Contagion

3. the medium by which a contagious disease is transmitted. http://www.dictionary.com/browse/contagion

Some time ago, a few weeks at least, I recall David Brooks, the NY Times columnist who frequents the NPR Newshour observing that something about the Trump Administration caused otherwise honorable people to have their integrity and standing stripped from them. Watching the Chief of Staff surrender any perception of veracity, decency, or honor as he flat out lied about a Congresswoman's speech, I recalled the comment.

I would like to think that serving in the highest levels of government would elevate a person. My observation is that those who served in prior administrations, of either party, often wear that service as a sort of mantle. Especially, recently, the former officials in the Obama administration are proud, and recount how working for Mr. Obama was a highlight experience.

Contrast that with the experiences we have endured in the first few months of the Trump Administration. Staffers have come and gone in a dizzying swirl of Federal investigations, power contests, and personality incompatibilities. I cannot imagine several of the press office leaders calling this their highlight experience.

Something is happening in the White House and it is not good. Decent honorable men and women are being corrupted. It is also a spreading disease, moving out from a corrupt center. Watching the incredible illogical, and outright false statements made by "Christians" who claim that they can support and indeed are represented by this presidency and its equally corrupted Congress is horrifying.

At its center are three corrupt men, and one woman. Together they are the core of the corruption of public service, decency and integrity.

1. Paul Ryan is Speaker of the House. He allows the so-called Tea Party to effectively control the legislative process.
2. Senator Mitch McConnell is majority leader of the Senate. In that office a leader is called to maintain the order of the legislative process, and defend the dignity and tradition of the Senate. He does not even try. His only efforts are to support Mr. Trump's latest fantasy with procedural maneuvers designed to avoid any semblance of compromise by somehow gathering at least 50 votes so that the intellectual non-entity that is Vice-president Pence can cast a vote.
3. The president is a constant liar, a will-of-the-wisp who will say anything to advance his racist drive to whitewash the Obama achievements instead of seeking his own. Lacking even any pretense of gravitas, he is at the mercy of whomever gets his attention and convinces him that something is in his own interest.
4. Finally, the late and unlamented Ayn Rand. A writer of incredibly bad fiction and if anything worse prose, she remains the closest thing to an intellectual center to the horrible idea that greed is a virtue, charity an error, and poverty the sentence that nature imposes on those who cannot or won't compete. Her ridiculous "philosophy" is what underlies the actions of these men and their fellow travelers.

What is happening is that these people are a center of contagion from which the entire American experiment is being infected. Trump, boasts of destroying the credibility of the free press. His people staff and cabinet, the Congress all are being drawn into a vortex of anti-American, faux-Christian, dishonest racism. This is the road to Fascism. And the worst part is that he told us where he would take us. His nomination acceptance speech among the worst oratory in American history, his refrain, "Only I" was the marker of a Facist regime to come.

It may be time to fight, but it also may be time to paint your wagon. America is falling its destiny, rejecting it promise. Dark times as the contagion at center spreads. And spread it will. The disease racism, sexism, and faux religion is unleashed and fed from the center. Lord, have mercy.