Little did MAD magazine know how truly big a thing they were onto with this classic cover:

Fran calls it the Longest Long Con, which works for me equally well.

If the media megaphone can get you charged up about a notionally two-sided contest — with the help of the contestants, of course — it can keep your attention on what’s being said and away from what’s being done. That is the pattern of the last forty years at least. It keeps the political parties fat and happy, the media moguls dancing in dollars…and you and I bereft of the thing this nation was founded to protect and preserve: FREEDOM.

It’s a con game, Gentle Reader. It’s been nothing else since Ronald Reagan left office — and do you want to know what the Big Giveaway is, the one that everyone in this country should reflect on? It’s right out there in front of God and everybody, but only a handful of commentators have even brushed their microphones against it:

It’s the swindling of Donald Trump.

Trump was a genuine Outsider, a maverick determined to do right as he saw it. That made him an unacceptable, permanently “outside the tent” figure to the master croupiers of the Con Game, they who pour the Very Best Butter over the cams of the Big Rake-Off Machine we call party politics. They labor ceaselessly to keep We the People in Us vs. Them mode, that the oceans of campaign dollars might continue to flow uninterrupted into their coffers. Despite their best efforts, Trump gained the White House and set about doing as he said he would do. Unthinkable! the masters of the Establishment said to one another. No one keeps campaign promises! That’s why we let our puppets make them!!

So Trump had to go. The theft of the 2020 presidential election was the plainest imaginable revelation about the essential phoniness of contemporary political “conflict.” But despite Election 2020 and subsequent developments – Ukraine, anyone? — only a few have caught on.

Disaffiliate yourselves from the farce. Stop paying it any attention. Stop expecting political mechanisms to solve any of your problems. Concentrate on doing the best you can for your family, your friends, your neighbors, and your community, however defined. The game is rigged — so completely that even though “it’s the only game in town,” there’s absolutely no point in playing it any longer.

Be free. Freedom is not granted; it is taken: by you or from you. And the longer you focus on the con game called politics, the longer it will be withheld from you — by your own stubborn inanition.

Wait, if by that you mean I can no longer poke fun at the buffoonish, shambolic FiNC (Feeb in Chief, that would be), then I’m totally NOT down with that, now.