The closest thing I’ve ever seen to a fascist country was the United States of America  between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. The classic Marxist dictum that everything happens twice, once as tragedy, once as farce, still holds. George W. Bush may have been a buffoon, just like Donald Trump, but the people around him, the Cheneys and the Karl Roves, were hard, disciplined, competent. They used 9/11 for everything it was worth, played the American people like a violin, built an almost seamless network of propaganda between the the White House and cable TV news, and branded all dissent as weakness at best, treason at worse. The Trump administration, by contrast, is disorganized, ineffectual, a grotesquely comic opera buffa. Now that Trump has appointed John Bolton, one of the most belligerent of the Bush era neocons, to the position of National Security Adviser, he finally seems determined to become a “war president” just like Bush. We’ll see if he can pull it off. I suspect Bolton will last all of six months.

The man speaking in the video above is former Georgia Governor and Senator Zell Miller, a far right wing Democrat who decided to throw his support to George W. Bush and speak at the Republican National Convention in 2004. If the organizers of The March for Our Lives want to know why Americans are killing one another, they could do worse than to examine this fascist cretin. Miller starts off by declaring that all of our rights come, not from the Constitution, nature or “nature’s God” but “from the soldier.” It gets worse after that. Miller’s speech is pretty much just a nasty old man reeling off the names of (expensive and useless) weapons systems while the audience (all members of the Republican Party elite) all but cum in their pants. I’m glad Miller’s speech was recorded. It is a document of a profoundly disturbed, even demented culture. The Republican National Convention that night was just as frightening as any Nuremberg rally. A million Iraqis paid with their lives.

I can’t say I’m glad Zell Miller is dead. He was 86, after all, and dying that age is normal. I will say that I hope he died in a lot of pain, slowly, and in the ugliest manner possible, howling in agony as he pooped into a colostomy bag, and felt his muscles atrophy away from his brittle old bones. This man, and the culture he represented, lived far too long.