Plane Dumb

God help me, I listened to about five minutes of Glenn Beck’s radio show this morning. I don’t listen to the radio much anymore, but I was driving a rental car in rural Oregon and it was just about the only thing that came in clearly. I didn’t recognize Beck’s voice at first, and assumed it was a local conservative trying to make a name for himself because what came out of his mouth was so very stupid, it could not, I imagined, be a prominent voice. Yet again, I have underestimated the stupidity of the American conservative movement.

Beck was discussing the new Qatari airplane sometimes being used for Air Force One. As you’re probably aware, the president made a big to-do over his new grift gift, calling it the finest airplane ever built. So anxious was he to ride his new toy that he rushed the retrofitting process, as detailed in yesterday’s New York Times. Because of the rush job, the normal defensive capabilities for Air Force One were not installed, causing the Secret Service to request Trump not fly in the plane during Iran War III or IV (not sure which one we’re up to at this point).

The president, as is his way, lied about why he was not returning to the States aboard the new 747, claiming he was sending it to some European military base so our servicemembers could get a look at it. What?

Anyway, Beck’s tortured logic regarding this newest Trump fiasco is that reporters who criticized the Qatari bribe as a Qatari bribe ought to now rethink their criticism because, now that the plane has been revealed as unfit to serve as Air Force One, requiring anywhere from an additional $400M-$1B in upgrades, the press should recognize how dangerous the job of President of the United States is. Since they, too, travel aboard the plane when covering overseas trips, and were thus potential targets themselves, they ought to “rethink their priorities” when criticizing Trump.

I repeat: WHAT?!?

Beck’s “logic” seems to be that Trump made the patriotic choice in discarding the new plane in favor of the old neglecting to mention that the former Air Force One already had all of the defensive capabilities the new one lacks. In which case, why did he take delivery of the new plane in the first place?

The answer is obvious: because the terms of the deal allow Trump to keep the new airplane once he leaves office. In other words, he wanted his new private plane ASAP regardless of whether he put national security at risk by accepting it before it was equipped to serve as an airborne White House.

None of this seemed to matter to Beck. Instead, he used Trump’s greed as an excuse to lambast the press for, I guess, caring about their personal safety and that of the president?

Not fit for service.

Because I’m not a historian, it’s difficult for me to ascertain whether we live in the stupidest times. I would hazard a guess, however, that the Trump era will contend for the title. The amount of willful idiocy on display from literally every single prominent Trump supporter is off the charts.

From JD Vance yesterday trying to make the pitch that the Democrats are the party of “fraudsters,” to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum defending the ludicrous claim that a former Olympian vandalized Trump’s botched reflecting pool fix-up job, to Scott Jennings failing to grasp the hypocrisy of excoriating Graham Platner for his odious behavior while excusing that of our adjudicated rapist president, we’re living through a moment of such breathlessly stupid lickspittledom, it would embarrass Saddam Hussein.

These are not dumb people but they play idiots on TV. They have to because one must lobotomize oneself in order to make sense of and excuse the reckless behavior of the man to whom they’ve tethered their fortunes. So they get on the air and tongue wag about the dangers of windmills and the Communist menace plaguing our cities and the absolute necessity of colonizing Greenland. To say these are not serious people is an insult to those of us for whom unseriousness is an occupation.

There should be no world in which I have more gravitas than the entire Republican Party establishment. Yet here we are.

Mediocrity and mendacity have replaced contemplation and competency as the nation’s operating principles. Better minds than mine will eventually sort out how we arrived at this moment, but that’s assuming America is still capable of producing better minds. At this point, I’m not so sure.

What I never expected about our fascist moment is twofold: one, that we would ever reach an American fascist moment and two, that it would be so everloving dumb. The entire conservative movement appears to have the combined IQ of a legume. These are wildly successful people showing their entire dumb asses on a daily basis as they jockey for position in the MAGA sweepstakes, each believing that they are the rightful inheritors of the emperor’s new clothes.

When this moment passes – if it passes – we ought to turn those ICE concentration camps into MAGA re-education camps. Make them attend lectures on American history, force them to endure a life without hairspray, and maybe even teach them to read. With luck, perhaps some of them can one day be re-integrated into society. As for the rest, I hear there’s a lovely prison in El Salvador designed to house the worst of the worst. And I know just the airplane to fly them there.