Those Tatterdemalion Thugs

By Dennis Reardon, guest columnist

We have a munificently funded private Executive army invading the capitals of states that didn’t vote for Grifter-in-Chief Donald Trump. I refrain from calling ICE Trump’s Gestapo only because the Nazi Gestapo was a highly-trained and well-disciplined set of brutes.

The tatterdemalion thugs that invaded Minneapolis were not trained and couldn’t spell ‘discipline’ if you handed them a dictionary. Calling them ‘patriots’ at every opportunity is a laughable perversion of the language foisted upon us by MAGA dominatrix Kristi Noem.

Let’s get real.  ICE consists entirely of mercenaries fronted by right-wing ideologues and erratically controlled by the most insane fascist of them all, the deranged Dracula lookalike Stephen Miller.  Has there ever been a more hateful visage whispering in the ear of a more toxic President?

Dear God, how did this befall us?  Why did so many of you vote for a twice-impeached sexual predator who furiously tried to overthrow our duly-elected Government?  You saw those rabid J-6 lice crawling up the face of the Capitol.  You saw them mobbing those brave but overwhelmed police.  You had the whole debacle excruciatingly spelled out for you by the January 6 Committee.  And then you voted for him.  Again.

If I think about this for too long I’ll go mad.  I’m appalled by what it blaringly screams about nearly half of my fellow citizens.  In my search for a shred of rationality in this electoral carnage, I am compelled to attribute a significant portion of the disaster to the most bungled Presidential election process ever perpetrated by any opposition party.

The Dems allowed the vanity of a senescent old man and his ever-loyal Lady Macbeth to forestall all efforts to put forth a more electable candidate.  When that disaster was exposed for all to see in the most cringeworthy debate of all time, the Kingmakers deferred to the Queen-in-Waiting.  They chose to run a woman.

Did anyone mention that in the entire 250 year history of America we have never elected a woman?  Oh yes, one other salient point: She was Black.  The Dems ultimately put forth a Black woman to run against a candidate who despises Black people and humiliates women, a prototypical misogynist racist.  In other words, the living embodiment of the worst stains in the fabric of America.

Do we not now have a solution to my earlier beleaguered question?  How did this nightmare befall us?

So we now have citizens being murdered in our streets.  Not ‘outside agitators.’  Not antifa, whatever the hell we’re supposed to believe that nonexistent entity embodies.  And oh, batter my soul, must these fools once again summon the bedraggled GOP specter of the Methuselah-aged George Soros?  Is that poor right-wing punching bag still alive?  Did he ever matter one whit?

Cease all these degrading and threadbare RNC talking points.  ICE murdered Renee Good.  Then their thugs totally lost whatever was left of their minds and pumped ten rounds into an ICU nurse named Alex Pretti.  Or as Stephen Miller called him, a “would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.”

Miller, of course, is the ventriloquist who feeds the botoxed MAGA pin-up Kristi Noem all her slander-the-victim lies.  Who among you can still swallow any of this crap emanating from the ‘Rapid Reaction’ mouthpieces in the White House?  Did you ever?

So what to do?  First, impeach Noem.  Second—this is your job, spineless and corrupted GOP courtiers—get Trump away from that creepy embodiment of evil Stephen Miller.  By whatever means necessary.  Brylcreemed Macho Man Pete Hegseth is the task of our still Constitutionally compliant military.  Ridicule his FOX-enshrined ass into oblivion in every Officers Club where they serve your Scotch.

Then the big one: Hand Trump the largest electoral humiliation in the entire annals of the Midterms, then finish him off by impeaching his grotesque derriere into the dustbin of History.  Once achieved, let us all silently pray that Mankind will eventually forgive us for the crime of handing him the keys to our once-sacred Kingdom.🐝

2/14/26

Dennis J. Reardon is a Vietnam era vet.  Discharged in 1970 at the rank of Specialist 5^th Class, he became one of Joseph Papp’s most-produced playwrights, culminating in the 1975 Broadway production of “The Leaf People.”  From 1987 through 2008 Reardon oversaw the Indiana University Playwriting Program, retiring as a Professor Emeritus.  He continues to reside in Bloomington with his wife, the actress Mary Carol Reardon.