It's Okay, Never Mind

This will be a rather long post for me these days, in which I want to cover two things: Just how big a hole we have dug in this country, and why we are in it.  For the first point, I want to quote rather heavily from an article that appeared in the Washington Post this weekend.  I must make it clear that I am certainly not singling out the Post for an attack; sad to say, with the possible exception of the two hours a day we can watch Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell, it is perhaps the most trustworthy source of news we have left in our pathetic excuse for a mainstream press.  Anyway, here is their analysis of what just happened in the Senate Trial of Donald Trump, with Green Eagle's usual added sarcastic squawking, because, of course that's what Green Eagle would do.

"Senate to emerge from impeachment trial guilty of extreme partisanship...The Senate is poised to end its impeachment trial of President Trump far deeper in the partisan trenches than when it started."

Because what we just witnessed was not the betrayal of our country by one party, which has given in to utter corruption, but two parties, who are equally guilty of "partisanship."

"That’s a remarkable feat given how deep the Senate has already descended the past decade, but conversations with several of the more widely respected senators revealed a troubling state of affairs that looks nothing like the last time the supposedly august chamber came out of a presidential impeachment trial."

What is a truly remarkable feat is that the Washington Post manages to provide an analysis that entirely avoids one word: "Republican."  And incidentally, which reduces the entire matter to nothing but mutual impolite behavior by  both sides, a minor break of decorum, rather than massive corruption by one party, met with a futile attempt by the other to put  a brake on a pack of determined criminals.

“I’ve got to figure out where we go from here, because right now, my view, this is the saddest day that I’ve seen in the Senate,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said Friday. “I’m really disgusted with everybody, just really — the House, the Senate, the Republicans, the Democrats. It’s just a sad day.”

Disgusted with everybody: both the Republicans, who have committed an almost endless list of crimes, and the Democrats, who tried to hold them responsible.  But of course, what do you expect a cowardly Republican to say in the face of the overwhelming evidence of the President's guilt?

"So much for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s prediction on Jan. 15, when the House articles of impeachment first arrived, that the Senate would rise above “factional fervor” and bring the nation together."

Are you fucking kidding me?  Mitch McConnell, who personally orchestrated the Republican intransigence that produced this Senatorial disgrace?  McConnell, the most corrupt majority leader in history, is who you turn to for an explanation of what happened?    It was "factional fervor" rather than open criminality from one side of the aisle that prevented the nation from being brought together?  How in the name of God can a newspaper print such malicious garbage?

"Murkowski issued a statement Friday morning, before the vote on having more witnesses, declaring “Congress has failed.” She said the Senate was incapable of holding a “fair trial” but did not spell out the causes, other than taking a thinly veiled shot at Sen. Elizabeth Warren..."

Elizabeth Warren!  It's all her fault!  So that is the answer!  Either the blame is to be equally found on both sides, or if not, it is some Democrat who caused Donald Trump's Presidency to spiral into an endless maelstrom of criminality, and caused the Senate Republicans to openly refuse to look at the evidence. 

Both sides! Or maybe it's not both sides, it's the Democrats' fault for...something.  How do the Democrats ever function when faced with this kind of nearly universal reporting from the mainstream press?  And this is the account of what just happened that is going to be crammed down the throats of the American people, every single day until the next election.  When I say, over and over again, that the Democrats could crush the Republican party out of existence without hardly trying, but that they cannot beat the Republicans and the press working together, this is exactly what I mean.

Well, seeing as how you might as well spend your time asking "Who wrote the book of love" as expecting the mainstream press to offer an honest account of the state our country is in, let's just move on to something perhaps marginally less depressing.

But first, let me diverge for a second, to ask a historical question:  How do you think the Nuremburg trial would have turned out if the Judges started the proceedings by deciding to hear no evidence and no testimony?  Just a random question that occurred to me, so feel free to ignore it as we move on.

So, on to the other half of my comments.  In the time since the Republicans decided to have a trial without evidence, I have heard liberal lamentations far and wide about how, in one day, democracy was crushed in this country, never to appear again; how months of Democratic efforts could not make a dent in the Republican scheme to turn our country into a dictatorship.  Well, sorry to inform you of this, but that has been the goal of the Republican party for half a century now.  Why are so many Democrats only now snapping out of their slumber and noticing what is going on?

All of us, across the left, should have been shouting about this every chance we could, for half a century now, while the Republicans were systematically  mesmerizing the American population.  But we didn't.  Why?  Well, in large part that is what motivated me to write the first half of this post:  The mainstream press hardly treats both parties the same.  Consider how the press dutifully reported the Republican freakout over Adam Schiff's having quoted a line from the Washington Post, apparently accepting the idiotic assertion that he had so insulted Republicans that they were entitled to rig a corruption trial, while Trump was saying things like the following, without ever suggesting that such talk is outside of the Washington norms:

“Shifty Adam Schiff is a CORRUPT POLITICIAN, and probably a very sick man,” Trump tweeted Sunday morning. “He has not paid the price, yet, for what he has done to our Country!”

"I always say they’re lousy politicians, but they do two things. They’re vicious and mean. Vicious. Adam Schiff is a vicious, horrible person. Nancy Pelosi is a horrible person."

I understand that Democrats have to face abuse for telling the truth, while Republicans are free to lie with impunity.  Still, consistently reminding people that the Republican party is nothing but a criminal conspiracy for the last few decades would have resulted in a different playing field today.  Our representatives must accept the risk of insisting on reality, and we must too.  It is not a specimen of politeness to allow the Republicans and the press to continue their malicious campaign of lies, whether on a national scale, or in the encounters that all of us have in everyday life.  After forty years of letting the Republicans have their way with the truth, we are not going to work our way back to the light in a few months or years, but the sooner we start, the sooner we can hope that things will return to the moderately terrible but survivable situation that has long been the norm in American life.