Demagogue's harvest

The Blob could write about the usual playground stuff today. It surely could.

But as it continually reminds all you Blobophiles out there (OK, so BOTH  of you Blobophiles): My Blob, my rules. So we will depart the playground for a time.

We'll talk demagogues instead. Demagogues, what they sow and what they reap.

 Unless you've been holed up in your bomb shelter the last couple of days (not a bad idea, all things considered), you know what's been going on out there in America. An old and noxious American tradition has been revived, one that goes back nearly as far the republic itself. Or what once was the republic.

What it is now is hard to say, in this time of naked voter suppression and raving charlatans commanding our bully pulpits. But bombs being sent through the mail to political enemies and those who support them?

From anarchists blowing up the house of the attorney general in 1919 to now, that is nothing new at all.

So far, bombs or packages suspected of being bombs have been sent to a major news network, a former President of the United States, a former Vice-President, a former Secretary of State, several congress folks, a former national party chairman and several prominent supporters of that party. All of them are Democrats, Democratic supporters or non right-wing media. All of them have one other thing in common.

They've all been political opponents or critics of Our Only Available President, Donald J. Trump.

Who yesterday blamed the Democrats and the media themselves for inciting the attempted violence against them.

Who told a crowd of his supporters we all need to be nicer, not be so mean and nasty, like those awful Democrats and that awful media.

Who is as breathtaking a hypocrite as ever sat in the White House, and the purest demagogue as well.

His supporters like to portray him as something unique in America, an outsider who's no politician and has the money and clout to cut through the jungle of Washington corruption and entrenched influence peddling. In truth, there is nothing new about him.

Demagogues, after all, have been around forever. Every nation has had them to one degree or another; Germany and Italy in the 1930s and '40s are simply the most extreme examples of the ruin they bring if raised to power.  This president isn't that -- he is not nearly enough an ideologue, except in the matter of self-interest --  but he is a far more distilled version of the form than we're used to.

Like all demagogues, his rhetoric is deliberately inflammatory, deliberately hyperbolic and (in almost all cases) deliberately, flagrantly untrue. It is reckless in its execution and calculated in its goal, which is to inspire fear and loathing of imagined threats that obscure the real threat, which is the demagogue himself.

In other words: Pay no attention to what we're doing here behind this curtain. Look at what those evil Democrats are doing! What the evil, lying media is doing! And how about that invading army of killers and rapists coming up from Central America? America is UNDER ATTACK!

The genius of this is it almost always works, because it identifies and reinforces what the willfully deluded believe, no matter how absurd. The dark side of it is it almost without exception incites violence or attempted violence -- which the demagogue professes to decry with a wink and a nod.

Our Demagogue in Chief did just that yesterday, of course, but then he went right back to scapegoating those evil Democrats and the evil media. Coming from someone who has so relentlessly demonized both, and continues to do so, this was hypocrisy raised to a high art.

Not two weeks ago, remember, the Demagogue in Chief was applauding some thug in Montana for beating up a journalist. In 2016, he did the same while a handful of his goons roughed up a protester, rhapsodizing about the days when the cops could crack skulls with impunity. And he's repeatedly characterized the free press as "the enemy of the state."

Yet now we're supposed to believe he's appalled by violence? Or that it's just awful that a pipe bomb was delivered to the home of Hillary Clinton -- whom he repeatedly refers to as "Crooked Hillary," meanwhile openly applauding the chants of "Lock her up! Lock her up!" at his rallies?

How many steps are there from "Lock her up!" to "Blow her up!"? One? Two? And can the Demagogue in Chief really be so deluded as to think his over-the-top rhetoric wouldn't eventually inspire some nutjob to action? What, then, was its purpose?

And yet it's her fault. And the media's fault.

This is impossible to take seriously if you're a thinking human and not a member of the Tinfoil Hat Brigade, which has been hard at work crafting the usual wingnut conspiracy theories. Yes, it's all a Democratic plot! They sent these bombs to themselves to make the president look bad! After all, none of them blew up, did they?

Well, no. And thank God for small mercies.

But the eternal question remains as long as a demagogue commands the most bully pulpit of all: What about next time?