Monday wasn't fun. Tuesday wasn't great, either: my back. I've been living on aspirin and sleeping on an ice pack, walking as much as I can manage, and I'm getting better, but oh, jeepers. I did not see this coming.
I mean, it could be worse. I could be stuck in a country rapidly sliding down into competitive authoritarianism, in which one party's politicians were uniformly crooks, cranks and grifters, while the other party distinguished itself by fielding many more plain old hacks and allowing the occasional idealist to slip though, counterbalanced by a scattering of outright weirdos; not that their opposite numbers didn't have a few of those, too.
Oh, wait.
The United States may be the only two-party democracy (in the broadest sense) that does itself in by the two parties leaping off a precipice, one shouting, "Hey, everybody, lookit me! I can fly!" while the other party mutters, "Oh dear," and frantically tries to improvise a parachute from a pocket handkerchief all the way down. They'll both make identical splatters when they hit the ground.
The next person who gives me a version of "Same old same-old" in response to our present crisis is going to get the unexpurgated version of this diatribe, because no, it's not. I'm looking back on LBJ and Nixon and both Bushes and Bill Clinton with fond regret: we didn't realize how good we had it at the time.
Update
1 year ago
8 comments:
Nixon, even.
Perhaps because we weren't aware of what was actually going on?
You are kidding yourself.
The most corrupt scandal of the most corrupt previous administration is barely Tuesday in the current egomaniac manbaby’s revenge tour.
You’d have to be absolutely pig-ignorant to think otherwise.
An awful lot of people apparently were. This was, for a long time, a country where you didn't need to pay much attention to what the fed.gov was up to. You paid your taxes and you voted for whichever party you had decided was "yours," way back when, and everything was mostly fine.
Things are not fine now, not for a lot of people and for many different reasons, most of which trace back, one way or another, to a single source. (And that's not so much one man as the conditions that enabled him and the moral depravity of those in power or near to it who decided to ride the lightning for their own ends.)
The women of Roseholme Cottage have the correct perspective, that so many others do not. This regime is so far out of bounds, so Not Normal, it is horrifying. The Project 2025 playbook of overloading both our senses and the courts with a avalanche of outrageous, immoral, illegal, unconstitutional and unethical conduct has worked. We have so much work to do to repair some of the damage. We can't heal all of the damage that's been done...too many have died at the hands of this regime.
It's the new Robber Baron era- just without the snappy suits or pretense of hiding the shady stuff from the public.
The system assumes basic integrity among (most of) those who seek public office. Instead, 77 million voters decided that reality TV ethos was more important than standards and civic duty, so they enshrined a cult leader who lowers them to his level with his every breath.
UFC on the White House lawn is only symbolic of a moral and mental abyss.
It’s actually way worse than the old pre-regulation late 19th Century Spoils System era. Not that the principals involved are necessarily worse people, but everything’s turbocharged by modern communication speeds and mass media.
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