The rest
.Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana. He can be reached at edit@dailyinterlake.com
The swamp creatures in Congress and the media pretend they like things nice and tidy, but that’s only because they are so deep inside the mud that they have no idea just how dirty they are. I guess we’d all like things nice and tidy at some level, and that’s why the swamp has survived so long. By keeping our eyes closed, we can pretend the muck doesn’t stink. We can pretend that senators and congressmen are statesmen instead of power-grubbing pigs living in the muck and feeding at the public trough.
It would be awesome if someone would clean the mess up, we tell ourselves, but we forget that cleaning up a swamp means getting your hands dirty. In some measure, Trump disappoints us not because he fails, but because he makes us confront our own part in allowing the swamp to exist.
To reference a superhero who pre-dates comic books by a couple millennia, it was Hercules who was tasked with cleaning up the filthy Augean stables that housed 3,000 head of cattle. According to Greek mythology, the stables had not been cleaned in over 30 years, a strangely fitting number since it also closely approximates the time period since Ronald Reagan tried to clean up Washington in the 1980s.
Hercules used his strength and his cunning to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of cleaning up the stables. It remains to be seen whether or not Trump will have similar success in draining the swamp, but it should be pointed out that Hercules did not get credit for his remarkable labor. Nor may Trump, but I venture to say that he will leave Washington, D.C., a fresher place than when he found it.
He got Douglas MacArthur wrong...he loved being popular and screwed his men..
Hmmm,.... I see SHREK.
I love Montana. But the writer of that article has not the foggiest notion who or what the REAL Donald Trump is. He, unfortunately, has swallowed the CNN Fake News version of Trump. How does one bloviate that many words on something about which they are CLUELESS?