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Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Friday, May 11, 2018
Trump is no longer the worst person in government
Vice President Pence sometimes seems to agree with President Trump just by looking at him. Here are some of the ways he does it. (Video: Bastien Inzaurralde/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)Donald Trump, with his feral cunning, knew. The oleaginous Mike Pence, with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness, could, Trump knew, become America’s most repulsive public figure. And Pence, who has reached this pinnacle by dethroning his benefactor, is augmenting the public stock of useful knowledge. Because his is the authentic voice of today’s lickspittle Republican Party, he clarifies this year’s elections: Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.
Last June, a Trump Cabinet meeting featured testimonials offered to Dear
Leader by his forelock-tugging colleagues. His chief of staff, Reince
Priebus, caught the spirit of the worship service by thanking Trump for
the “blessing” of being allowed to serve him. The hosannas poured forth from
around the table, unredeemed by even a scintilla of insincerity.
Priebus was soon deprived of his blessing, as was Tom Price. Before
Price’s ecstasy of public service was truncated because of his
incontinent enthusiasm for charter flights, he was the secretary of
health and human services who at the Cabinet meeting said, “I can’t
thank you enough for the privileges you’ve given me.” The vice president
chimed in but saved his best riff for a December Cabinet meeting when,
as The Post’s Aaron Blake calculated,
Pence praised Trump once every 12 seconds for three minutes: “I’m
deeply humbled. . . . ” Judging by the number of times Pence announces
himself “humbled,” he might seem proud of his humility, but that is
impossible because he is conspicuously devout and pride is a sin.
Between those two Cabinet meetings, Pence and his retinue flew to Indiana for
the purpose of walking out of an Indianapolis Colts football game,
thereby demonstrating that football players kneeling during the national
anthem are intolerable to someone of Pence’s refined sense of right and
wrong. Which brings us to his Arizona salute last week to Joe Arpaio,
who was sheriff of Maricopa County until in 2016 voters wearied of his act.
Noting that
Arpaio was in his Tempe audience, Pence, oozing unctuousness from every
pore, called Arpaio “another favorite,” professed himself “honored” by
Arpaio’s presence, and praised him
as “a tireless champion of . . . the rule of law.” Arpaio, a
grandstanding, camera-chasing bully and darling of the thuggish right,
is also a criminal, convicted of
contempt of court for ignoring a federal judge’s order to desist from
certain illegal law enforcement practices. Pence’s performance occurred
eight miles from the home of Sen. John McCain, who could teach Pence —
or perhaps not — something about honor.
(Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)
Henry Adams said that
“practical politics consists in ignoring facts,” but what was the
practicality in Pence’s disregard of the facts about Arpaio? His
pandering had no purpose beyond serving Pence’s vocation, which is to
ingratiate himself with his audience of the moment. The audience for his
praise of Arpaio was given to chanting “Build that wall!” and applauded Arpaio, who wears Trump’s pardon like a boutonniere.
(Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)
Hoosiers, of whom Pence is one, sometimes say that although Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky and flourished in Illinois, he spent his formative years —
December 1816 to March 1830 — in Indiana, which he left at age 21. Be
that as it may, on Jan. 27, 1838, Lincoln, then 28, delivered his first great speech,
to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield. Less than three months
earlier, Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaper editor in Alton,
Ill., 67 miles from Springfield, was murdered by
a pro-slavery mob. Without mentioning Lovejoy — it would have been
unnecessary — Lincoln lamented that throughout America, “so lately famed
for love of law and order,” there was a “mobocratic spirit” among “the
vicious portion of [the] population.” So, “let reverence for the laws
. . . become the political religion of the nation.” Pence, one of
evangelical Christians’ favorite pin-ups, genuflects at various altars,
as the mobocratic spirit and the vicious portion require.
It is said that one cannot blame people who applaud Arpaio and support
his rehabilitators (Trump, Pence, et al.), because, well, globalization
or health-care costs or something. Actually, one must either blame them
or condescend to them as lacking moral agency. Republicans silent about
Pence have no such excuse.
There will be negligible legislating by the next Congress, so ballots
cast this November will be most important as validations or repudiations
of the harmonizing voices of Trump, Pence, Arpaio and the like. Trump
is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing
insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic.
Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying.
Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.