The President and the Marine

 (In which the Blob once again escapes the Sportsball World enclosure. You know the drill.)

Sooner or later, if you're of sound mind these days, you stop wondering if the President of the United States has lost his. That's because we passed that mile marker some time ago, and wondering has become unnecessary.

Yes, our Fearless Leader is cuckoo. Nutso. A couple of sandwiches shy of a picnic.

Choose your adjective or metaphor, they all apply during a time when an American president essentially has decided it's A-OK to declare war on his own people. Strip it down to the bare wood, jettison the party-line hysteria, and that's what we've got here now. Bottom line, President Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump has pre-emptively ordered several thousand National Guardsmen and U.S. Marines to L.A. -- the Marines, for God's sake -- in order to stop the citizenry from protesting his policies.

The Regime shall not be opposed, and no overreaction is over-reactive enough to ensure it. Overreaction is, in fact, its default position, as it always is with extremist ideologies.

Me, I'm wondering what Smedley Darlington Butler would think of all this.

Butler was a United States Marine -- a Marine's Marine, not to put too fine a point on it -- who did the usual Marine's dirty work serving his nation's imperial ambitions during the early part of the 20th century. He helped squelch a nascent independent republic in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. And he went on to defend American business interests in China during the Boxer Rebellion, and in Haiti, Mexico and Central America during the so-called Banana Wars.

Along the way, he became the youngest major general in Marine Corps history, and won two Medals of Honor. At the time of his death in 1940, he was the most decorated Marine in history.

Looking back on it all prior to that, however, he became disillusioned (and not a little disgusted) by some of the things he did and the reasons for which he did them. Eventually he became an antiwar activist at odds with the Corps, and in 1935 wrote "War Is A Racket," in which he claimed to have been "high-class muscle" for Wall Street and the banks.

"There are only two things we should fight for," Butler once said. "One is the defense of our homes. The other is the Bill of Rights."

Now the President of the United States has deployed Butler's Marine Corps for something entirely removed from either of those. If not diametrically opposed to them.

I don't know exactly what Smedley Darlington Butler is doing in his grave right now. But I imagine it's rather strenuous.