I Can't Explain

     Wisdom may not arrive with age but you do begin to develop a sense of what you can't solve.

     Take the Middle East as an example: it was a horrendous, tragic mess long before I was born and no effort, no matter how well-intended, brilliantly conceived or even brutal, has managed to change it.  It's easy to make worse, not difficult to shift the misery around, but ending it?  Barring an all-out war, a devastating wave of infectious disease or the emergence of a new and aggressively proselytizing religion -- all of which have happened in the region before -- there's no solution in sight.

     Take the U. S. House of Representatives, a legislative body that is by design fractious, given to argument and enthusiasm, as unruly and opinionated as the citizenry themselves.  When the House ties itself in a knot, it's got to do its own untying -- and the traditions of the House, as I have pointed out, put absolutely no onus on the minority to bail out the majority if the party holding the most seats can't agree on a Speaker.

     Right now, we've got a President in the White House who puts in a solid day's work, stammers his way through press conferences and has been able to work with the House and Senate to accomplish the things that had to get done; and we've got a former President facing a long list of criminal and civil charges in multiple jurisdictions (including an attempted coup) who left chaos behind at the end of his term and can't seem to construct a single coherent sentence when making a speech.  Both are frontrunners to be their party's nominee for President in 2024 -- and they have nearly identical public approval/disapproval polling results.

     I can't explain it.  I can describe some of it, but the why remains a mystery.  I certainly can't fix it.