Okay, this diary needed a preface, an explanation for why I am saying this. I think it's Trump. The guy obviously needs to go, like Biden needed to go. The Democrats kept him, Biden, around because they secretly wanted a second term of Trump, and so they got their second term of Trump, and he served his purpose. But they keep him around! It's got to be the big mystery of today's news, of why this guy is still there. The critiques can be withering even if they only cite the obvious stuff: that's what Lego videos are for. Maybe the inside traders profit from America's continual embarrassment. But everyone else? And the Republicans are going to go down with his ship! Now, there are two mechanisms in the official scene for his removal: impeachment, and the 25th Amendment. Both look obvious. But the key to his political survival is that Trump is kept in power through all-American delusions. So this is an exploration.

The two-party system in this country is eternal, though of course our insistence that we do all of our politics through the two-party system is how we got Trump. It's okay to have a deranged narcissist running the Federal Government, though, because the Democrats gave us the narcissist, and they're the good guys. Biden and Biden's stand-in so totally had a chance to win the election, because everyone knows there's an irresistable appeal to seeing Joe Biden stare off into space in a Presidential debate, or hearing Kamala Harris fail an interview. That's why the Democrats felt totally safe rigging the primaries for Biden -- twice. What chance Biden and Biden's stand-in had, in the year before last? Who cares? It was your responsibility to support them, not theirs to win.

We can wish politics away, and if it turns out we can't, we can just blame everything on ourselves and go into therapy -- at least until we're dead from an increasing number of causes. Meanwhile we can get jobs advertising AI, which is the best thing to come along since sliced bread, though in the end it will leave us all unemployed and homeless and on the wrong side of the law. We're so totally going to enter the Age of AI because our energy grid can so totally handle the data centers' energy load, what with gasoline prices at only $6/ gallon in California until the petroleum reserves dry up and we start to notice that 20% or 30% of the worlds fossil fuel reserves are now off the US market indefinitely. We all like high energy bills anyway, right?

America is the greatest country in the world, having been the country which inspired Hitler. So what could go wrong? At any rate, we didn't need Finland's education system or universal access to health care or China's or Japan's rail systems or houses for our 700,000 or so (that's an undercount) unhoused people -- especially in the winter because everyone thinks that sleeping outdoors when it's freezing is good for you -- or affordable education or affordable housing, anyway. The education problem was totally being solved with No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, just like the university problem is totally being solved now by having the universities shrink to nothing. It will save our Zionist billionaires the trouble of ordering the crushing of nationwide student protests. What America needs, you see, is a good, solid war like the glorious one we had in Afghanistan, one that lasts forever so we ignore it and go back to being ruled by Zionist billionaires or climate change deniers or religious fundamentalists. The pattern was set earlier, theen, just like we said fifty-eight years ago that we were winning the war in Vietnam without so much as having a reliable metric which would tell us if we were winning or not.

Communism is bad, you see, even though it's in the Bible.

What makes America genuinely adorable is that its non-human nature is such a thing, it has thing-ness down, Theodor Adorno called it the "preponderance of the object." Whereas much of the rest of the world is still recovering from the scars it received from past eras of capitalism, America's long-standing self-proclaimed cause. Also, because when anyone on the Internet criticizes something as being "bad," it is my American consciousness that allows me to smile benevolently in the knowledge that there's always something worse. "Our state's test scores are low," but there are worse things to learn, and there are always blessings to be thankful for, always reasons to say thank you, while we pursue the long and arduous journey toward the eventual rejection of the philosophy that we don't actually need to dream of a better world -- we can just make stuff up -- and toward that moment when in full realism we dream of a better world. Think of it as the negative version of the saying about "if you meet the Buddha on the road..."

In the Sixties, Zappa composed this song:

Today we have Carsie Blanton: