The poker's in the fire and the locusts take the sky

Ah, scott pruitt: almost certainly the worst person in trump's cabinet, and THAT is a horrifyingly impressive achievement. His unwavering determination to destroy the environment in any and every way he can is one thing, but the massive personal corruption and the hysterical paranoid terror at the idea of ever being confronted by anyone about his awfulness are really the fecal cherries on top. It's a rhetorical problem, because "he's a fucking Captain Planet villain" sounds like so much hyperbole, and in most cases it almost certainly is, but boy, leave it to trump...you know, with most corrupt dictatorships (and I mean really, even if we're not there yet, you know damn well it's how they think of themselves and what they aspire to, so I feel comfortable using the word), you get horrible people because they're there to do horrible things. You don't specifically think: hmmm, who are the worst people I can find? They need to have failings above, beyond, and unrelated to what's needed for the job; really be the absolute worst conceivable. Don't get me wrong: if pruitt tried for one minute to do his fucking job, he'd be out on his ass. The environmental destruction is the main thing. But don't fool yourself: the corruption is a huge bonus. Any other president would have gotten rid of pruitt long ago; even a super anti-environmental one would've thought "eh, I can find someone who's just as bad in that regard but who's at least housebroken; I don't need the PR hassle." But for trump and his fans, the sure knowledge that pruitt's corruption is further pissing off The Libz is a huge bonus. Resentment and malicious schadenfreude is all they've got, but trump certainly knows how to give it to them in spades. I'll give him that.

Any President is going to alienate a large portion of the country. That's just inevitable, in these fox-news-inflected times (and BOY are the architects of that structure going to burn in the deepest recesses of hell). But we've never had a President who so explicitly considers himself the President of his base and no one else. Who can't even make the most feeble bromides to the contrary. He wants to dominate and humiliate us, yes--he's nothing if not a sadist--but that's as far as it goes. He certainly doesn't feel any responsibility to us. Of course, he doesn't feel any responsibility to his base, either, or anything outside his head, but as long as they're willing to feed his bloated, cancerous ego, he's willing to feed them the right kind of bluster, like the lab monkey who obsessively pushes the button for cocaine to the exclusion of the button for food even when starving to death.

He's like a bully who lets you hang out with him and spares you the worst of his depredations as long as you're willing to toady to him sufficiently. He doesn't like you, and if he even momentarily perceives it to be in his best interests (or even just on a whim), he'll smash you like a bug. But you amuse and gratify him, so he'll more or less tolerate you and accept your sycophancy. And in return, you get the thrill of existing in the shadow of his power and reveling as he hurts the people you hate.

Boy, that's not a pretty picture. Is it any comfort to realize that none of his supporters are actually coming out ahead here? I mean, obviously, he implements policies that hurt the non-mega-rich, but even the mega-rich, would they acknowledge it or not, would fundamentally benefit from living in a non-evil society, in ways tangible and not. I know it's not exactly viscerally satisfying to know that the koch brothers--say--are spiritually dead (they'd have to know it, and if they did, they'd be self-aware enough to not have died in the first place). But there it is. A thing.

I don't really have a point. Left political commentary these days seems to have devolved to the extent that it's basically just trying to find novel ways to illuminate the fact that we're in Hell, but, well, that fun fact does tend to dominate the mind.