SUGGESTED READING LIST (TRUMP EDITION) ~ MARCH 3, 2016

1. If, like many other Americans (and citizens of the world) these days, you're sitting at home scratching your head trying to puzzle out how the USA could possibly have reached the abyssal precipice upon which it now stands poised... you shouldn't be. Because the tracks were laid for the Trump Train - which so many of our fellow humans seem all to eager to hop aboard as it

chugs with increasingly dread-fraught inevitability towards an unprecedented apocalyptic abyss - was first laid over fifteen years ago. In an article entitled Revenge of the Simple, Rolling Stone Magazine's Matt Taibi explains: 

To hear GOP insiders tell it, Doomsday is here. If Donald Trump scores huge tonight and seizes control of the nomination in the Super Tuesday primaries, it will mark the beginning of the end of the Republican Party, and perhaps the presidency. But Trump isn't the beginning of the end. George W. Bush was. The amazing anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today's nightmare possible. 

People forget what an extraordinary thing it was that Bush was president. Dubya wasn't merely ignorant when compared with other politicians or other famous people. No, he would have stood out as dumb in just about any setting. ... Bush went to the best schools but was totally ignorant of history, philosophy, science, geography, languages and the arts. ... Bush showed no interest in learning and angrily rejected the idea that a president ought to be able to think his way through problems. ...  

There are educational apps that use groups of images to teach two-year-olds to recognize that an orange is like an orange while a banana is a banana. Bush was stalled at that developmental moment. And we elected him president.

The always excellent Taibi goes on to explain how Preznit Dubya's personal Svengali, Karl Rove, banked on the notion that decades of cultural debasement, combined with highly orchestrated right-wing talk radio propaganda campaigns cooked up in billionaire-funded conservative think tanks "left huge blocs of Americans convinced that people who read books, looked at paintings and cared about spelling were either serial killers or scheming to steal bearer bonds from the Nakatomi building." It's an excellent series of riffs, and it ultimately leads to a discussion about the blowback from such ambitious civilizational engineering which leads, now, to...

... Washington freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron. That's really what it comes down to. And all of the Beltway's hooting and hollering about how "embarrassing" and "dangerous" Trump is will fall on deaf ears, because as gullible as Americans can be, they're smart enough to remember being told that it was OK to vote for George Bush, a man capable of losing at tic-tac-toe.

There is no comfort offered here, folks. Taibi claims that "we're about to enter a dark period in the history of the American experiment", and yer old pal Jerky couldn't agree more.

2. Make no mistake... yer old pal Jerky is no fan of Mitt Romney. He's a New Millennium Republican after all, and is thus a willing representative of, and standard bearer for, the worst, most greedy, venal, arrogant, bigoted, ignorant, elitist, phony, limited, authoritarian and spite-fueled voting bloc in the history of American democracy. And yet his speech today at the Hinckley Institute in Utah, wherein he savaged Donald Trump with a withering volley of honest, fair and accurate put-downs and insults, was a thing of beauty, and not just because watching right-wingers devour their own makes for great entertainment. It was beautiful because, watching it, you got the sense that there's a very real possibility that the GOP may actually be disintegrating from the inside out. I mean, just watch this thing!

"His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University." Savor that. Swish it around in your mouth for a while, then swallow it. Nice, isn't it? Now consider; whether the Republican establishment's obvious contempt for Trump ultimately leads them to force a brokered convention where they pull some smoky backroom shenanigans to oust him (thereby alienating a huge segment of their base), or simply pushes Trump into exiting the party in order to mount a third party campaign (thereby guaranteeing a Republican defeat), it's all bad news for the Conservative Movement. Because, let's face it; they can slice that shit cake any way they like, but they're still gonna be left with a plate full of shit.

3. John Oliver, host of HBO's satirical news magazine Last Week Tonight, has tried his best to make his show a Trump-free zone. It was a laudable goal, but the stress and strain of trying to cast his gaze away as Trump's bloated, reptoid countenance continued to bloat, swell, and metastasize across and throughout the media ultimately proved impossible. Which brings us to the following video, which serves as yet another bit of evidence in support of the thesis that the best contemporary political news reporting comes from comedians and/or comedy show hosts. Just watch, and maybe when you're done, stroll on over to MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain.com and install Oliver's "Drumpfinator" app. It transforms all web-based instances of Donald Trump's name into his original archaic German family name, "Drumpf", for multiple reasons, all of which will become obvious once you've watched the video.