IMPERIAL EXIT

Paul Edwards

January 24th, 41 AD – The Assassination of Caligula (Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus). Yes, he was the great Julius Cesar's namesake.

If this were ancient Rome, the Praetorian Guard would already have killed him.  That’s what they did when it became obvious that an emperor was too goofy, too crazy, too abusive, or was otherwise a shaming liability.  Roman Emperors had a history of not reaching their sell-by dates, not making it to early retirement.  Once they lost it, there was no hand-wringing agonized debate in the Senate about their fates.  They were summarily offed.

Not suggesting for a moment that this was a justifiable means of ending even a terrible reign, or that any violence should ever be inflicted on our CEO, no matter his howling liabilities.  We murder Presidents only when they cross our Capitalist oligarchy, or dare suggest we cut our War Machine back a few hundred billions.  That crosses a Red Line.  For some sins there is no absolution.

So no, there must be no rough stuff, but Melancholy God, action must be taken to remove this blithering, beclouded ninny.  At the NATO shindig he introduced Zelinsky as President Putin.  You saw it, and so did the rest of the world.  He could not have been more deeply ridiculous if he had thrown up, or farted.

Can you even imagine what the rest of the world thinks of The Empire, the Indispensable Nation, whose masses chant “We’re Number 1”, at witnessing this absurdity?  Z. hid the reflex grin he could not suppress.  Putin must surely have loled.

Certainly, his ushering out should be gently done; this pathetic shell of a man is not to be excoriated for his deteriorated mind and mechanically impaired body.  His condition is due to age for which he can’t be blamed.

What he can and must be blamed for is his long, disgraceful, and devious career as a phony, smarmy, glad-handing flack for Big Money as the Senator from MBNA, his vulgarly cynical two-faced record on race relations, his Chickenhawk cheerleading for every military crime and folly, his rah-rahing for our fubar debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and finally, now, in his dotage, funding and embracing mass murder by Nazi Israel in Gaza and a grossly evil proxy war in Ukraine that bids fair to trigger World War III.

Easing this bumbling, manky marionette off to benign retirement in a cushy facility, immune from criminal prosecution, is a fate far better than the one he truly deserves.

Of course, it leaves the Democratic Party with its bare face hanging out.  Of course, choosing a stand-in for this jinky sham will be a ludicrous burlesque, a prat-falling, pants-down farce, leading to unimaginable carnivals of chaos in November.

And, of course, we know, or should, the certain winner: a man so nakedly unprincipled, so shallowly self-promoting, nurturing in the impenetrable thickets of his jungly brain who knows what odious nightmares.  We know him because we had him, a full dose of him, with his shady, vindictive cadre of moral gnomes and girning knuckle-draggers; the kind of ethical cripples and sociopathic gangsters who, while furthering the danse macabre of American disaster abroad, will butcher any remaining civil liberties and inflict ecological insanity at home.  This is the “democracy” Capitalism has made, and this will be your prize.

This grisly debacle, is what you as a public have been schooled for, over many decades, over lifetimes, because you turned your minds—such as they were—and your hearts, over to a Capitalist oligarchy that has owned you since before black slaves had their physical freedom.  America, The Empire, is a sad, disintegrating, bankrupt corporation, a failed, fraudulent, insider hustle posing as a government, a ruined Potemkin Nation, set up to rape and exploit to exhaustion a once bountiful, magnificent land, and to fleece, degrade and dispossess its prostrate people.

As Yogi Berra advised: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”.  We’re there.