The Blunder Games

Here is your dystopian future:  a hopelessly addled, embittered old man, brain permanently marinated in a bottomless vat of Cutty Sark, vaingloriously attempting to failsplain to Teh Kidz how flash drives work. Ghouliani is basically Trump with a drinking problem, and without even the small amount of exercise from a round of golf.

But that is not the problem, not remotely. The problem is that the comically inept project Ghouliani has undertaken here belies the truly corrosive nature of the effort. While we're having a larf at the audible courtroom farts and the drunk stripper testimony and the karmavirus catching the main players, they're fine-tuning their approach for the next go-round.

They know this won't work, and they're fine with that. It doesn't have to work, in the sense that "work" means "help Trump steal the election." That particular instance probably will not happen, though I wouldn't take that for granted until the actual moment of Biden's official investiture in January (and maybe not even then).

But this will definitely enable them to calibrate their efforts next time -- and I don't mean 2024, I mean the 2022 midterms. You just wait -- any Senate or House election that is even close is going to be contested.

One thing Trump actually has some expertise in is losing other people's money, which is not as simple as it sounds, since you first have to find wealthy people who are stupid enough to give money to a proven grifter. But second to that, Trump has certainly shown some venal aptitude for knowing how to clog the court system with frivolous nonsense and obstructionist pettifoggery. His penchant for vexatious litigation was well-known long before 2016, and as with all of his other ongoing bad behavior, he has never been given any reason to change.

This is really a moment of truth for Democrats:  either they succumb to the comfortable fictions of "unity" and "reconciliation" and "returning to normal," or they choose to enforce the laws and punish bad actors and criminals.

I wouldn't have much if any confidence in which path they will choose. When presented clear moral choices and opportunities, they typically choose to wring their hands and helplessly invoke Murc's Law. Time after time, they have proven to be infinitely better at excuses than solutions. Until people are held accountable for their actions, they will continue with their criminal activities. And why shouldn't they?

(If I were to propose some sort of addendum to Murc's Law -- call it "Heywood's Corollary" if you like -- it might be something along the lines of acknowledging the reality that Democrats face an opposition composed entirely at this point of amoral brutes, gutless hacks, and assorted actors of varying degrees of bad faith, and yet they (Democrats) continue to persist in equally bad-faith public recitations of an imaginary "need" to "return" to an imaginary "normal" state.

The point of having institutions is to curate a plausible history of how things work and how they transpire. To pretend that conditions were normal or desirable in any way, whether in 2015, 2005, or even 1995 or 1985, is to insist on indulging in a set of lies every bit as pernicious as anything the various Republicon chop shops routinely flop on the table like a twenty-pound sack of shit.

In accordance with formulating various internets laws and axioms and such like, I'll see if I can phrase all that more concisely in the near future.)