BY BOB BEARDEN
Will there be enough fences to go around?
He is not yet inaugurated and already scandals are plaguing The Donald. But he claims it’s the fault of the U.S. intelligence community and that his best bud, Putin, didn’t have nothing to do with it. Well, except now The Donald says maybe Russia was behind it, but of course couldn’t been Puty, naw.
As a student of history, I can’t recall any previous administration that ever had to start out dealing with scandals and rumors of scandals prior to being seated in office.
Even the wildly corrupt Warren Gamaliel Harding administration didn’t get bogged down in a scandal until well into his term. But, after all, what could we expect from a guy who hasn’t told a complete truth, perhaps in his entire life?
He built his campaign on lies. Even his rabid supporters didn’t disagree that he was an innervate liar – they just didn’t care.
It’s gonna be a wild four years [saying he will be able to last that long] and we, as the American public, are going to get it good and hard. But he’s already invented several outs for himself.
Fake news which spews forth from his corner daily is his backup for not telling the truth. The awful media who hates him is another out. Whatever happens over the next four years he will never admit to any blame.
We have elected a spoiled brat as our president and whenever he is called to task he will dish out the blame to anyone but himself. All failures of his administration will find scapegoats aplenty to be had. And with a cabal of billionaire CEOs now entering The Donald’s Twilight Zone it’ll only get worse, since they are all experts at deflecting blame onto someone else whenever they get caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
The Donald and crowd, I fear, are going to make Tricky Dickie’s gaggle of All the President’s Men look like choir boys at a church social. And after a recent exchange between The Donald’s No. 1 denier Kellyanne Conway and Anderson Cooper, I fear that by the end of four years she’s gonna look like a version of the Picture of Dorian Gray. Her smiles come off as if she has just sucked on a sour lemon.
Tweet storms and walk backs will likely become the order of the day as most of this administration’s time will be spent walking back what someone with a foul mouth that has been placed in charge of some agency has said and now needs to deny that they ever said it.
Well, let’s face it: pretending he never said what he said that is now on tape somewhere for all posterity to listen is the main mantra of what The Donald and his crowd stands for.
Pretending they didn’t say what they are going to be on tape saying will likely become the lead story on most days over the next four years.
How they will be able to get any real business of the affairs of state accomplished will be hard to discern. When you must spend most of your time walking back previous statements and denying you ever actually said them, even though there is a taped video or audio record of them, is likely to suck all the air out of the room.
Plausible deniability will probably be a term that even a first grader will understand the meaning of. But like Will Rogers said, “There are three kinds of men, the one who learns by reading, the few who learn by observation, the rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves!”
I expect there will be a whole lot of people in this incoming administration who will have to learn by peeing on the fence themselves, if they ever do learn at all. Will there be enough fences to go around?
– Bob Bearden is a trustee with the Central Oklahoma Labor Federation, a member of Mayflower Congregational Church in Oklahoma City and a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer
