The Strait of Arrakis

"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." -- Paul Muad'Dib, Dune, 1965

You Dune fans out there have probably noticed that the "power to destroy a thing" threat which Iran -- a nation governed by religious fanatics -- has now credibly leveled against the United States and Israel over the Strait of Hormuz is exactly the same threat that Paul Muad'Dib leveled at the rest of the Empire in Dune.  If you fuck with us, we will destroy this thing.   We will strangle it and then your empire will fall because your whole empire -- all trade, all medicine, all mobility -- depends on the product of this ancient place that you've been exploiting and abusing and messing with for generations.  

So welcome to the early premiere of Dune, III, but not in theaters in December.  This version of Dune is coming to our homes, our highway, our grocery stores, our schools, and our medical facilities right now courtesy of  Donald Trump, who, on a whim, decided to fuck with one of the places on this Earth that he should have left the fuck alone.

So, how did we get here?

Well, there are really two and only two theories of the case about the rise of Donald Trump.

First is that Trump swept in overnight as if by magic.  He just showed up, did some hoodoo and bamboozled 70 million United States citizens into voting for him.  Boom! Just like *that* he hoodwinked everybody.  First, handily sweeping aside all 723 of his Republican opponents in 2016  primaries, locking up the nomination early, and then proceeding on to win the general election due to the electoral college being massively tilted in favor of small states full of enough bigots and imbeciles to do the job.  

That's theory #1.

Theory #2 goes like this.

The rise of a monster like Trump was a long time coming down a long, and terrible road along which the Republican party has been marching for a generation.  Maybe two generations.  Either way, a very long time.   And eventually all the kindling, and all the oily rags, and all the barrels of toxic hate and bigotry and arrogant ignorance --  all the highly volatile poisons the GOP had been tinkering and toying with for decades -- finally came back to bite 'em.  

They had been using that poisonous alloy of focused hatred and stupidity and derangement to smite Democrats and win elections, and using the same logic that tobacco companies had used for decades: of course, we know the product we're selling is dangerous, highly addictive, and often lethal, but it's also incredibly profitable.   So we're going to go right on selling it because there is no way in this Land of the Free, that we're ever going to have to pay a price for how we make our money.      

And right down the line, the craftiest minds at every high-brow Conservative media platform and the savviest political operatives in the GOP -- even with examples like Golem, and Frankenstein, and The Sorcerers Apprentice, and all of human history right at their fingertips -- showed themselves to be utterly incapable of imagining that the doomsday machine they had built out of rage, racism and belligerent ignorance might one day be turned against them.  

For the record, this is what I wrote 36 hours after Donald Trump oozed down the Golden Escalator back in June of 2015:

In case you missed it, Squint and the Meat Puppet handed the MSNBC camera over to Donald Trump this morning for a relaxing, 30-minute handjob. While Trump rambled lazily from one pinnacle of bullshit and narcissism to the next, Morning Joe crack-house regulars Mark Halperin (Glenn Beck's favorite mainstream media enabler) and the pickled remains of Mike Barnacle looked on, smirking and giggling. All that it lacked to complete the creepy, peep-show effect were trench-coats and bad lighting.

But of course, the story of the Trump candidacy has very little to do with Donald Trump. 

As I wrote a few years ago, the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.  

In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.

They are the GOP's premium leads, but however abundant and renewable a resource the Conservative meatheads may be, come Presidential election time, there is never enough room at the trough for every rapacious Republican hog.  This is why every few years we have these Little Red State Fundy moments; that delicate time when the knives come out and the various species of Conservative con men start cutting each other's balls over who gets to pluck the wingnut pigeons...

...while trying desperately not to call attention to the fact that their entire political system depends on pandering to the army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps which the GOP has worked so long and hard to cultivate.

Fortunately for the Right, now that the "respectable" media has as much to lose by cracking out of turn as Hate Radio and Fox News, we can all look forward to another campaign season of the American mainstream media looking stoically the other way.

Seems like theory #2 actually fits the facts like a bespoke Savile Row suit, while theory #1 looks more and more like a tiny, tattered fig leaf trying to cover a mountain of shame, complicity and bad faith.  

So a sensible person might well ask themselves, "Why the hell do the Never Trumpers and the legacy media still cling to theory #1 like a drunk clinging to an empty jug?"

And I might well answer that person, "You know, that's a helluva good question.  The next time you're within shouting distance, why don't you ask them, because they ain't taking my calls."

I Am The Liberal Media.