Anyone who’s seen a loved one deal with stroke can see what’s happening here. The current occupant of the Oval Office is almost certainly taking blood thinners to prevent – or remediate – a TIA, or worse. He can barely hold his head up, his public utterances are the stuff that gets Papaw’s car keys taken away, and the press continues to act as if nothing is wrong at all by comparison to how Joe Biden was branded a senile half-corpse a year and a half ago. The question of whether any one person can take charge of the MAGAtsis going to be a serious concern sooner than later, and it’s the same problem that’s existed for a decade: the Republicans don’t have one person who can take the torch from Trump but at least half a dozen who believe they can.
This is an old old story – half a century, at this point. These things happen when the GOP and the mainstream press can’t accept that they were wrong – about Vietnam, about Clinton, about Iraq, about Trump. So the people who were *right* have to be discredited – because otherwise the press would have to acknowledge their wrongness. And right now, with three-fifths of the country out of patience with the bullshit, the white house press corpse [sic] is as hapless and helpless as ever.
It’s going to take so much. The power of billionaires has to be broken, ruthlessly and without ambiguity. A billion dollars has to be treated like a rogue nuke, and as equally unsafe in private hands. the Supreme Court has to be expanded and packed with people who respect the rule of law and reject a blank check for one party. There are entire layers that have to be peeled back to remediate what’s happening here. And it will take the rest of our lives. And it won’t work until enough people are fed up – you need 2/3 of the country to be mad enough to back a change. And while the numbers may be there, or close, the numbers of people willing to take action to turn things over aren’t where they need to be. You need enough people to elect 250 in the House, 54 or 55 in the Senate, a President who can hold their feet to the fire and make it plain they need to vote right, and a public mad enough to let them do what has to be done to clean up the rules and the process.
And we’re going to have to tear down the ballroom, rip down the tacky gold shit, make an affirmative rejection. It happened, and nothing can undo that, but we also need to make it clear that it has been rejected. The bullshit they build in an attempt to gain the continuity with some imagined great past – like all fascists do – has to be hosed down and washed away, and those who made it happen tarred for life. That’s the biggest piece of all: we are going to have to bring back shame, properly targeted and mercilessly pressed, and the kind of people who advocated for revoking women’s suffrage and repealing birthright citizenship need to be more radioactive than David Duke in 1991. “Republican” needs to be synonymous with “pedophile” for the rest of our days. The last decade – hell, the last three decades – need to be looked on like the Gilded Age or the Know-Nothing era, an age of kakistocracy and corruption without parallel.
I’d like to see things on the way back up before I die. It’s not much to ask.