Heretics in Washington D.C: “None Dare Call it Treason!”

The Russian Connection

“Beware of Donald Trump. Witlessly or willfully, he’s doing the Kremlin’s bidding. Anyone who enables him — on his payroll or in the press, by sucking up or by silence, out of good will or cowardice — is Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. This is a national emergency, and treating it like normal is criminally negligent of our duty to American democracy. “ Marty Kaplan, | Dec. 13, 2016, MONEY AND POLITICS.)

This morning headlines and “fake” new stories from the New Republic to Bill Moyers’ Money and Politics, from the Atlantic to The New York Times and Washington Post as network broadcast to cable television et al describe the Kremlin’s man in the White House, Republican President Donald Trump alternately and figuratively as a Russian Mole and Putin’ s Puppet.

For those of us who were once mesmerized by John Le Carre’s famed detective-spy, George Smiley, in his trilogy, aka the “quest for Karla,” we remember how Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People focused on the Russian connection. Whether you read the novels or watched the BBC production with Alec Guinness, the spectacle of a plump aging spy taking down the svelte traitors and grimy thugs from Moscow Center was a thrilling spectacle. Then, Le Carre’s art imitated life, inspired by the British traitors Philby, Burgess, MacClean, Blunt, and Cairncross aka the Cambridge Five. But who needs “Moscow Rules” when you have photos and emails?

Now life imitates art as Special Counsel Robert Mueller replaces George Smiley and Vladimir Putin plays Karla in real time as this reality drama plays on the 24/7 news. Mueller combines the character of a dogged Smiley and the indefatigable Javert of Les Miserables, while he pursues the ghost in the Whitehouse in order to save the Republic. To trope on the O.J. Trial: “If the evidence fits, you must convict.”

The Trump team and Trump have been cast as “fellow travelers” and a “Cat’s Paw” for the Russian Mob.

The Heretics of Church and State

Heresy, “belief or opinion contrary to orthodox religious (especially Christian) [democracy, too] doctrine,” underscores the Trump Doctrine of Greed, as it does the Corporatist Republican Party, who dance to the tune of “repeal and replace” while finding philosophical justification in the fantasy fiction of Ayn Rand.

Meanwhile, the alleged fundamentalists and evangelicals of every faux religious persuasion, who once gave lip service to canonical Christianity, known as the religion of “love” and “compassion,” promoted by the last great Christian, have foregone the maxim “Love thy neighbor as they self.” The faithful have transformed the notion of rendering to the Lord what is the Lord’s and render all to Caesar. Elite Democrats, too, in Congress have sold their birthright to Wall St. while the Republican leadership bows before the Great Koch Brothers of Wichita, Kansas, home to Dorothy and Toto and the land of Oz!

Among other heresies, the Republican leaders advocate intolerance for the poor and deny the Lord’s command to act as stewards of the natural world. They turn abruptly toward their enemies, not with the other cheek but with  with fire and brimstone. The rise of social injustice, reinforced by the Supreme Court, banishes refugees from the American wars abroad and forces victims of capitalism at home to stand in front of death squads composed of Insurance agents.

Secular humanists and the products of the Enlightenment, the principles on which the Republic was founded, have conspired with the Christians of Puritanical American Calvinism and the doctrine of predetermination to cast dark-skinned people into the debtors prisons under the rubric of the drug wars and wars against the lower classes. Without the bedrock of tradition, philosophical and religious values, the law is merely today’s post-modern exercise in fatuous and deconstructed interpretation.

American Calvinism or Predetermination, the dark principle that undergirds American Exceptionalism, favors the wealthy as the elect of God. The wealthy are saved, the rest punished. The poor and the dark skin tones embody the sign of the sin with which the Lord has cast down the guilty into the world.

Yet Jesus, the God of Love, said, “let ye who is free from sin cast the first stone.” He cautioned his Father to “Forgive them for they know not what they do” even as the “right-to-lifers” abandon to the “death penalty” the ones they initially sought to save.

“J’accuse”

“Trump the Destroyer…has stuffed his Cabinet with tyrants, zealots and imbeciles – all bent on demolishing our government from within” (Matt Taibbi, (Rolling Stone, March 22, 2017).

Once, long long ago, the scourge of “fellow travelers,” Joseph McCarthy (backed by Nevada Senator Pat McCarthy) would have hauled the Trumps, McConnell and Ryan up on charges to face the House on Un-American Activities (HUAC) for hanging out with “commies” and destroying the American way of life. Republicans have changed.

Today the pious pols and patriots from the Bible Belt, brainwashed by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, have thrown in with the Devil’s Spawn and turned against the American People. As Joseph Welch, chief counsel to the U.S. Army might have said to the homicidal pols attempting to kill health care: “Have you no sense of decency?”

“Have you no sense left of common decency?”

(Don’t answer lest you perjure yourself.)