A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Some light reading:

Rebecca Solnit, The Coup Has Already Happened

Associated Press, The Princes, the President, and the Fortune Seekers

Daniel Larison, [Clownstick] Doesn't Have North Korea 'Cornered'

I suspect that most of us non-cultists veer between good days and bad days, or perhaps between bad days and worse ones. For the most part, I manage to persist in two assumptions that keep the balance mostly on the positive side:

1. That the inept crime syndicate currently running ruining this country are a special combination of arrogant and stupid. They are too arrogant to realize how stupid they really are, and they are too stupid to realize how their arrogance will undo them. This mitigates a lot of the damage they could be doing if they were even marginally competent.
2. That Mueller knows far more actionable information than we do, and is building his case with care and prudence, in order to keep it unassailable when the time comes.

It doesn't take much scrutiny to render these assertions as teleological more than anything; I am counting on these things to be essentially true, more than actually knowing or being able to prove them. They are at best semi-educated guesses, gleaned from years now of spelunking in the self-reinforcing mines of endless data, most of it contextualized as best as possible.

But let's take it as a given that both of the above statements are in fact empirically true. Each of them can still be rebutted:

1. They are still doing a lot of damage, in a lot of areas. After years of Republican obstructionism to Obama's judicial appointments, the skids are now greased, and they are making an effort to appoint younger judges who can populate the court system for decades to come. The damage to the integrity of our governmental institutions is racking up with alarming quickness, and is already incalculable. Just a few random examples:
   
   Less than two years ago, the nation was beside itself that Bill Clinton had a private thirty-minute conversation on an airport tarmac in Arizona; today, the emperor called the head of the FBI and the assistant AG on the carpet to tune them up for not carrying his holy water. They don't work for him. We used to know that. Now we just accept it, just another typical day under these hopelessly bent people.
   
   In September of 2016, people of both parties were obsessed with the state of Hillary Clinton's health. Conspiracy theories abounded, despite independent evidence that she was at the normal state of health for a woman approaching seventy years of age. A few weeks ago, Clownstick's former doctor admitted what we all knew, that Clownstick had dictated the letter attesting to his own health (which must be a breach of the medical code of conduct; this man should not have a medical license), while almost simultaneously, the White House doctor was being booted out the door, after a bizarrely inept attempt to install him at the Veterans' Administration. Bottom line is, right now, no one has any idea what the health of the chief executive -- a fat old man who lives on fast food and rage, and literally believes that exercise is bad for you -- might be right now. And it's not even on anyone top ten list of concerns. Corruption has become normalized, and it will take tremendous effort to weed it out, if ever.
   
   Apparently it is now a crime for American citizens to speak a language other than English. People are getting threatened with ICE in New York City, and detained by Border Patrol agents in Montana for this violation. We are turning into something we would not have recognized eighteen months ago. These people are destroying the soul of this nation, in large part by simply denying reality, lying and gaslighting right to our faces. That crushes the will of the hostage after a while; the hostage either decides there's no way out and becomes suicidal, or develops Stockholm syndrome.
   
   Foreign policy is even worse:  our European allies hate us; Russia is playing us; China is eating our lunch and drinking our milkshake; the clown car is obsessed with starting a war with Iran, and in their rush to buy a shelf for a Nobel Peace Prize, has elevated a vile pariah nation like North Korea to equal status, shitting on six decades of consistent American (not Republican or Democratic, but American) geopolitical strategy. Kim Jong Un is going to punk him, if the summit happens at all, and in his rage and embarrassment he will instigate a war with the Iranians, because we don't have quite enough disastrous conflicts going on already.
   
   And obviously the above hardly scratches the surface. That's part of why they've been so successful, why he slithered in in the first place -- because it's impossible to keep up with the steady barrage of bullshit. It's impossible to generate a comprehensive list that wouldn't take an hour just to read.
2. At the rate Mueller is going, it may already be too late to do anything about the crime and corruption endemic to these animals. They don't care what he finds or what he says. They don't care about his evidence and his indictments. They scoff at his findings and sneer at his insistence on the law. Clownstick will certainly invoke some inept variation of Andrew Jackson taunting John Marshall to go ahead and try to enforce his ruling. And the Republican party and voters will back him up on this.

Which will bring us to an impasse, if we aren't already at one. Our differences are irreconcilable, it seems, primarily because by definition, Clownstick allies and supporters are dishonest brokers. When you have one side adhering to the historic norms and rules of convention, and the other side functions with the consistency and rationality of a hopped-up three-year-old, you're unlikely to ever find a point of agreement or compromise. The only solution is to crush them at the ballot box in six months.

And even that may not be enough. They traffic in conspiracy theories, the loopier and dumber the better. They're looking for any excuse to tell "elitists" -- that is, people who read books and insist on empirical evidence to make their decisions -- to go fuck themselves. Whether they do it violently or not remains to be seen, but the fact is that no one knows, and frankly, a cursory look at the spate of mass shootings indicates a certain pattern already.

If there is a Second American Civil War coming, it won't be fought by pitting formations at each other on this or that hill or ridge. It'll be the local three-percent militia paying visits to everyone in their area who had a Hitlery sign in their yard in 2016, or the wrong bumper sticker on their car. Vandalism and burglary at first, violence at some inevitable point. That's how these things start in other countries these days.

We're not there yet, but we are down the road in that direction, farther than we'd like to be, farther than we'd like to believe. It is going to take a concerted effort to turn things around, even with a blue tsunami in November. Don't discount the power of an economic boycott, either. The Fox Entertainment network has a Sunday night lineup of shows I've enjoyed for years (Simpsons, Family Guy, Bob's Burgers), plus regular NFL coverage and a solid pre-game show, but I'm done with all of it and I've told them so, and I've told them why. Nothing's going to change because of what one person decides not to watch anymore, but you can bet if it went viral, if people passed it around on Twitter or whatever and stuck to it, told their advertisers that they were on the hook as well, it would have an effect.

If it all sounds like work, that's because it is. But either we're tired of this doddering barstool drunk and his sociopathic family, or we're not. Excuse won't make these scumbags go away. Remember that the thing these fuckers fear most of all is losing all their ill-gotten pelf. So let's make them lose it.