Rising From the Ashes Like a Rubber Chicken

Throughout 2020’s boring apocalypse the one thing we could depend on to cheer us up was America’s political sitcom. It came filled with a cast of awkwardly flopping sleazeballs, continually confused neo-liberals and the main attraction, a Tango tosser suffering a case of narcissistic personality disorder so acute that it would drive any would-be therapist to an early grave.

The push to make Trump appealing to the gamut of the American republican base is quite impressive and something that could only be achieved with modern day information bubbles.

To the religious conservative republicans Trump is shown to be a wholesome, rags to riches, grandfatherly figure who is willing to put Christian values first. To this group it was important to hide his litany of forced sexual contact allegations and obscure his constant haemorrhaging of the titanic inheritance he was left by his father. The man doesn’t even own the ‘Trump’ brand anymore.

To the conspiracy addled wing of the party, Trump is shown to be a paedo-bashing, commie fighting, freedom lover. Yet he allegedly snuck into the changing room of 15-year-old beauty pageant contestants, adhered to policies which helped the Kremlin and pushed for the censorship of anyone criticising him.

I had said in a post back in 2016 that electing Trump might be a good thing:

Recent American elections have been glorious competitions to see who can add more holes to the sinking American ship. Perhaps it’s time to elect a candidate who would set the boat on fire. Someone so incredibly bad that Americans would be forced to acknowledge that they need to take a second look at how their very democracy works. And I can think of no political candidate more qualified in the realms of abject stupidity than Donald Trump.

Last Bus To Pluto 2016 – Maybe Americans Should Vote For Donald Trump

Unfortunately, America seems immune to introspection. Rather than examine what led to Trump’s rise and attempt to adjust their political structure to possibly dangerous presidential hires, they have rallied around a ‘business as usual’ candidate.

Whilst this choice will lead to long term problems it did also leave Trump with the unenviable task of persuading the American public that the most boring candidate in 50 years was a dangerous threat to America. Trump failed because everyone yawned. As he couldn’t actually beat Biden, Trump tried to steal the election whilst projecting the same theft onto his opponent and he almost succeeded. Few alarm bells have been raised by how close this came.

Alarm bells might have guaranteed some much-needed red tape wrapped around the position of president but the hope that the Democrats will restrict their own power is folly. They would never do something so selfless. No sign of ratifying control of the nuclear football, no controls placed on announcing war on other countries (something Obama damaged) and certainly no curbing of the party farting hilarity that is the presidential pardon system.

For America, some things will never change.

Closer To Home

At home Brexit is finally underway and predictable problems are starting to arise much to ambivalence of the disaster capitalists that funded the Brexit campaign in the first place. The government made slow progress of stabbing the DUP in the back again. I’m honestly surprised their leadership doesn’t suffer a PTSD attack every time a Tory butters a scone.

Boris Johnson is continuing to make Covid decisions three weeks too late but it’s hard to make a joke about needless deaths. On the other hand, you can always get a laugh at the Tories continuing embezzlement.

We all expect and tolerate a little bit of stealing from politicians. You might get angry at your children for putting their hands in the cookie jar but at some point, you have to give them a Chocolate Hob Nob to stop the whining. The Tories however have not been able to restrain themselves. Gone is the cookie jar, the cake and the veneer of respectability. Take PPE MedPro, a firm linked to Tory peer, Baroness Mone. After being swiftly set up, the company used a mere £100 of capital to secure a contract of £122m. You can tell from the website that things have been done on the cheap:

Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with using a template, hell, this website uses one. You really should go to the effort of changing a few things like the colour scheme, the links and the content. Some of this was not done at the time PPE MedPro received the contract. Some of that still hasn’t been done in the months since then! It really doesn’t help that their catalogue for medical equipment contains lots of bad photoshop work:

The National Audit Office pointed out that government medical procurement was an issue:

The cross-government PPE team established a high-priority lane to assess and process potential PPE leads from government officials, ministers’ offices, MPs and members of the House of Lords, senior NHS staff and other health professionals.

National Audit Office 2020 – Investigation into government procurement during the COVID-19 pandemic

A lot of money is being spent on equipment that can be purchased at a fraction of the price from easily accessible wholesalers.

In Conclusion

With Covid vaccines being passed out at an impressive rate, scientists might once again save politicians from their own failings.

I hope that when this is finally over, we won’t take the simple things for granted but I somewhat doubt it. We won’t rise from the ashes like a phoenix destined to take flight. Instead, we’ll rise like a rubber chicken spinning through the air, destined to fall back to the ground, make a comedic farting noise and continue on like nothing ever happened.