Trump hands the world to China and Russia

 The greed and corruption of the Trump regime was already well on the way to knocking the United States to at least the third spot in the world order, before his adventure in Iran sealed the deal.

Trump and Hegseth treated our weapon stockpile like a Hollywood six-shooter that always has enough bullets to outgun the bad guy. Their orgy of violence in Iran burned through a couple of wars' worth of expensive munitions that they can't just order on Amazon with overnight shipping.

In addition to the military depletion, our country has been reduced diplomatically to the foot-stomping and whining of a spoiled rich kid. This regime was put in power by pissed-off simpletons. As such, it is perfectly representative of its constituents. The rest of us just got dragged along.

The pissed-off simpletons include the ones who voted directly for the vile, bigoted, lying grifter and the ones who sat it out in a snit in 2024 because the Democratic candidate wasn't perfect enough.

Whether Trump is formally a foreign asset or not, he has acted perfectly on their behalf, with the full approval of most of the office holders in the party he captured in 2016. We can neither fight nor bargain our way out of the shit swamp that the entire passel of clowns have dumped us into.

The failure of Soviet communism wasn't communism per se. It was the power-mad, sadistic liars in control of the government. The same right wing people who continue to bleat about communism have no problem with the Russian heirs to the same power-mad, sadistic liars exerting control to this day. And now we have our own power-mad, sadistic liars in control of what remains of our democratic government.

We have one needle's eye left that we can squeeze through to oust the power-mad, sadistic liars and resume our zigzag march toward the inclusive and imaginative powerhouse that this country could be. It happens in November, 2026, when one imperfect party stands against a party monolithically devoted to stamping all that out and settling grumpily into their rightful place below a former communist empire and a current one. Because that's how it will be. Tough talk. Threats of global holocaust. No real leverage. But we can stay home and dominate our women and pick on minorities and paint the walls with our own shit, for all that the rest of the world will care.

The problem of political prisoners

 The crimes of the first Trump administration involved not only the occupant of the Oval Office himself, but many others inside the Executive Branch and scattered through Congress and across the country.

Before Trump even lost the 2020 election and began to lie about it, he was impeached for misdeeds in his first campaign and while in office. Some of the offenses in the Mueller Report could have led to criminal prosecution. Certainly his retention and mishandling of classified information would have led to charges. And let's not forget his 34 felony convictions for fraud, and the judgment against him for improperly reporting expenditures related to paying off Stormy Daniels.

Then there's the unresolved matter of the Epstein files. Who knows what's under that scab.

Some small fry were tried and convicted as a result of his crimes, including more than 1,500 people who had taken part in the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Only a handful remain in custody after the mob boss in chief issued blanket pardons to the rioters and individual pardons to favored minions he could spring from federal charges.

A majority of Americans seemed to be okay with the convictions of the January 6th rioters. The criminal behavior was plain to see on national television and all over the Internet. However, the acceptance that MAGA operatives had attacked the mechanisms of government at the strong suggestion of their leader was not enough to discourage voters from putting the criminal back into office in 2024.

As Americans we reject political prosecutions. The current criminal regime has taken advantage of this by generating doubt -- not reasonable doubt, just doubt -- among enough Americans to allow genuinely bad elements to take power and remain viable.

The Constitution describes how to get a bad official out of office, but the framers never imagined that Congress would be controlled by a corrupt president's allies, who would prevent any action to remove him. And one person's corruption is another person's ruthless politics. The First Amendment gives wide latitude to political opinion blending with religious freedom. Yes, there are election laws and supposedly guardrails around the proper roles and functions of government, but the infractions can be hard to explain to ordinary citizens. With a powerful propaganda machine pumping right wing messaging into every media channel like a toxic gas, the intellectual atmosphere is foggy and mind-numbing.

Voting out the Republicans at every level is only step one of the national detox from authoritarianism. The second, vital component is prosecution, conviction, and imprisonment of individuals who have been trying to replace representatives with rulers.

Prosecution of the people who have broken government will elicit howls from the people who relished the authoritarian crackdown on the elements of society that they hate. Many of them used to squawk at length about heavy handed government stepping on the little guy, when what they really hated was not being able to kick down themselves. Once the jackboots were aimed the right way, those brave rebels grew docile and smug.

While we are finding out what it was like to live in Germany during the 1930s, we are also finding out why Reconstruction failed after the Civil War. There were no extensive  trials of Confederates. The South did rise again. They bitched and grumbled about having to extend any measure of respect to their former slaves, but they got things mostly their way. It will be even worse this time, because we have the examples of repressive regimes from the early 20th Century onward demonstrating political retribution. Fascist and Communist/Socialist governments as well as independent dictators have shown over and over the dangers of political prosecution. 

In a country where government is "of the people, by the people," a politician has to be very obviously extremely criminally corrupt to avoid the accusation of political prosecution. We've had such figures. Right now we have a bunch of them. But the case has to be carefully made. That was one reason that the current occupant of the Oval Office is where he is instead of in prison: the case was being carefully and thoroughly made, and his lawyers threw enough speed bumps in to get him to the 2024 election. A rush to judgment would have failed. The careful walk failed anyway. And then the voters failed massively.

We don't know if we'll get out of the present mess in any kind of shape to seek legal action against the officials who have dragged us here. We don't know what form the MAGA movement will take after the inevitable demise of its god-king. Recovery, if it happens at all, will come in stages and could fail at any time, like recovery from addiction. For that matter, life is full of addictions. The challenge is to get hooked on beneficial things instead of destructive ones. I don't know if we can even control our predilections enough to choose which path we take. Psychology and physics both offer bleak prospects there. But there is dissent in both disciplines. I'm holding out for the things I like. I have slowly learned to be less of a dick to people, so it's apparently possible, but I guarantee that I have relapses, so maybe it's just chrome on a turd. I hope not. For any of you out there trying, keep at it. For any of you blessed to be be perfect by nature, congrats.

What's wrong with these judges?

 The right wing beef with judges makes perfect sense. It's interwoven with their misogyny and the myth of the rugged individual. It reflects their presumed virtue.

All the way up to the US Supreme Court, the only judges they like are the ones who act as servants to the ideology that has been building steadily to the current crisis. Since that ideology promotes centralized rule by a few, the judiciary is expected to be subordinate rather than equal.

The power players sell it to their base by tapping into how many of their voters -- mostly men -- have had bad experiences on the wrong side of a court judgment, whether it's domestic violence restraining orders, divorce settlements, or criminal activity of some sort. When your brand centers violence as an expression of strength, you're going to attract people who have a record of it.

All the way back to Dirty Harry and to popular written fiction for decades before that, audiences have liked characters who express their lawfulness with direct action, cutting out the cumbersome, and often disappointing, legal process of prosecution and sentencing. In fiction, the writer can establish certainty in the reader or viewer, that the bad person is a bad person, and that the good guy is fully justified. We're free to enjoy the plot as the game plays out between these adversaries. When the bad guy gets it, the audience feels jubilant.

The hero can be a deeply flawed and unhappy character. That only makes them more sympathetic. As long as they represent the frustration that we all feel when bad guys get away with their crimes and the system seems to let them slip away, we'll forgive their rough edges. They might even have marital problems or other relatable qualities that make their extrajudicial activities more satisfying as they operate outside of the suffocating constraints of red tape and procedure.

At the elite level, where billionaires buy the government that feeds their wealth at the expense of the majority of the rest of us, they're happy to undercut the power of courts. White collar criminals are still criminals. Most of them never see the inside of a cell, but pesky fines and liability settlements drain money that could be spent on bigger yachts, private space programs, and a stunning mansion on top of El Capitan, once Yosemite is privatized and sold off for development.

As frustrating as the judicial system can be, the basis of it is sound. No human system can be made immune to human frailties. Those have to be addressed by general philosophical arguments that guide our thinking overall. We’ve been at it for thousands of years. We could have consensus any day now. In the meantime, we need to shore up the structure that we have.

The task of our government is to reconcile the desires of the majority of the electorate with the rights and needs of individuals and an expertly advised assessment of the public good. Piece of cake!

Staying elected

 I'm getting emails telling me to press my Democratic senators and congressional representative to hold the line against the Trump administration and demand guardrails against the blatantly unconstitutional devastation and pillage of DOGE and cabinet members purposely selected to destroy their agencies or use them as tools of Trump's personal vengeance. These are worthy and necessary goals, but they're running up against the endlessly grinding wheel of the election cycle.

New Hampshire identifies as Republican even though the entire Congressional delegation is Democratic. Those Democrats manage to piece together enough factors to appeal to a majority of voters. But it could flip at any time. The majority in the state legislature are Republicans, and mostly hard right. The countryside is studded with Trump flags and signs even now.

Without a Congressional majority, Democrats can't do anything that will stop Trump completely. Even if they could, Democrats in swing states would have to impress enough right-leaning independents to retain their seats so that they could continue the fight. If they lose, a senate seat goes out of reach for six years. A Representative goes out for two. If that provides or perpetuates a Republican majority, their program continues, perhaps with new energy.

It's not just about staying in power. It's about continuing work in progress. The Republicans have the power now because they have no work in progress in the government. They can sub in any yokel who can get elected to swing a sledgehammer or a pickaxe. The painstaking work on their side has been done in places like the Heritage Foundation and right wing media. All of that has just been a setup to get their wrecking crew in place. They could literally just jump up and down and throw feces at this point.

You might think that Democrats would then be free to field a variety of candidates, but for some perverse reason the Republican shit show still draws significant support. It manages to attract a small percentage of self-identified "thoughtful" voters who believe that they are supporting some kind of coherent policy. Once they realize that they've wasted their vote it's too late. Maybe they reject the candidate they picked the first time, but their conservative leaning means that they're ripe to believe the marketing they hear and see about the replacement goon put up next by the Republicans.

The Democrats aren't a pure force for good by any means. In states where they are the entrenched power, human nature dictates that they succumb to corruption at the same rates as their right-wing counterparts. Maybe the goals of it are different in some cases, but the methods are still questionable or illegal. It's significant that the Trump administration has reached across the aisle to pardon corrupt Democrats like Eric Adams and Rod Blagojevich. It proves that criminality is the unifying principle, not any of the political, economic, and social philosophies they claimed as talking points in the campaign. Rod Blagojevich?! Who even remembered who that was? His name was fun to say, though.

I can tell an elected official what I wish would happen. I can advise. But I know that they know things that I don't. They're dealing with the situation in person, and coordinating information from their state and districts. They have to run the calculation constantly to find the balance between what a portion of their constituency says it wants and what will actually fly. I'm as disgusted and disappointed by John Fetterman as anyone, but I also know that he's balancing the input from his diverse state, attempting to represent them fairly and stay in place to advance better values when the opportunity arises. He seems like a duplicitous asshole to some of us right now, but maybe he's not a complete Manchin or Sinema.

At least he's no Tulsi.

Is it ideal? Of course not. But the strength of democracy is also its weakness. At every election, the candidates have to persuade a majority of eligible voters to pick them. The process never ends. Every action is scrutinized and analyzed, packaged and presented by all interested parties to guide the choice for or against.

The US is no longer a great power

 Isolationists have succeeded in taking the United States from being a global power and a force for good and converting us into a global threat and an untrustworthy ally, possibly forever.

The politicians who cultivated a base of voters who live in anger and fear thought that those voters were stupid and apathetic enough to remain controllable. But somewhere along the line they started believing their own shit. We have a whole regime devoted to destroying our strengths both domestically and internationally.

We could have been great. Sure, we made mistakes, usually propelled by the same greedy impulses that have now led to this complete undoing of all progress. Countries don't have friends, they have interests. The same is true of corporations. But in the case of nations those interests can align with what's kind, moral, and just, as well. Everything does come down to philosophy eventually.

Kindness, morality, and justice, have gone in the shitter with this regime. It's all about the money and power.

It is much easier to impose a regime of cruelty than one of kindness. A free society always contains the seeds of its own destruction. The people who hate the freedom of anyone who is not like them will take advantage of the freedom to speak and assemble, to spread their anger and fear to anyone susceptible, and organize their militias and pressure groups. 

The fact that the regime's budget proposal rips away large sections of the social safety net for chronically underpaid "essential workers," the elderly poor, and children proves that they hate spending money on much more than foreign aid. They're demonstrating if not admitting that they consider anyone below a certain financial threshold to be a useful idiot at best and vermin at worst. And you could be in both categories.

The oligarchs believe that they do represent American values. They represent you, because you would certainly do what they are doing if you had the chance. This is depressingly true in a lot of cases. Now it's our nation's global posture. Turning inward has never worked out well for us in the past. We always get blown out of our complacency by world events and have to play catch up because we had let our global awareness and capability deteriorate.  This time around, our rivals will fill in behind us, and then sweep over us. The current regime is the most ignorant, inept, and corrupt in the history of the United States. Their lust for power will end up leaving them with none, and the rest of us with the ruins of what had been a promising young nation.

We could dust off the Constitution and start applying it in the more inclusive way that those soft-headed liberals had been suggesting before we decided to go ahead with the right wing's experiment in unbridled greed and cruelty. It will be too late for US standing as a global leader. We might even be a vassal state of China by then, in which case our Constitution is just a historical curiosity for underground scholars to remember wistfully. Same goes if the victor is Russia, but I don't think that Russian leadership is capable of global dominance the way the Chinese are.

The bullies are in charge of the playground now

 A minuscule majority of the voters who actually bothered to show up in November, 2024, put into office the worst executive branch in American history, and paper-thin majorities of GOP enablers in the House and Senate.

In "A Christmas Story" the narrator states that "in the kid world, you're either a bully, a toady, or a victim." In a momentary triumph, Ralphie beats the bully so badly that if it happened in a schoolyard today he would be charged with aggravated assault. Many of us smaller, nearsighted boys had similar experiences growing up, though perhaps without Ralphie's primal ferocity.

In the adult world, bullies organize. The fascist movements of the 1930s were just super organized bullies. The regime in the United States today formed a coalition of narrow-minded bullies, because narrow minds are easier to capture and control. The coalition will fracture, because the factions want different things, but it won't happen soon enough and completely enough to save American stature and power in the world.

The tech oligarchs want to use up the Earth to build their starships and leave behind the dead weight of people they consider inferior. It's a grand sci-fi fantasy. Thus they are strip-mining the government for resources that can be transferred to them in contracts and subsidies, making those inferior people subsidize their greatness through our taxes.

The ideological bullies include the Christian nationalists who want to cement the patriarchy and the libertarians who just don't want to pay taxes. There's some overlap between the libertarians and the religious dictatorship, in which male libertarians feel adequately  liberated as long as they can control their subservient women and shoot nearly anyone who pisses them off. But true libertarians want everyone to be able to shoot anyone who pisses them off, and to make bank on all of the toll roads and other privatized services that are going to be so wonderfully efficient and profitable.

The oligarchs consider nations to be tools to help control labor costs in the short-sighted grovel to control what's left of the planet's resources. The libertarians imagine exuberant anarchy in which they always manage to draw faster and shoot straighter in a world no longer encumbered by law enforcement.

To beat these bullies will take more than a single Ralphie to go berserk. It will take more than a handful of Ralphies to administer the beat-down. It will take the impossible dream of millions of ordinary voters getting together to defeat the voter suppression and gerrymandering, to ignore the oceans of money that the oligarchs will use to flood the election with advertising. It will take damn near all of the indoctrinated toadies defying the demographics that put them all in weird, sprawling voting districts and voting against the candidates that we all know were anointed for them.

The toadies think that they're bullies. Remember Scott Farkus's shrimpy little sidekick trying to exchange shoulder punches with him? "Scut" escalates until the little guy gives up. And when Farkus goes down, Grover the toady has no one. All he can do is run, and threaten to tell his dad.

The toadies of the current regime haven't been abandoned yet. The bullies are still in charge. Their little cheerleaders keep wearing the clothes and displaying flags and stickers. In the administration itself, politicians like Marco Rubio, who once considered himself a presidential contender, shames himself and his country as the Secretary of State. Republican senators and representatives abdicate their responsibility to stop the bully in chief because they support and expect to profit from the devastation.

The victims are starting to mount up. They're not the legions of illegal immigrants that the presidential campaign assured its followers would be marched onto cattle cars and made to disappear. It's thousands of federal employees, most of them far from DC, who, until yesterday, contributed vital funds to the local economies where they were working and living. It's workers at businesses who just had federal contracts canceled. It's veterans losing health care and mental health support. Thank you for your service! The silence of Republicans about the betrayal of veterans proves that Donald Trump was hardly the first person to consider them "suckers and losers." These are added to the casualties of Republican health care and reproductive rights policies who have been adding up since the midterm elections of 2022.

Victims include any of us who like to visit national parks and forests. Do you like good roads? Enjoy the state of the pavement now, because this is the best it's going to be for the foreseeable future, unless you happen to live near a rich neighborhood or along a route important to the burgeoning private space industry. The rest of it can crumble and rot in the name of tax cuts and deregulation.

Anyway, as long as the regime leaves the forms of democracy in place to set the stage for their sham elections we have the power to surprise the shit out of them by voting en masse for their opposition. That may lead to the sort of accidental deaths that plague opposition candidates in Russia. Then I don't know. 

I'm just glad that I never had kids. In the meantime, whether you have kids or not, it's time to step up and vote in favor of the younger generations. They deserve a planet that hasn't been hollowed out and burned over, presided over by bullies.

Final note: being asked or even required to accommodate people who diverge from an exclusively white, male, hetero stereotype is not bullying. It's the opposite.

Another Day, Another Constitutional Crisis

 I don't know what people might see in mainstream media, because I don't consume any, but online sources and activist emails seem to call out a constitutional crisis almost daily.

What the heck is a constitutional crisis and why does it matter?

Most adults in this country know that there is a constitution, and that it confers the right to talk shit and the right to carry as many guns as you can strap on, and also some other stuff further down. Varying percentages of people will know specifics about other portions, even going so far as to know about the whole thing end to end. This helps if you're going to try to run things or want to keep tabs on the people who already do.

The country used to be run by people who understood the principles and methods contained in the document. Quite a few of them are still in office though, sadly, not the Oval Office at the moment. And this is the source of constitutional crises, one after another and sometimes piled two or three deep.

Constitutionally, Congress is supposed to have delineated powers and responsibilities, one of which is to defend against a dictatorial president acting like a monarch. In the faster and faster paced arena of international relations from the end of World War II until today, the executive branch has needed to be able to react nimbly to changing circumstances. Congress has ceded power to the executive branch on the basis that the president's people and the departments could be trusted to make good decisions in the national interest. Then the beginning of the 21st Century saw a massive surrender of Congressional oversight as the nation panicked after the 9-11 attacks.

Partisanship made the situation worse, as well as anti-democratic forces in the business sector. Business interests have pumped money into both parties, but really took over in the GOP. They use their elected employees to advance the concept of centralized leadership and limited voting. This puts the Constitution under stress, which has increased steadily since 1981. But only recently did the ideological and financial pressure groups decide that the basic concept of the United States as we had known it wasn't worth supporting anymore.

Wealth is global. Jobs are sent to other countries by corporate titans in this one without a second thought. A rich person's net worth might be described in a US publication in US currency, but it's a multinational fortune. A publication in another country would translate it into the currency with which its readers are familiar, because ultimately it doesn't make that much difference. Filthy rich is filthy rich in any language.

Ideology is global. Religious zealots who want to claim the planet for their One True God® might assign a value to a particular nation as crucial to whatever piece of their mythology that they're trying to enact, but the goal overall is world domination, same as it ever was. Business leaders and religious leaders just use people. Some of the religious ones might mean well, but at some point the needs of an abstract god will take precedence over any individual or group that seems to be impeding progress toward the Grand and Glorious Day of whatever the fck.

So: the most powerful influences on the current regime are greed and coercive religion. The founders wrote extensively against both of these, but they acknowledged that the only real defense against them was an educated and informed populace.

Greed and ideology have infected Congress and the Judicial Branch. The federal courts were supposed to act as the referee when it came to both executive overreach and Congress passing laws that conflicted with the Constitution. However, between ambitious judges who can be bought for a few luxury vacations and a motor home, and religious hardliners on the bench with them, the Supreme Court, and quite a bit of the rest of the judiciary has become a tool of corporate and religious interests under the umbrella of the Republican Party. At the same time, Republicans in the House and Senate don't act as a check on executive power, they act as willing and energetic enablers. They have no pride and no sense of their own power, bowing instead to the mighty president.

On the Democratic side, the stark division between two opposing teams rather than "loyal opposition" has led them to have to defend their own occupants of the White House perhaps more than they might have when the branches of government were more distinct and feeling their own power. That being said, they are much more likely than the Republicans to consign one of their own members for discipline and penalties, which usually blows up in their faces as they lose a seat once their erring colleague has been ousted. We do the right thing and no one is inspired. At the same time, Republicans behave in openly corrupt ways and everyone just shrugs. The public is steeped in the notion that absolutely all politicians are completely scummy, and the Republicans know that the system is so broken from their sabotage that no one can really hurt them. This is especially true now that they control so much of the courts.

So what's a constitutional crisis? The whole damn thing is a constitutional crisis. But out on the street the sun doesn't suddenly darken, or the earth rumble and shake every time corrupt scumbags take away a little more freedom, hurt marginalized groups, start fights with our allies and cozy up to our global rivals. Life seems basically unchanged. Did anyone notice a sudden drastic difference in their lives this summer, when the Supreme Court made the president an untouchable king? No.

No regular person will be motivated by the words "constitutional crisis" any more than they are motivated by the words "climate change" or "mass extinction event." Nothing hits like a massive asteroid impact, so it goes virtually unnoticed. We just keep getting up and going to work each day, hoping to stay housed and fed, and afraid of having to pay for medical care.

The consequences show up off to the side, happening to "other people." The reactions from those unaffected range from, "It sucks to be you," to "thoughts and prayers."

I'm sure there were Germans who managed to be just the right age and in just the right place to go through the entire loss of World War II without missing a meal or facing an enemy directly. The same thing is true here. Lots and lots of people will experience only the basic economic challenges of late stage capitalism on an overpopulated planet and never believe that they could have made anything better by so simple and stupid a thing as voting. Maybe they're right, since really adjusting our course away from collapse would require levels of sensitivity that our species has never exhibited in all of history. Oddly, it is possible to make a great destructive difference with your silly little vote. We are where we are because of a combination of people who voted directly for it and people who didn't vote at all.

Have they got us by the founding document?

 I keep seeing posts on Xwitter asking whether we should impeach Clarence Thomas. Other posts ask about investigating and prosecuting members of Congress and other public and political figures for crimes associated with the Trump administration.

Of course we should. The Constitution provides a few avenues through which this can be done, and the legend of the Rule of Law in this country promotes the belief that the public should welcome it. Investigate fully and fairly. Penalize appropriately.

The problem is that the government is not the Constitution. It is the visible manifestation of the intentions of the Constitution. It relies on people to execute the programming written into the Constitution. Partisan people. And it all plays out in front of an audience constantly being recruited by the two major political parties and a myriad of fringe groups.

You'll have your own opinion about which of the two major parties is more corrupt and why it's the Republicans. It's easy to spout the truism "power corrupts," and point to political machinery in strongholds of either party. How about this? Corruption empowers. Look at Jimmy Carter. A nice guy who made it all the way to presidency of the United States, and then spent his retirement helping poor people get houses. While he was in office he was terrible at playing the power games necessary to outmaneuver political opponents and impress the public. A little bit of sleaziness could have shined up his image.

Anyone who stays in the game develops a cloud of suspicion around them. No human reaches a position of power without offending someone, or worse. The more entitled to power a person feels, the more they will treat others as objects to be used. Power selects for corruption.

Power also selects for nobility. Some leaders have the ego to envision themselves in a prominent role, but the integrity to respect the humanity in at least some of the people they deal with as peers, rivals, and constituents. The greater the recognition of humanity, the higher the level of actual nobility. These are the people who concede elections when they lose, acknowledge their mistakes, and accept the just penalties for more serious transgressions.

The Constitution was designed to protect us from authoritarian leaders. But the country itself was formed by compromises between factions with opposing views of who gets the rights of full citizenship, and how the governments of states interact with federal authority. As the country expanded and developed, private wealth gained unanticipated power. At first this seemed to be a point of pride, that hardworking Americans could amass fortunes that rivaled the old money of Europe. It was only fitting that these achievers should exert leverage on the government. Weren't they of the people? Shouldn't the country be for them, as leading citizens?

We're still arguing over the place that massive wealth should have compared to the workers who generate the wealth. In the meantime, the country still needs to run. Power gravitates to the people best placed to exert it. The members of the Republican Party, and the billionaires pouring money into increasingly questionable plans for the country are already framing the constitutionally outlined processes for dealing with criminals who infiltrate government as totalitarian attacks on legitimate political opponents. Americans who have absorbed decades of anti-government rhetoric and stories about totalitarian regimes in other countries don't scrutinize the critical differences between a righteous defense of citizen government and American liberty, and a genuine act of dictatorial revenge.

The Republican Party declared war on the United States when Ronald Reagan gave his commandment that no Republican shall speak ill of another Republican. It squashed intra-party dissent and set them on the path to perceiving themselves as the only true Americans. It began the rightward drag that has dumped us here on the threshold of genuine fascism.

The f-word gets thrown around a lot, so I can't blame busy people for just tuning it out as more hype. Just remember that one day the boy who cried wolf actually got eaten by a wolf. If you never have a fire drill, how do you know what to do when there's a fire?

To get to the point where we could even consider investigating and prosecuting all of the criminals associated with the Trump administration, we first have to remove the GOP from power in Congress, deny them the presidency, and break their power at the state level and below. Then we have to remain vigilant so that the Democratic Party doesn't succumb to its own forces of corruption, because corruption cozies up to power.

Citizen government requires constant attention. This alone is why overworked, tired people are tempted by an authoritarian leader and his political machine, so that they don't have to think about it anymore. It's all nicely bleached and homogenized.

Our country has tried traitors before, and investigated presidents. What stops us now, besides the decades of paranoia cultivated in susceptible conservative voters, is the sheer scale of it: so many people in all three branches of the federal government and multiple state governments. Private citizens. Foreign agents. It's too big, too close to focus on. If ever something did need to be prosecuted to prove that the Constitution is real and powerful, it's this mess. Republicans are going to have to acknowledge it and join the Democrats in calling it out and taking it down. Many of them won't. Even if none of them do, the Constitution, the undying document from which we all get our notions of individual rights, must be defended.

It will be very hard to punish the most powerful criminals in the Trump administration, because they have legends now. Lock them up and they become folk heroes. If they die in prison they become martyrs. It will be very frustrating to watch, but nowhere near as frustrating as watching them skate away with no consequences, or far worse, getting elected again to cinch their theocracy and take us all to church with them. It was another Republican who declared to the world, "If you're not with us, you're against us." That all or nothing mindset is deadly for a country that wants to think of itself as the Land of the Free.

Civilization: Humanity's Greatest Blunder

Civilization is the mechanism for concentrating and exerting power. Offspring of the lust for power, civilization has created all the problems that compassion seeks to cure. Without consolidated power, evil can only work piecemeal. Without consolidated power, there is no prize. No prize, no contest. No contest, no cheating.

Civilization started innocently enough. Some geniuses figured out that plants and animals people eat would be easier to find if we kept them together in one place conducive to their proliferation. Some places were better than others. Crops and herds grew in those places more than in others. The people stuck in the less comfortable environments organized themselves to see how they could improve their circumstances in various ways, through trade, conquest, or assimilation.

Without question, civilization has gradually made life more comfortable. I wouldn't want to give up the creature comforts. But since no one can be trusted to run things, and thousands of years of resentments keep grievances fresh through generations, we've probably hit our peak as far as attaining a peaceful and happy world.

When altruism reaches the point where people kill themselves almost daily for the sake of killing other people they see as opponents to their ideology, you see how far the lust for power has come. Murder-suicide is always a problem, because the knowledge of inevitable mortality makes some people unstable. Add the allure of a heroic contribution to a better future, and people who might be teetering, wrestling with the decision whether to embrace suicide, get a new incentive to choose flamboyant death. Political manipulators will encourage the tendency. Manipulators always know how to get the most out of other people's emotions. Political manipulators use these controls to advance grand plans.

Civilization helped the human population surge, and life spans increase. Civilization nurtured technology. Technology advanced civilization. Industrialization increased the speed and efficiency with which natural resources could be gouged out of the Earth and turned into useful objects. The byproducts of these processes have been wealth, filth, and disregard for each other and for nature.

Civilization could have been good. If you're a hopeful sort, you probably believe it still could be. Past performance does not guarantee future results, as the investment shills like to warn us before we hand them the check. The greedy, the angry and the far-too-clever stand in ranks between us and that brighter future.

Your Chilling Thought for the Day

When George H.W. Bush chose Dan Quayle as his vice president, many of us joked that it was Bush's life insurance policy. Who would take out the president if that would simply put the photogenic but mentally void Quayle in the Oval Office?

Now it is 2012. Mitt Romney has chosen ultra-conservative poster boy Paul Ryan as his vice president. Since the far right would love to have a zealot like Ryan in full command, doesn't that give a faction already known for gun-toting, threat-spouting and blowing up federal buildings a huge incentive to remove Romney from office as soon after the inauguration as possible, in a way that automatically places Ryan in charge?

In an article yesterday, Bill Moyers pointed out all the ways in which Paul Ryan meets the far right's strongest expectations. He did not venture that this choice presents a physical risk to Romney. I came up with that myself. But if I, a tree-hugging peacenik, can think of it, so can people more inclined to act on the impulse.

A more patient approach for conservatives would simply let Ryan call the shots from the copilot's seat and then run him for the presidency of whatever is left of the country after two Romney terms. He's young enough and in much better health than the country's previous leader from second chair, Dick Cheney. Romney could even come up with an excuse to step aside after one term for Ryan to run that much sooner. Romney barely has a quarter of a billion dollars. He's really the poor boy in the wealthy elite. With all the money funding the right wing, I'm sure he can be bought. Someone with real wealth can provide a very nice severance package for him.

None of this matters if he does not get elected. If Barack Obama remains in office for a second term the right wing will have to continue to inflict their damage through lower offices and obstructionist tactics to keep the economy tough so the majority of citizens will perhaps be more susceptible to persuasion or coercion next time.