The Flight MH370 Election

In case the avalanche of tragedies precipitated by the maladministration of President Stupid had swept this specific, little travesty from your memory, in order to proceed with our story this evening I am required to remind you that just about one year ago a minor wingnut crackpot and professional fear-monger named Michael Anton pseudonymously penned an unhinged diatribe entitled "The Flight 93 Election" which was picked up, repeated and referenced everywhere.

In it, Mr. Anton warned explicitly that a Hillary Clinton presidency would certainly destroy the country and kill us all.  "Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto".   And so  it was up to voters to "charge the cockpit" and vote for Donald J. Trump regardless of their misgivings:

You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: If you don’t try, death is certain.

For the record, Mr. Anton has parlayed his raving, racist batshittery --

According to commentator Jonathan Chait, Anton's editorial claimed that a Trump defeat in the 2016 U.S. presidential election would have meant the end of "white America" and "conservative America". 

Neoconservative analyst William Kristol compared him to German Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt.

 -- into a paid, senior national security position in the Stupid Administration:

Michael Anton...is a senior national security official in the Trump administration.

So there you go.

Well, it is now one year and many catastrophes, Nazi torch-lit parades, and treasonable and impeachable offenses later.  And if there is one thing we can say definitively, it is that last November was not "The Flight 93 Election".

 It was The Flight MH370 Election.

And just in case you forgot what MH370 was:

New Evidence MH370 Was a Zombie, Not Controlled by Humans

One piece of debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has delivered the most significant picture so far of the last minutes of the flight, confirming that no human hand was in control of the Boeing 777 as it plunged into the Indian Ocean...

There were supposed to be rational, professionally-qualified human beings in charge of our politics and our media.  That has always been our unspoken social compact.  Rational, professionally-qualified human beings who might be full of shit six days out of seven and might put their careers and personal agendas ahead of everything else during ordinary times, but who, at a bare minimum, would alert us to the presence of genuine, existential danger when it was bearing down on us and who would help steer us away from it.

Our whole, glorious system is predicated on this terribly fragile, consensual hallucination (h/t William Gibson) and last year that dream collapsed.  And that, more than anything else, is what has freaked us out so badly.

Instead of rational, professionally-qualified human beings in the cockpit, it turned out (as those dirty Liberals had been warning for years) there was no one in the cockpit at all.  Just a collection of obscenely overpaid autopiloting algorithms, all ideologically daisy-chained together, all locked onto the same course, all insisting that our ship of state go right on mindlessly navigating in the direction of a wholly imaginary Center despite the imminent existential threat that was tearing us apart from the Right.

And now here we are, wildly off course, far out over dark, strange water on a moonless night.  The cockpit door is in splinters, and inside, instead of even marginally-rational, minimally-qualified human beings who are at least capable of finally identify the danger they have put us in, we find the nothing but same puerile zombies, unable to stop robotically repeating their same old lies that led us into disaster in the first place:

From MSNBC's Morning Joe, yesterday:

JOE SCARBOROUGH:  ...This is easily the least popular thing Donald Trump has done. Do you think he really didn't understand that until he got the feedback, and that's why he did a 180 about five times?

MARK HALPERIN:  It's a great example of how the loudest voices on the national town square on the right and on the left can drown out and create a distortion for politicians...

From CBS, yesterday:

“There’s plenty of blame to go around to both parties on this,” Sen. Cotton says on failure to pass new immigration legislation pic.twitter.com/i2VQQU1Iet

— CBS News (@CBSNews) September 6, 2017

Both Siderists in politics and in the media cannot help save us from the genuine, existential danger which we now face because Both Siderists in politics and in the media are an integral part of the genuine, existential danger which we now face.

Behold, a Tip Jar!