Allen West -- a Grand Champion Disgrace

I would guess that many if not most of us have been in settings that are endlessly desecrated by people who make things so difficult for everybody that when a way is finally found – finally! -- to see the last of them, even the atheists in the group find themselves thanking God over and over again.  Yet, in our more generous moments, after we have re-learned how to breathe easily and not have to come to work or wherever anymore with a sinking heart, we think of how such monsters could not have just vanished from the planet, never to be seen again, like a puff of snot-green smoke.  (Thank you, James Joyce.)    Instead we remind ourselves that they must be somewhere else making things just as intolerable for others, and we wonder where that could be – hopefully not anywhere closer than about 2,000 miles.  

One answer is supplied by the career of an ex-Lieut-Colonel, who despite having been booted out of the U.S. Army, hopped like a giant, flatulent flea from torturing Iraqis into, a few years later, "serving" – I use that word with reservations galore –  as the U.S. Representative of Florida’s 18th District.  This man’s name is Allen West, and his pugnacity and his character are so inexcusable that just the sight of him suggests that he has managed to make new contributions even to the already bad name of military haircuts.

But at least we can say that because of West, we can get an idea of where some number of those who make life so difficult for everybody -- and take sardonic delight in doing so -- go.

First they seek refuge in indiscriminate outfits like the Army, which, in addition to spending a lot of time with them, asks mainly that some day, somewhere, the recruits will stand ready to take lives as well as forfeiting their own.   Then, when that institution takes its turn at realizing what pitiful pretenses for human beings these rejects really are, and kicks them out, they next head like angry, rogue, giant bell hornets for what they now see as having been their only true home-sweet-home after all.  They run for Congress.

If they are shrewd enough they take care to set up in a district that is in such a state of temporary mental collapse that once in a while they even win!  That’s why today we can find so many of those total baboon-butts babbling away in those fabled marble halls, nearly all of them--   No, hell no, and forget that equivalency bullpoop.   ALL the several dozens of them are Republicans.  That party is their party of choice, just as with racists, rapists, and all other unsavory types.

However, here I will concede one thing.   Few of these miscreants have talents for abusing everything in sight, including themselves, that match those of A. West.   He is in a class by himself --though it’s not too much to say that he definitely has a true soulmate in the House, in the person of Michele Bachmann, the even more notorious euro virago from Minnesota, and a mating between them would definitely be a match made in Heav -- no, in Hell, and she is only saved from being his equal in unbearability first by being a woman and second, by being in dire need of a complete mental examination.

Usually, when a man is in his first term in Congress, he keeps a low profile while he feels his way around in hopes of not doing anything that would keep him from serving a second and a third and a twelfth and a thirteenth term down the road, so addictive are the many perks and the sensation of power of those offices, especially if he doesn’t have anything better to do in the meantime.  But not this guy.  A. West, who, as of this writing, has not yet finished his first term, and if a merciful God does exist, will not get a second, came roaring in there eager to get on the cases of the large number of people who don't snap to attention and salute whenever he walks by.  His aim also was to get into the news as often as he could while he was busy vying to become Chief Infuriator of the House, and to that end his energies have rarely flagged.  Ask the Congressional Black Caucus, though -- in appearance only -- he is of that ancestry himself.  And while you’re at it, also ask all liberals, progressives, Democrats, and others who are the least bit non-regressive and therefore decent and non-Republican.

In the process he has become so successful at being sensationally thuggish, ignorant, and unpleasant that he is the most famous of that huge number of Tea Party freshmen who came storming into Congress in 2010 as if, in my wife's words, they owned the place.

West strikes me as being a guy who, in his nearly 50 years, has left behind him an enormously long string of people who are just as happy as they can be that they’ve seen the last of him – except in the cursed news -- and not least of those must have been the Army, despite the haircut.  So how did he get elected to Congress?   Who gave him references?  Who endorsed him?   The KKK?   Al-Qaeda?   The International Torturers Guild?  Who would want to live in a district represented by such a chronic dipstick?

The answer to that can only be that the Tea Party has found a way to fence in and hold prisoner an entire Florida Congressional District without enough of them realizing it.   Or either the baggers have managed to keep that district’s several good people drugged out of their skulls through the past two years with an especially potent libation that thankfully has not yet found its way much past that district’s borders.

A. West, wrapped in everything he stands for (and the U.S. flag would not want to be included in that), is a world champion disgrace to …what?   The expression used to run, “a disgrace to the race.”  But he is so endlessly disagreeable that I can't see how a race of any kind in existence today would want to claim him.