America's 'Chicken Coup'

If the feathers fit....

It brings me little pleasure to refer to MuskTrump apologists as chickens willing to sacrifice the nation and their own-self respect out of fear that they’ll be spanked and told to write “I’ve been a bad” a thousand times on a Capitol blackboard. Still, it must be done.

Perhaps MuskTrump’s facilitators can find comfort in the fact that the very first time the word ‘chicken’ was used as a synonym for ‘coward’ it was a barb aimed at the Bard, William Shakespeare. In William Kemp’s 1600 book, Nine Days of Wonder, Shakespeare makes a cameo appearance.

In the book, Kemp, an actor on the Elizabethan stage, says he met “a penny poet” who had written “a miserable stolen story of Macdoel, or Macdobeth, or Macsomewhat.” According to Kemp, the Bard accused another man of abusing Kemp in print, so Kemp hunts the accused down, accosts him in a tavern “and then laid this terrible accusation to his charge.”

In response, the accused laughs and fires back at Shakespeare, “swearing it did him good to have ill words of a hoddy doddy, a habber de hoy, a chicken, a squib, a squall.”

So, I ask anyone offended at being called a chicken to please remember that I did not call you a hoddy doddy, habber de hoy, squib or squall. In Elizbethan-era language, those words would describe you as a loud, windy cuckold who, like a cheap, smelly firecracker, pops too soon before disappearing altogether. No, I did not call you such. That would have been over the line.

My dear Republican lawmakers, you know as well as we do that MuskTrump should be stopped. You know you could do it. And still you don’t. Is it really because you fear you’ll be booted from office, as if you believe the very future of the world depends upon your forever presence in Congress? That’s rather vainglorious of you, isn’t it?

Have you told your parents, spouses and children that Elon Musk now has access to their most personal information, hijacked and hacked by a team of teen misfits who barricaced themselves in federal agencies. You banned TikTok because you were afraid its owners would do something like this. But you turn and run, chickenbutts-to-constituents, when Musk does it?

There is no doubt that MuskTrump is engaged in a coup, illegally underminding the American government. Americans did not elect MuskTrump and they did not ask to have the Treasury plundered at their expense.

But it is you who facilitates the coup. You’ve fled the freerange for the Chicken Coup.

It’s quite the spectacle, you know. You rally‘round the hyper-masculinity thing with its pugilistic poses, aggressive language and disdain for the un-muscle shirted. But at the very same time you are playing the weak-kneed scoundrel all too quick to strike a very different pose when it comes to MuskTrump.

Open your eyes. MuskTrump has not yet fried your eggs. There’s no real fox outside your henhouse. The latch is your hands.