The Hail Mary Assassination

It was in reality the ultimate Hail Mary pass thrown by a small man being trolled by a much brighter woman cornering him with an impeachment.

by Rich Herschlag

Early in The Godfather Part 2 there is a particularly low key yet memorable scene in which consigliere Tom Hagen tells his stepbrother, Michael Corleone, that he doesn’t have to wipe everybody out. To which Michael Corleone replies, “I don’t feel I have to wipe everybody out, Tom. Just my enemies.” The reply represents a turning point not simply for the movie plot and the mayhem that is about to ensue but also for the signal to the audience that the new don has lost whatever may still have been left of his soul. There will be no redemption.

There will be no redemption for this president. Yes, we already knew that, just like we already knew Michael Corleone was probably going to take out Tartaglia, Barzini and the rest even before his candid private proclamation. But unmistakable confirmation is still meaningful. It’s a dark epiphany. It runs deep and is fully felt in one’s bones long before the parts are dissected and analyzed. There is no humanity left in this president. Not even a trace.

But as poetic as this cinematic analogy might seem while writing a column at two in the morning and wondering how anxious you’re going to be in a few days when you have to travel by tunnel into Manhattan, it falls short. Michael Corleone is much smarter than Donald J. Trump. He is braver, more disciplined, and more legitimate. The thin veneer that is his vestigial soul exceeds Trump’s.  Most importantly, Corleone is playing chess via the anarchy he unleashes. Trump hasn’t yet studied checkers.

Trump we have learned is prone to panic. Killing a de facto number two head-of-state in response to essentially business as usual is among the ultimate panic moves. Of course, the assassination on Iraqi soil by drone of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani—someone who in the strictly moral scheme of things deserved to die—was not really in response to business as usual in the Middle East or anywhere else. It was in reality the ultimate Hail Mary pass thrown by a small man being trolled by a much brighter woman cornering him with an impeachment.

Back in May 2017, with the FBI looking into Russian interference in the presidential election, Trump made his first obvious panic move by firing FBI Director James Comey. Countless additional relatively minor panic moves followed—going after Andrew McCabe, forcing out Jeff Sessions, hiring Rudy Giuliani to destroy Joe Biden, and basically every tweet Trump’s ever composed with two shaky bulbous thumbs. But hitting Soleimani on a Baghdad tarmac like John Gotti whacking Paul Costellano in front of Sparks Steak House was a defining moment. A gory climax. It was the other shoe dropping.

As utterly transparent as the motive was, the cable news networks over the weekend went through the motions of discussing every other remotely conceivable explanation ad nauseam with panels of pundits drawn from every federal agency, periodical, blog site, street corner, barbershop and competing cable network. It was as if they were driving 25 mph in the right lane of the New Jersey Turnpike to mollify the state troopers parked along the median aiming radar guns at cars to catch speeders. The TV talking heads were oh so thorough and methodical as if somehow to mitigate retroactively the complete disregard of the Trump administration for any sort of rational internal policy debate or reality based concern for the safety and security of the American people.

Much of the news coverage was just an exercise, like when the murderer is caught red-handed stabbing the victim with a kitchen knife but the police run DNA tests anyway. No harm done, I guess. The message is we go by the book even though the president has never read one.

If only there were just two shoes. The Iranian regime like all so-called theocracies is little more than a vehicle for sadistic authoritarians to compensate for their inability as youths to attract members of the opposite sex in a normal, healthy, forthright manner. Once that dysfunction is swept under the rug, it’s a life of brutal misogyny. Just ask Donald Trump. But Trump’s country of origin is well off materially if not spiritually, while the Islamic Republic of Iran is currently economically ravaged. The leaders of this quasi-prison state have nowhere to go, and so there is no downside to their delivering all sorts of carnage as payback.

The greatest minds in our land have no easy answer to where the reprisals might begin or end, and so the least of our minds has no idea whatsoever. The least of our minds knows only what it means to buy another day of time at the expense of countless other lifetimes. When you elect a completely amoral, unqualified individual to the most powerful position on the planet, this is what it comes to. He can make mistakes here and fudge it there, and a historically strong economy forged by checks and balances that scarcely exist any longer in the government itself can merrily roll along for a while at about two percent annual growth.

But at some point, as the complexities of the job and the cumulative effect of those numerous smaller missteps mount, the personal survival of the president comes into direct opposition to the survival of the country itself. And you know whose survival the president will choose.

By comparison, The Godfather is kid stuff. The stakes in Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola’s epic 1972 film and its brilliant sequel are a single family, a few rival families, and perhaps the well being of a few New York neighborhoods. A closer comparison is the 1997 Barry Levinson film Wag the Dog. Perhaps the best we can do is pray the coming conflict with Iran ends as innocuously as the largely fictitious war of distraction in Albania. But maybe, just maybe we can write, direct, and produce an all new movie—Article 25.

(image via WaPost)

Enjoying The Banter Newsletter? Drop your email in below and get the best political commentary on the web. No ads, no spam, ever.

Read the latest for Banter Subscribers:

Trump Totally Botched The Iran Crisis, Achieving Exactly Nothing - by Bob Cesca

It’s not even a lateral move, it’s a giant step backward.

Chris Cillizza Attacks Elizabeth Warren For Saying Things We All Agree With - by Justin Rosario

There is no penalty for being consistently terrible at your job if you're part of the media elite.