OPINION:
The new boss set out to drain the swamp of its stinky people.
They are the hucksters, the connivers, the self-proclaimed strategists, the fixers who take candidates and politicians for a ride, who milk the stewards of the government for all their — or they’re — worth.
They’re the ones usually resplendent in hand-tailored threads or in rare cases in shabby-looking but carefully chosen, image-creating attire.
Regardless of dress, they’re the ones who lose elections they are hired to win and then get hired again to do the same damage, because in the end everybody gets a cut, including the election-losing candidates.
The stinky one are figuratively alligators, but actually real people of questionable values who pollute the air and ethics of a nation.
Once in a lifetime, if that often, there comes a person of above-average intellect (for the swamp) who has a worldview that’s a near-match for a candidate.
We’re talking about a “strategist” and a candidate who appear to agree that making their own country great again is more important than expending trillions of dollars and untold lives to make over somebody else’s government.
But eventually, somehow, the old maxim “the truth will out” scratches and gnaws its way to the surface and breaks out for all to see.
The “strategist” persuades himself that he won an unwinnable election for a candidate who couldn’t have won without him.
The candidate takes office and for eight months puts up with the strategist who, to give him due credit, fends off most of the war hawks and border doves but does so while flatter-chattering his boss in person, then talking condescendingly behind his back.
That can’t last.
Finally, the boss jabs a finger at the strategist and says, “You’re fired.”
The fired strategist can’t believe the boss is so ungrateful that he let the strategist go. The strategist says the boss now has only a 30 percent chance of getting re-elected in 2020. The two remain conversants.
The fired strategist convinces his ex-boss to back a Senate wannabe who is a scoff-law ex-judge accused of dating girls half his age four decades earlier. The child-enthusiast candidate loses. The boss looks bad.
A book makes news by quoting the strategist as calling the ex-boss’ son a traitor to America.
The had-it-up-to-here boss tweets that the strategist had the honor of working in the big house “& serving the country. Unfortunately, he squandered that privilege & turned that opportunity into a nightmare of backstabbing, harassing, leaking, lying & undermining” the boss.
The boss says the strategist is not really a strategist but an opportunist who promoted himself by “leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was.”
The strategist is unwelcome among those few conservatives who knew who he was before he gained renown by convincing the ever-alert press he was the real genius who got the boss elected. Cursing his fate, the strategist grovels.
He takes a knee and calls his ex-boss a “great man” whom he still supports.
No movement.
The strategist gets down on both knees and says the boss’ son is also a great man — and a patriot to boot.
The boss boots the kneeling strategist back to the sidelines whence he came. The boss goes back to work his MAGA thing.
Who’s the genius now?
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