Democracy finished? More after the break

"Due what now process?" asks the Decision Desk on Received Opinion

BOLT UPRIGHT: Good evening, I’m Bolt Upright and this is Received Opinion!

[In three keys simultaneously, the destruction of 2,000 years of culture. Screen behind UPRIGHT: Limited-animation cartoon of presidential advisor/Nazi STEPHEN MILLER in his traditional SS uniform, giving a Hitler salute in front of a brick wall that bears a sign reading WORK MAKES YOU FREE and topped with barbed wire; at right, a grinning DONALD TRUMP grabs one from a pile of small, shaven-headed brown convicts rolled up like armadillos, and bowls it at MILLER while El Salvador president NAYIB BUKELE pats him on the back; MILLER, in a goosestep manner, kicks it over the wall; process repeats endlessly. Chyron: NEW WEIRD ORDER!]

Yesterday El Salvador president Nayib Bukele met with President Trump and they both said there’s just no way to bring wrongly relocated Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from Bukele’s hellhole, so too bad. Oh, and they said the same thing to the district court that ordered Garcia brought back, and by extension also said so to the Supreme Court, which by unanimous vote said the White House had to cooperate. Well, guess that’s it for democracy — bye!

[UPRIGHT turns, pretends to leave, then spins back and re-enters his key light.]

Just joking, folks — democracy may indeed be over, but major network news will be with us always. The arguments against America becoming a banana republic where anyone can be disappeared and sent to a foreign concentration camp far beyond the reach of what we now humorously call “the law” are well-known and, our pollsters assure us, boring to our viewers, so let’s go straight to our Decision Desk for some snappy patter.

[Musical squeegee on a shit-smeared windshield. UPRIGHT strolls to the Decision Desk, at which are seated the usuals — PEONI DOYENNE, wearing a Carolina Herrera peony-print trench gown with pink Ferragamo Ines Xs suede sandals, and CHAFE DRAMATURGY, wearing a gray Thom Browne seersucker suit with a chambray blue Ralph Lauren basket-weave linen shirt and Bass Weejuns with no socks — and BARI WEISS, wearing a black Sumisurra twill skirt suit with a pink Brooks Brothers cotton oxford, top button undone and collar buttoned, and flip-flops.]

We welcome Bari Weiss of The Free Press and the University of Austin Texas to our panel, and as she’s made her reputation as a free speech advocate I’m sure she’ll have something to say about this — notwithstanding there’s practically nothing about Garcia in your magazine.

WEISS: Well, Bolt, it’s true that I rep free speech day and night, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to just, you know, reflexively say “orange man bad,” I mean there are so many variables. Just as we don’t know the legal status of many of the men Trump has sent to this prison, we also don’t know whether any of them are antisemites. In fact they could all be antisemites. I don’t see the mainstream media asking these questions, do you? All they say is this Garcia’s a “good father,” which, yeah, so was Goebbels.

UPRIGHT: So you’re saying if these men were antisemites, it would be OK to send them to a foreign prison without charges?

WEISS: I’m saying we have to cut through all the media fog and look at both sides of the issue. Like, we’ve only seen them in prison garb — is there a chance some of them, when they came in, were wearing keffiyehs, and if they were —

[WEISS is drowned out by the instrumental version of “Three Cheers for Captain Spaulding” employed by the old Groucho Marx quiz show “You Bet Your Life,” and a wooden duck descends from the flies with a card bearing the “Secret Word” KEFFIYEH in its mouth. DOYENNE, DRAMATURGY, and UPRIGHT chortle and applaud.]

UPRIGHT: Chafe, I believe you had “keffiyeh” in the pool.

[DRAMATURGY waves what look like a raffle slip.]

DOYENNE: Oh, no fair, if you’d let me use “antisemite” I’d have been miles ahead!

UPRIGHT: Well, we have a lot of airtime to fill, Peoni.

[WEISS stands up, outraged; PAGES rush onto the set.]

WEISS: How dare you! Wait’ll Bill Maher hears about this!

UPRIGHT: Thanks, Bari, it’s been a pleasure.

[The PAGES seize and drag WEISS off.]

Say hi to Bill for us.

WEISS: [As she is escorted out] It’s a pogrom!

[Duck flies up and out. DOYENNE holds up a piece of paper like DRAMATURGY’s.]

DOYENNE: Ha! Well, I finished, but out of the money!

UPRIGHT: OK, where were we? Chafe, in the old days your former employers at the Times would have been all over the Constitutional issues here, but —

[UPRIGHT gestures to an overhead screen, which shows the New York Times headline “El Salvador’s Leader Says He Won’t Return Wrongly Deported Maryland Man” and slideshow caption “During a meeting at the White House, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador said that he would not bring back a man who was wrongly deported to his country.”]

— they’re basically covering it as if it’s an example of foreign recalcitrance rather than an American president disappearing a resident of the U.S. – and threatening to do so to American citizens as well. Does this strike you as, well, sort of an enabling act?

CHAFE: Chortle chortle, I see you snuck in a little imputation of fascism there, Bolt! I’m going to have to tell Kash Patel about you.

UPRIGHT: I’m sure you already have, Chafe.

[DRAMATURGY goes saucer-eyed and dead white for a moment, then recovers.]

DRAMATURGY: But as much as we kid Bari Weiss, I do think some people are making too much of this. I mean, all Presidents disappear people. I don’t like to talk about it, especially when it’s Presidents that I worked for, but say this for President Trump, he isn’t trying to hide it like the others — he’s right out there, telling the voters he’s doing extraordinary renditions and that they may be next.

PEONI: Yes. The transparency is admirable.

UPRIGHT: Of course even as he admits this, he has Stephen Miller and others lie about the legality of his actions on TV.

DRAMATURGY: Chortle chortle, come on, Bolt, I don’t want to have to send Kash another email! [Suddenly stone-faced] Seriously, I don’t.

UPRIGHT: While I decide whether to physically strike Chafe, Peoni, let’s hear from you.

DOYENNE: Bolt, I’m surprised at you. Regular people don’t care about due process and all that legalistic mumbo jumbo. Take Natalia, one of my cleaning ladies, you know she has a nephew in that prison camp, she recognized him on the news from some deformity or other, and yes, she wants him out, of course, and she asked me, and she kept asking me whether I could do anything about it and I tried to explain, it’s not like the Reagan days when I can just pick up the phone, but she kept on asking and it got to be too much and then suddenly one day ICE picked her up and she was gone. And now I no longer have that problem. The girl we replaced her with is very, very quiet and timid. That’s what Trump is doing for us, and I think it’s something voters will respond to.

DRAMATURGY: Also the stock market.

DOYENNE: Yes! So clever of him to exempt the Chinese smartphones. Shows flexibility.

DRAMATURGY: And then to threaten to un-exempt them. Shows forcefulness!

DOYENNE: Yes. [Addressing the camera] And President Trump, if you’re listening, the next time it’s time to buy on the dip, do a girl a favor and send me a note. [Winks.]

DRAMATURGY: Ha ha, yeah, me too! Whoo hoo, it’s all out in the open now! Like the wild wild west!

[We notice UPRIGHT has taken a big pull from a small bourbon bottle and is replacing it in his jacket pocket.]

UPRIGHT: Okey doke. When we come back, Jonathan Turley will tell us why Harvard refusing to do Trump’s bidding is what’s really unconstitutional, and maybe Chafe will get within arm’s reach and show us what he’s made of.

[Orchestrated howls of the damned. DRAMATURGY gets up and runs for it. UPRIGHT gets back on the bottle, and the screen pixelates and dissolves into dust.]