The Least Among You

I admit I haven't been paying 100% attention to the everyday ins and outs of the Republican pre-primary traveling roadshow and presidential nominating process. So far it seems like a contest to see who can profess to hating specific groups of people in the most public of ways. Lots of lip-service is being paid to the usual suspects of Mexicans, ladies with abortionable uteruses and Muslims, with the only real question being which participant them can publicly hate them the hardest.

So far the closest we've come to having any kind gathering point of agreement for a hate-consensus over nearly all the candidates has been around Donald Trump. But even there we can't quite get unanimity because of the weird obsequiousness of Ted Cruz toward Mr. Trump and the star-level gravitational self-love of The Donald for himself, warping and bending the feel-space around him as a kind of prophylaxis. There may be some flares and roiling beneath him, but containment seems to be holding for the moment.

He may be off the hook anyway, because in their race to be the most publicly Christian person in the country, they've finally found someone they can all band together to mutually destroy, ideally on television. I mean of course Pope Francis, the most publicly Christian person in the world.

First of all, he just shows up here. He's from Argentina (not Italy like he pretends) where they speak Spanish just like the Mexicans do, except worse because it also tries so hard to sound like Italian. He's not even using his real name. Francis? No, try "Jorge Mario Bergoglio." No, not "George." It's "Hor-hay." Just like your gardener. This is not a coincidence.

So with all this deception he somehow gets past TSA and into the country. He could scout out some super-famous lapsed Catholics to chill with, maybe work their hookups to raise some money for a vanity charity foundation named after himself like a normal famous person would do, but instead? He goes and tries to find homeless people. To, like, talk to. On purpose. Like some kind of socialist. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt seeing as he was in DC where it's pretty hard to take a picture that doesn't feature a homeless person in it, but nope, confirmed: on purpose.

Nobody is more dubiously suspect than this person. A pseudonymous lover of the poor, draped in fabulous satin, espousing a message of destabilizing wealth redistribution and in command of a small band of armed men? How sure are we that this isn't actually Robin Hood?

Allergic as they are to public sincerity, earnest feelings and actual Christianity, the Republic candidates and their colleagues in Congress have been out in force condemning this man for his message of anti-Reaganism. Bush got him on climate change, Cruz on the death penalty, Rep. Steve King chided him for, I think, not having the balls to approve of drone strikes on people walking in the general direction of our border with Mexico...

Politicians of course don't have the courage to actually act on their convictions, only talk about them. Even if they are good and helpful convictions. Luckily there is a group of concerned citizens out there willing to move from words to action if their government won't. A small number of white supremacist militia types are actively looking to arrest U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mitten) because the dumb local sheriffs won't agree that her stance on the Iran nuclear agreement isn't treason.

Their plan hasn't come to fruition because some of the people in their white power group are too wussy to affect an armed kidnapping of a sitting U.S. senator. But then again, she is white and English-speaking. I'm sure whatever cage they fashioned to hold her in out of branches, twine and their own feces in the middle of a forest in Michigan* could just as easily be used to hold an old-ass South American dude. All they'd have to do is find a way to get to him through the enormous throngs of eager admirers every single place he goes and boom: justice.


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*from which she would never be found seeing as, outside of the dystopian scrabble of what used to be Detroit, the whole state is a fucking tree farm.