Post-electile dysfunction

Those reading this survived 2016, ready for the challenges of another New Year. After the last one, however, billions worldwide who’ve been dysfunctional since January 20 may be pouring over encrypted files labeled “How to Make A New President Go Away, Without Getting Caught.”

But as drug infomercials might caution: “Talk to your spiritual and legal service providers. Actions which overly-fussy authorities might view as criminal can have serious side-effects, now and in the Hereafter. Or the Whatever.”

So if, upon merely hearing the new president’s voice, bile arises in the throat and dark thoughts appear unbidden, DO NOT entertain them for a second. OK, maybe a minute. Max. But also consider the consequences.

Imagine the Breaking News tsunami that would swamp cable networks if the president suddenly, ah… left office. Pundits would discuss ad nauseam each poll of popular reaction: What percent in favor? What percent opposed? And what happened to Pence? Tragically, important sports programming would be pre-empted for an entire season or more.

Consider, too, the eternal stain on the family name of anyone responsible. Such befell the kin of John Wilkes Booth, Gaius Cassius Longinus and Marcus Junius Brutus. Older readers will remember that the latter two stabbed Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. Caesar had been declared “Dictator For Life” by the Roman senate, which infuriated Gaius and Marcus.

Point taken. Hopefully our own senators were paying attention, and U.S. Senator David Perdue of Georgia may have been. A Man of Faith, he advocated a religiously approved remedy for Post-Electile Dysfunction: Pray Away the President.

At the 2016 “Faith & Freedom Coalition” conference in Washington, DC, Senator Perdue invited attendees to pray for then-President Obama “like Psalms 109:8 says: Let his days be few, and let another have his office.”

While Perdue’s office strenuously denied that he wished Mr. Obama any harm, the complete Psalm is decidedly less nuanced:

 

Let his days be few; and let another take his office.

Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.

Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.

Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour.

Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children.

Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.

Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the Lord; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.

Surely Perdue was not advocating violence against Mr. Obama — the Feds didn’t even taze him. So perhaps those in despair over He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named can find solace and salvation in his prayerful example.

For Verily, assassins who might evade Seal Team VI wouldst be forever cast out, doomed to hear endless accounts of their deed over shortwave radio while sipping a soft wine in a small café in a quaint mountain village in a distant land with no extradition treaty, populated by statuesque heavily-armed women determined to resist to the death a President who claims a Divine Right to grab them by the pussy.

So let distraught readers of every faith – and no faith – raise their voices heavenward in Psalm: “Let his days be few . . .”

Come on, now, louder. It’s non-violent and the very worst it could do is drive him stark raving mad.