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Playing Chicken with the World [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-02
By David Glenn Cox
I saw something interesting yesterday. It was the top of the King’s head while he signed a Fuehrer Directive. Gone was all pretense of creative hair weaving and design. Skin! Houston, we have lots of scalp! Don’t need no fancy store bought haircut now. The honeymoon is over, a bathrobe and slippers are good enough for you now.
The King was studying on the directive closely as he applied his pen in the deepest sort of concentration you can possibly have just by signing your name. In fairness to the King, you have to get it right the first time. It would look unsightly to have one attempted signature crossed out with another inserted underneath. Donald John Tump “We need another copy in here!”
What I witnessed was a very old man. He’s gotten the job so there is no need to appear to be shiny anymore. More concerning was the king seemed to be vibrating. Vibrating like a man riding on a bus only, there was no bus. Concerning even if historically accurate. Just another sign of mental decline, nothing to worry about really. Nothing we didn’t know about the King already.
The King has fired the first shots in his trade war. An economic war of supremacy. You don’t need Panzers to take over a country. If you can bomb their economy and cause enough disruption. It’s all about the King trying to play Emperor of the whole world. We’ll take back the Panama Canal like the Nazis took back the Sudetenland. This one doesn’t miss any of the Fuehrer’s tricks.
The goal is to unnerve the status quo by bluster and threats. Now! Now, the King says offhandedly there may be some short-term discomfort in his economic plans. (The last time someone said that I lost my house!) You’re not busy, are you? You don’t mind if the King borrows a few of your best earning years, do you? The King announces tariffs on the Friday news dump. So as not to disturb Joe six pack and Mary lunch pail with possibly distressing news, but Wall Street noticed. Step one, lock the upper floor windows and restrooms. Step two, acquire cardboard boxes and severance checks.
Watch me kill the new car market Mama! Bam! The new car market today is already struggling while offering huge discounts and interest rate deals. The price of used cars will rise appropriately while new cars languish in the showroom. In times of business uncertainty, it is important to hold onto your cash and not make any large capital expenditures. Uncertainty is the knife at the throat of business. The King is playing poker with your life.
Step two, housing! If you have a home that you would like to sell. Don’t pass up any reasonable offer as chances are in a year from now, you might wish you’d taken it. When it stops it stops cold and stops fast. With it stops the building material industry and right behind the trucking industry and then retail and then restaurants. Are they crazy? Crazy with the zeal of a Washington know it all. Think tank guys and gals mainly. We can just go into Iraq and Afghanistan, take whatever we want, and it will all be over in a month. Plus, they’ll pay for it too! “We only need to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down!”
What has four wheels and flies? Give up? A garbage truck and Elon Musk. The earnings report smelled to high heaven, and it is only going to get worse. It is like an episode of the Twilight Zone. Where Elon told the genie he wanted to be the richest man on earth, and you know already it’s going to end badly. What sort of delusion or mental constipation could make a reasonable person think supporting a Nazi while Seig heiling yourself won’t have negative business ramifications?
There is no rival in business history where a successful businessman destroyed his own business with the force of his own personality. Like an ornery Colonel Sanders or anti-Ronald McDonald standing out front shaking their fist at the cars as they go by. All for the lure of power Icarus thinks it’s a good day to go for a flight. He’s so high up in the clouds he hasn’t realized yet he’s becoming a pariah and a clown. A worldwide meme and a laughing stock as the fool on the hill who blew it.
Our new Defense Secretary Foster Brooks Hegseth says, “Ya know nothing; nothing is off the table, (burb) nothing! We, we, we might even invade Mexico! Mexico! Sure, why not? Mexico! Why not? Why not? Not. It’s close, close by and they have, have oil. Ya know? Ya know, (burb) nothing is off the table. We might even invade Mexico sure! Invade Mexico sure, pick up some tequila and some sombreros and fireworks. You know, nothing is off the table. I love tacos, you know?”
Come on, say it with me! “Good morning, Czechoslovakian border crisis!”
The intent is to kick over trash cans and sweep all the papers off the desk. Listen up peons; there’s a new King in town! We play by his rules now! Got it? What the King gains in accommodation he loses in cooperation.
Much of Slapstick comedy is predicated on just one single joke. One hundred years and the whole world still loves it when the bossy know it all takes a crème pie right in the kisser. Playing chicken with the world with you and me in the front seat of the car.
“You do not become a ''dissident'' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”
― Vaclav Havel
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