Merry Christmas, everybody. It’s a good day to try to forget that the Deep State somehow became the good guys and then failed at doing the one thing they’re supposed to do, which is to get rid of anyone who gets in their fucking way. I still can’t believe how easily Robert Mueller rolled over for William Barr. What a goddamned joke the Deep State turned out to be. They’ve never been great at protecting our interests, but now we learn that they can’t even protect their own.
Rather than roll Trump up like the halfwit habitual crook that he is, these buffoons have sat back and watched him take over the “National Security” party in Congress and gut every decent thing “the best and brightest” accomplished since Nagasaki.
The most we get is some quiet mewling about how it’s all very disturbing to have a fucking moron get away with turning the GOP into an old-fashioned fascist cult of white nationalists.
Trump isn’t getting weaker. Every time he demonstrates his grip on the Republican Party, he gets stronger. Every time that another expert is forced out of an embassy, kicked off the National Security Council, or hounded out of their job at the State Department, Pentagon, or CIA, the president grows more dangerous and more difficult to stop.
Every day, the integrity of the Justice Department and the FBI is further diminished and the courts become more a part of Trump’s cult. So, yeah, Merry Christmas. Next year at this time, we’ll know whether Trump could ultimately be stopped. If he was, it won’t have been because of anything the Deep State did. They already lost.
Managed to largely avoid any thought or conversation about 45. What little was said was of profound disrespect, which is about status quo in my home. No one’s untouchable or unstoppable. Comes down to whether there is enough of a united front in opposition. If that unified opposition shows up in full strength, we have a damned good shot. Don’t discount the potential of angry people eventually doing the equivalent of the Euromaidan rebellion in Ukraine a few years ago. Yanukovich was supposed to be unstoppable, until he wasn’t. At least of one of those thug’s henchmen who was a 45 aid is now sitting in a Federal prison and will likely die there. If there is people power, we’ll drive the bastards out, one way or another. That’s what gets me up in the morning.
Well the post wasn’t as uplifting as the headline suggested…Next year will indeed be the year we learn of our future. My family had one of its most peaceful and loving Christmases in a while and I wish the same for everyone here at the Pond.
Well, that turned dark quickly.
I’ll go you a couple dark turns further:
1 – The “Deep State” is what got Trump elected—the NY FBI office in all-but-open-rebellion at the prospect of Clinton’s election, Comey caving to their pressure, the inability/unwillingness of the intelligence agencies to subvert McConnell’s blatantly partisan and unpatriotic obstructionism.
2 – If Trump gets a second term (by whatever means), there’s a good chance he gets 2 more Supreme Court seats, as well as scores more federal judgships, a dominant hand in all the redistricting fights, and four more years to destroy democratic norms here and around the world.
3 – If Biden (Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, whoever) wins, there’s a good chance they’ll face a Republican-controlled Senate and a severe recession with virtually no fiscal or monetary policy tools at their disposal…resulting in a cratering economy that does for the Democratic party for the next generation what the October 1929 crash/Great Depression did to Hoover and the Republican party.
We may have lived through the most democratic period in US history (1965 – 2016), and we may already have entered the beginning of a brutally violent, racist and anti-democratic downward spiral that rivals the post-Reconstruction Redeemers and Jim Crow.
The question is: what are we going to do about it? We don’t get to know the future; and the present is—as it always was—uncertain, tentative, and confusing. Since this is a Christmas thread, maybe we can draw some measure of inspiration from some Mary and Joseph, and some of the other adults they knew. In the face of a hostile empire, and their cruel puppet local ruler, they did their best to protect the child(ren), hold onto the best of their own traditions, tried to keep in mind that their struggle wasn’t for a day or a week or a year, but for generations. Do the best you can with what you have to keep hope alive.
Merry Christmas, y’all.