It's to the point where a scorecard, and / or some kind of chart that can accommodate mind-boggling intricacies, is needed to keep straight the layers of investigation, scandal, speculation and known fact covering the District of Columbia these days.
The layer that has been the biggie - the Mueller investigation into supposed collusion between the Trump campaign team and some official or quasi-official elements in Russia - hasn't come up with anything substantive that moves it toward a conclusion in over a year. Nothing. Every supposedly exciting tidbit turns out to be an anonymously sourced nothingburger.
There's the question of which players in all of this are really corrupt, have just been leaned on by one nefarious force or another, or are simply misunderstood honest brokers. Mueller? Flynn? Comey? Rosenstein? Wray? Sessions? In each case, there's no shortage of opinions about that question.
Which leads to the sad state of punditry in post-America. Lefty outlets like MSNBC go apoplectic over each revelation that feeds their feeble hope that the latest tidbit is The Smoking Gun.
Then there is the fever-swamp right's utter conviction - or at least a good impression thereof - that a "deep state" is so infected with a leftist fervor and now also a blind hatred for Trump that it is about to bring down the foundations of the Republic. Sean Hannity merely has to phone in his five-alarm-outrage schtick these days.
Which isn't to say that something doesn't smell awfully rancid. Along with having an affair, FBI agent Peter Stzrok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page left behind a correspondence trail that clearly shows they wanted to cook up a way to render a Trump administration ineffective.
Then there's this memo Devin Nunes has drafted that is supposed to blow the lid off the FBI's agenda. Hot stuff, apparently, but no one else is getting to see it - not Senate Intelligence Committee staffers, not fellow House members, not FBI or DoJ lawyers. No one is getting to see the memo, let alone any underlying documentation related to the FISA court.
The Hillary Clinton email server situation also still smolders. That one stinks, but it's worth noting that Hillary Clinton will never be in public life again, and there are pressing matters in the present that move something that is receding into the realm of history off the front burner.
Then there is the mouth and the phone keypad of the president, which inflames both bases - the one that loves him without reservation, and the one that hates him without reservation.
And then there are those pressing matters referenced above.
I'll close with what I said about those the other day in a post on this general subject (staying out of the weeds and declining to draw conclusions about all this):
And what are those major issues?
They're not infrastructure. They're not a southern-border wall. They're not the renegotiation of global-trade deals.
These are the front-burner issues:
North Korea's nuclear program, brought to fruition due to decades of US appeasement, now poses an existential threat to the entire North American landmass.
Post-American culture is so thoroughly rotten that major societal institutions have embraced the infantile fantasy that there are more than two genders. Christians are being persecuted for conducting business in accordance with their faith. Influential figures in not only the entertainment field, but intellectual circles and even government, are being exposed, in huge numbers, as rank sexual predators. Only 26 percent of the population can name all three branches of the federal government. 37 percent can't name a single First Amendment right.
Heroin and other opioids are as cheap and available as weed, and as a result, unprecedented numbers of post-Americans are overdosing on them.
Blatant falsehoods such as rampant police brutality against black Americans, or the global climate being in some kind of trouble, are perpetuated in our schools, corporations and even churches.
Institutions that once fostered our civic bonds - Rotary Club, Boy Scouts, Knights of Columbus, Masons, bowling leagues - are dwindling (and buying into the falsehoods enumerated above).
That's the front-burner stuff.
And a narcissistic, bombastic, petty man in the Oval Office, and a disproportionally vocal base of drool-besotted supporters, are in no position to help with amelioration. In fact, they are inclined to make society more brittle with the rigid nature of their zeal.
With two indictments and two guilty pleas (so far), some of the key figures will have (after sentencing) the opportunity to reflect at length on this "nothingburger". Cheers.
ReplyDeleteBig pharma and the docs pushed the pain meds like candy is why we have so many addicted today. It has absolutely nothing to do with moral failure of the addict but maybe the doctors and pharmaceutical executives.
ReplyDeleteThe jazz drummer friend who died and the niece who nearly did just got int it as an outgrowth of their general activity
DeleteDrug activity
DeleteThey are overdosing because they are addicted, but maybe if they raise the price and throw the pushers and users in jail for a long long time it'll go away and everybody left will just say no.
ReplyDelete"Blatant falsehoods such as rampant police brutality against black Americans..."
ReplyDeleteI have very few African-American friends who do not have some story of terrifying run-ins with law enforcement either of their own of a loved one. Having been a minute in law enforcement I have little difficulty believing them. It is YOUR expertise in this area that is staggeringly suspect.
All you have to be is pushed around by a cop or cops once to stop believing. The
ReplyDeletehttps://www.city-journal.org/html/hard-data-hollow-protests-15458.html
ReplyDeleteWho is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks. In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The Post categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed.” That classification masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest. Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly worsened in 2016, in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers—committed vastly and disproportionately by black males. Among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243.