The GOP “Big Tent” malarkey has always been amusing. The wealthy elite should know well enough that it means “throw a tent out there and let the riffraff in…whip up some resentment and let ’em know we’re on their side.”

Now I, for one, love to watch a writhing horde of winos crawl out of the gutters and crash someone’s cocktail party, chugging the tent’s Popov disguised as Dom Perignon and shitting in the middle of the dance floor, but it seems like the carnival barker/swineherd in the tent has his trough-swilling people really shaking up the tent poles and threatening the dinner party up the hill in the fancy manor. He’s pretending he’s one of them so well that those people can barely hold onto their champagne glasses, which are shaking as though they’ve been dropped into Jurassic Park and the T Rex is about to make an unmistakably ugly appearance. All the while they’re busy chatting about their latest investment heist and pretending as though Black Lives Matter is actually about something other than their tent operators continuously being caught gunning down the troublemakers *not* invited to the circus.

There are now so many angry people in the big tent — this despite all the great things and great opportunities they have here, that the cocktail party is in disarray. Empty bottles are now flying through the manor’s fancy sitting room windows. The dinner party guests got a bit too drunk and just assumed their “guests” were out slopping around in the mud, having yodeling contests or whatever it is Those People do.

In my younger years, I’d relish this event, but I don’t now. I’ve waited year after year for a libertarianish/socially liberal politician who speaks of sacrifice and balance and not simply vengeance, and I don’t give a damn what party they come from. They don’t exist.

If you support Trump, you are either sociopathic or deeply ignorant and actually believe there is something in it for you. There’s not. Turn on the television with your children around. Watch their unadulterated, unjaded reaction to the man. Try to explain that this is your country when he says that we should “punch people in the face” for disagreeing with us. Try to explain why female journalists are assaulted for asking fair questions.

Try to explain why bombing people enough to find out whether sand “glows in the dark” is not a solution to the difficult problem of sharing a planet with lots of people who disagree with each other. (that was Cruz).

If you have ever thought about all the terrible places on earth throughout history and hit upon this very basic idea — that we are born free and it is only we who can lose our freedom — voluntarily — then you start to read about Chiang Kai Shek and Mao and the Long March; The Batistas and the Castros; the Papa and the Baby Docs; the Ceaușescus, the Amins, the King Johns, the Pol Pots and the Stalins. You read about the rise of Hitler every which way, since that just recently happened and you actually know or are related to people who laughed it off at first but soon ended up atop a pile of corpses.

You learn that they are weak and vengeful people full of shortcomings that haunt them. You learn that with enough hardship and enough antagonizing and some simple answers (bigger walls, bigger guns, bigger bombs), there are actually a large number of people will come and drop to their knees, open their palms, relinquish their minds, and submit. You understand that ensuring the health and well-being of a majority of the populace is your *only* deterrent, because this will happen if that is not the case. We should argue intelligently about the best way to do that, of course.

I’m not saying we are there yet…not even close…most of these people put food on the table, take selfies with fun electronic devices, go on vacation, and send their kids to schools. This is *not* the Weimars, where a cup of coffee might cost $50 when you buy it and $300 when you finish it. These are not the closing days of Tsarist Russia.

So don’t be a fucking idiot, man. Don’t go jumping into the crazy tent. At the end of the day, this establishment businessman is a hired gun gone wild…a loose cannon. He doesn’t believe a word of what he says. He’s a patsy like the others. When the guy manning the carnival game yells “Step right up!” and offers you a chance to “be great again”, think about being great yourself…and walk the fuck away from that shit.