In a Chinese restaurant the other day, my fortune cookie message was this: "Leaders are like eagles.  They don't flock...you find them one at a time."  Not your usual fortune cookie note.  No credit given for such a wise little sentence, probably because it is commonsense observation.

This little bit of universal truth made me smile.  It was a timely reminder of how fortunate we are to have elected Donald Trump, not a member of any flock, which is why the D.C. establishment hates him so much.  They are all of a flock.  They think alike, act alike, do business alike, barter for favors in the same ways.  For the most part, party identification is irrelevant.  Most of the major players collude with each other.  We conservatives must be grateful for the exceptions to the rule: Ron Johnson, Devin Nunes, Matt Gaetz, Chuck Grassley, Lindsey Graham, Jim Jordan, and Ted Cruz.  There may be others momentarily out of mind, but the lesson of the quote is how rare real leaders actually are.  We know now that both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would have been leaders but have since betrayed their stated conservative principles.  Neither of them recognized Trump as the leader he is, and both have shamelessly sought to sabotage him.  They are not the only ones.  Justin Amash comes to mind, as do all the Republicans in Congress who quit because they thought Trump would be found guilty of the Russia collusion meme invented by that cabal of arrogant criminals in the Deep State who believed themselves to be above the law.

What has become of our American government?  It long ago became an elite club of like-minded self-appointed elites who care only about preserving their own power and prestige.  They care about enriching themselves, and they do indeed become very wealthy.  Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein are among the richest members of Congress.  Shouldn't we see their tax returns?  What do they do for their constituents?  Absolutely nothing.  San Francisco, whence their political base springs, is a disaster of Democrat malfeasance.  So is Los Angeles.  Both cities are longtime Democrat strongholds.  California is a one-party state, and it is Democrats who have singlehandedly destroyed it.  Like Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore, Democrat-run cities are like third-world entities, crime-ridden and corrupt.  For decades, they've been run by flocks of "progressives" and have regressed into medieval bastions of the very rich versus the very poor.  That's the way they like it, the middle class be damned.

The Left wants to be the boss, like the ridiculous Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to mandate how the rest of us live.  The Left is a flock of wanna-be overlords.  In their dreams, leftists revere Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Stalin.  Leftists such as Tom Friedman admire China and the way it is run; it's a communist dictatorship, and he writes for the NYT.  The NYT is a member, perhaps the leader, of the flock.  Its editors think they lead, but what they really do is propagandize as surely as Orwell's masters of a fictional universe manipulated its subjects.  They lie.  Orwell was more prescient than most authors; he understood how easily language could be corrupted, and he knew how catastrophic that corruption of language could be. 

That Trump was elected is some kind of miracle.  Somehow, enough people were awakened to the planned obliteration of American exceptionalism implemented by the Obama administration to get the man who promised to drain the swamp into the presidency.  He is a leader who is like an eagle; he is one of a kind, a loner, an interloper into the world of American politics.  For decades, he has been blasting what is wrong with our trade policies, etc.  Now he is in a position to do something about the injustices all previous presidents have accepted as what must be.  And he is doing it.  God bless the man who is not a member of a flock, but our eagle who soars above the fetid swamp.