his exponentially growing dementia cannot blunt much less to take steps to stop it in its tracks. And the fact that so many federal judges, even some of Trump's appointees, are proving the only meaningful bulwark against his lawlessness shows in unmistakable terms just what a criminal he truly is.

     And tomorrow, he's going to "celebrate" our independence, the 250th anniversary of it, by pitting meatheads against each other would give the Founding Fathers cardiac arrest.

     My God, people. Aren't you alarmed by this?