Semper Paratus (not)

We’re in commencement season, which means that Personages high and low will show up on university and college daises to mouth platitudes as one final trial for graduating students. If you’re lucky—and your institution has juice—you get Matt Damon or even Condoleeza Rice.

If you’re not, the Kleptocrat may show up.

As he has done twice this week. The crowd at the completely misnamed Liberty University, an offshoot of the RWNJ Jerry Falwell’s evangelical enterprise, kind of had it coming as penance for their individual and institutional support of someone who in every respect both professionally and personally is the antithesis of Jesus.

The poor cadets at the Coast Guard Academy, now—they did not deserve to embark on their careers in service to this country by having the whiner-in-chief whiz on their commencement. Because, after submitting a budget to Congress earlier this year that cuts the Coast Guard’s budget by $12B, somewhere in the vicinity of 12%, he had the unmitigated gall to not only congratulate himself on how swell a job he’s doing as president, but to go on and moan that “no politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.”

And this, BTW, was part of his “advice” to the graduates. You know—the part where the person at the podium, who’s supposed to be imparting a few final nuggets of wisdom, gives his or her secret of success. The Kleptocrat’s secret is to moan.

Well, not secret, really. More like his defining quality. "You want advice, guys? Lemme tell you what a great job I'm doing. Best in history. And I don't understand why the cool kids don't want me to sit at their lunch table."

That “no politician in history” thing—Jesus wept. Just off the top of my head: Julius Caesar, Michael Collins, Cataline, Abraham Lincoln, Jean-Paul Marat, Yitzhak Rabin, Gustav von Kahr, Anwar Sadat, Patrice Lumumba, Thomas More, Gabby Giffords, Salvador Allende, Rosa Luxembourg, Nelson Mandela, Alexander Hamilton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. To my knowledge not one of them hawked up the kind of self-pitying vomit as the Orange One. And anyway: I thought his whole point was that he's not a politician. At this point I believe it's his claim to being humanoid that is being called into question.

As for the cadets, it’s a mark of their professionalism and class that, when the Kleptocrat started his self-puffery and cringeworthy sniveling, the entire class did not stand up, turn their backs, drop trew and moon him. But I’m betting they couldn’t wait to hit the bars to start drinking away the memory of yesterday.