The Future Afterthoughts

Trump's Admin is Giving us a Plethora of Future Punchlines and People to Forget

“Politics is perception, and if this doesn’t work out the amount of time it’ll take to go from being a hired gun to a cocktail party joke can be clocked with an egg timer.”

—John Mahoney in The American President.

On Tuesday, former Vice Presidential candidate and Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin lost her second attempt to sue the New York Times for defamation. Now, in light of the current events around the globe and the ongoing clusterf**k that is the Trump Administration making a mockery of everything, this event hardly registered on the “newsworthy” spectrum. It’s a rather ignominious ending for the once heralded bomb thrower who many on the right saw as exactly what was needed in the Republican Party. It’s no giant leap to see that Donald Trump’s entire public Presidential persona draws a direct line from Sarah Palin’s ignorant, bombastic one that started 17 years ago.

Which got me thinking of the above quote from the movie “The American President.” There is a very fine line in politics between “Talk of the town” and “persona non grata.” One can be very fresh and on top of the pedestal today, only to be the punchline of a joke the next. There’s always ups and downs; some are lucky to have second acts, while others languish in infamy. I thought in light of the half term Governor’s yet again embarrassing debacle, we’d take a walk down memory lane and bring up some others…

Bill Clinton

HOO Boy. Clinton sure had his share of characters around him. It plays out almost like a parody of “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

“Gennifer Flowers. Vince Foster. 
Paula Jones. Whitewater.
Boxers/Briefs? Zoe Baird.
Travel Office Fired- No one Cared
Kenneth Starr. Linda Tripp.
That's not even the tip of it. 
Monica Lewinsky- Blows away
WHAT ELSE DO I HAVE TO SAY!!!"

And we can go on and on with old Bill, but I do have a size limit Im working with here.

George W. Bush

Bush Jr. certainly had his fair share of embarrassments. Who could forget Katherine Harris or Michelle Bachmann?

The most famous had to be “Heckuva Job Brownie”, Bush’s FEMA director Michael Brown, whose only previous experience as the head of anything was as President of an Arabian Horse Organization. Of course when Hurricane Katrina almost wiped New Orleans off the map in a deluge of meters of water, his incompetency was laid bare for the world to see. But there are still others…

Scooter Libby for instance. He intentionally leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame after her husband wrote an op-ed in which he refuted the claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Harriet Myers was Bush’s choice to fill Sandra Day O’Connor’s seat on the Supreme Court, but was shouted down…by Republicans who didn’t see her as conservative enough. There was Bush CIA director George Tenet, famous for claiming the evidence of WMD in Iraq was a “slam dunk.” Right around the same time, former Clinton Advisor Sandy Berger was caught taking classified documents out of the National Archives with them stuffed down his pants. Frankly, I think GWB’s finest moment may have been when he dodged that Iraqi Journalist chucking his shoes at him; that’s what I want in a President—cat like reflexes and the agility of a gazelle evading carnivores wanting blood.

On the other side of that coin, Democrats had their share in this period too. Remember Air America? Or how about Cindy Sheehan? The mother of a fallen soldier in Iraq, she camped a few miles down from George W. Bush’s Crawford ranch until he would talk to her, something he never took the opportunity to do. “Camp Casey” continued to grow in size during the entire summer as protest until Bush returned to Washington (and Katrina hit). But Sheehan? She was trotted out as a progressive hero until she started supporting Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Barack Obama

Obama didn’t have so many interesting people anecdotes around him as the others did. Still, he did have the Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning/Chelsea Manning disclosures happen on his watch, along with the Reverend Wright bruhaha while he was campaigning. Also, there was that Salahi couple who crashed the State Dinner.¹

But he did have his fair share of moments himself.

I mean, how do you explain “Cash for Clunkers?”² Or the tan suit? Of the red line in Syria? or the White House Correspondent’s Dinner where he bashed Trump while Seal Team Six was taking out Osama? Or his terrible bowling while campaigning? Or talking about arrugula? Or the “beer summit” with Dr. Gates? Or…

Donald Trump I

Another one where the entire roster seems like a neverending list of clowns getting out of the tiny VW bug. I mean, Trump’s first term gave us this for crying out loud.

So for the sake of brevity, we’re just going to put a partial list of them out here—quite frankly, there’s too many to count. You can look up how they completely f**ked up, embarrassed themselves (some just by serving for Trump) or quit out of revulsion on your own:

• Sean Spicer

• Mike Pompeo

• Gina Haspel

• Mark Sanford

• Jeff Flake

• Dan Coats

• Richard Cordray/Mick Mulvaney

• Scott Pruitt

• Linda McMahon

• James Mattis

• General Mike Milley

• Betsy DeVos

• Sarah Huckabee Sanders

• Rex Tillerson

• Anthony Scaramucci (who’s made a nice second career cashing in on the joke that was his brief 2 week stint as Communications Director)

• Mike Esper

• Cassidy Hutchinson

• Lynne Cheney

• Adam Kinzinger

• Robert Mueller

• Jeff Sessions

• Andrew McCabe

• Brett Kavanaugh

• Fiona Hill

And it could go on for a very long time. Frankly, I’m tired and depressed from this list already because it actually looks better than the current gang of monkeys banging on pots in the current administration. Ugh. Moving on.

Joe Biden

There really is nothing bigger during Joe’s Presidency than that of his son, Hunter Biden. It’s not often that you get Congressional Committees showing pornographic pictures of the son of the President, naked, smoking crack with a gun in his hand. Or detailed descriptions of how Hunter slept with the widow of his brother, Beau. In fact, every time Hunter’s name was mentioned in a public setting, everyone recoiled; for Democrats it was because some horrific new story was going to make its way through the cycle, and for Republicans out of pure anticipation of what disreputable thing he was caught doing again. Not since Billy Carter has a President’s relative so completely created a complete sideshow ripe for ridicule.

I really can’t add anyone else, because let’s face it, any other person who embarrassed themselves during this period doesn’t come close.

And let’s be frank, there are plenty more side notes, anecdotes, embarrassing figures, genuine imbeciles and entertaining mukluks whose 15 minutes of fame have passed but still remain in the back of our brains for nostalgia reasons. I go back to Sarah Palin again. Remember Bristol? Levi Johnson? Her husband Todd (Taaaaaddddd?!) Remember her interview with Katie Couric? Tina Fey satirizing her? Palin was a one person wrecking crew of the American zeitgeist. She was the epitome of someone on top of the world for a moment (and for those kiddos that don’t remember, the day before McCain announced her as his running mate, Obama gave his acceptance speech in Denver to Mile High Stadium and a hugely successful DNC; the next day at 10 am, it was like it was forgotten as everyone started googling “Who is Sarah Palin?”) only to come crashing down in a blaze of ignominy. More than any other of the also-ran people that everyone wants to repress into amnesia, Palin’s star burned the brightest and flamed out the fastest.

It makes you wonder who are the people around that we are talking about today who will be the joke punchlines of tomorrow.

PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day

The neverending use of the term “-gate” to describe a scandal had its beginnings with the Watergate Scandal in Nixon’s first term. The Watergate being just a hotel of all things.

The most recent use of the “-gate” moniker? The “Signal-Gate” scandal where Pete Hegseth, et.al. corresponded and conveyed War plans on a group chat on the messaging app, completely unaware they had erroneously included an Atlantic reporter.

Watergate took place because the Nixon White House was paranoid about leaks following the publication of the Pentagon Papers. The information in the Pentagon Papers was a Comprehensive Rand Study outlining how the war was progressing/failing. The Signalgate scandal was a disclosure in REAL time of an actual military strike hours before it occurred.

I’ll leave it to you as to which is more damaging.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

“There’s never an egg timer when you need one.”

John Mahoney, demonstrating the wisdom of the quote at the top of the page.

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. Fun side note on that: They soon divorced with the wife running off and marrying Journey guitarist Neal Schon.

2. I’ll admit. I did buy a new car at this time but it was entirely coincidental as my old car was about to go kaput.