{"id":2477,"date":"2017-07-14T05:31:56","date_gmt":"2017-07-14T13:31:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2477"},"modified":"2017-07-14T05:31:56","modified_gmt":"2017-07-14T13:31:56","slug":"after-the-funeral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2477","title":{"rendered":"After the funeral"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have described last November\u2019s election, and its aftermath, as being like a death in the family. It\u2019s not an idle comparison, the way my father passed: you knew he wasn\u2019t in perfect health, but certainly there was never a reason to think his life<\/em> was at risk, and then suddenly he\u2019s in the hospital, and sure that\u2019s not good but it\u2019s not time to panic, and then all of a sudden they lead you into the dimly-lit room with the only decent furniture in the place, because that\u2019s where they sentence your loved one to die. And then\u2026it\u2019s happened. You cope, you endure, you do what you have to do to get by. But there\u2019s no undoing it. He\u2019s never going to not<\/em> be dead. It happened and you have to live with what comes next.<\/p>\n

The current firestorm around Junior Trump\u2019s shenanigans has illuminated what should have been obvious all along, if only by providing some necessary date and time coordinates. There\u2019s a clear demarcation from which it becomes obvious that there was<\/em> some sort of collaboration between the campaign and nefarious forces, collaboration that already rises to a pretty clear level of criminality, from which you can then ask Howard Baker\u2019s legendary question<\/a> and be pretty sure the answer won\u2019t reflect well. From there, assuming the GOP is willing to allow it to happen (or the Democrats have somehow wrestled back the Congress), you have the prospect of an impeachment – and, for the first time in American history, the actual removal<\/em> of a president short of resignation a la<\/em> Nixon.<\/p>\n

Set aside the chaos that follows from that – or the fact that a Pence administration won\u2019t be materially different on one single policy position, and in some cases may be worse, and would get the additional media cover provided by \u201clook we got rid of Trump, why you bringing up old shit\u201d – and reflect instead on the fact that it happened at all. That a singularly unqualified person, with no political experience whatsoever and criminally compromised by a foreign power, received the nomination of a major political party and was able to engineer an Electoral College win in the absence of a plurality of votes. We got perhaps the worst candidate for national office in recorded history and put him in office with fewer votes than his opponent got.<\/p>\n

What that says is that our system is broken. In some ways it always was. It was conceived in iniquity and birthed in sin, with its \u201cthree fifths\u201d nonsense to appease the South, and was not intended to handle a strong central government whose authority would have to routinely supersede that of its member states. And now it\u2019s made it possible for one side to win the White House without the most votes, repeatedly. This is a flawed process, one that would be under fire constantly from the other side were it not working to their advantage. A Senate Majority Leader who denied so much as a hearing to a Supreme Court nominee for over a year, whose party controls the White House and both houses of Congress, is braying about \u201cunprecedented obstruction\u201d – if there were a God, He would have struck Mitch McConnell in the heart with a streak of lightning 932 times, so that argument is settled. But anyway.<\/p>\n

So what happens now? Even if Trump bites the dust and the GOP is turned out of office across the board in a manner recalling 1974-76, what are we left with? We have a political party still in existence whose members have been radicalized to believe anything they are told by their trusted leadership – which largely consists of conspiracy-mongering media. We have an electoral process that was compromised by bad actors in and out of government and which was swayed by a foreign power, and a nuclear one at that – what do we do about that? We have the precedent of a President elected while stonewalling any effort to explore his finances, his foreign ties or his past conduct – why should any future candidate not do the same? We have net neutrality crucified on behalf of Comcast and Verizon – how do we return to a regulatory framework robust enough to ensure actual competition in broadband and get us within shouting distance of what the rest of the world has? And – most of all – how do we convince the rest of the world that our leadership and our global role can be given any more heft than, say, Italy? Or Russia? Or any other country with a corrupt and compromised political leadership and a public unable to check or contain it?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also something of a Y2K problem – people today roll their eyes and say what a bust the whole Y2K threat was, because millions of people around the world busted their ass to make sure it wouldn\u2019t be a disaster. Right now, there are thousands of people around America and around the world busting ass to contain the damage we inflicted on ourselves – and if they succeed, people will say \u201coh Trump wasn\u2019t that bad\u201d and never correct the problem. So at this point, the deed is done – either we get the disaster, or we get a glide path to the next one because people wouldn\u2019t see the disaster for what it was. But they don\u2019t get it. We don\u2019t get to just go back<\/em> to being America. We don\u2019t get to go back<\/em> at all. I don\u2019t think a lot of people grasped this before last November, and I know there aren\u2019t enough that get it now. The toothpaste doesn\u2019t go back in the tube, the bell can\u2019t be un-rung, maybe you can rebuild the barn but it won\u2019t be the one that burned down\u2026and you may not care for the barn that gets rebuilt.<\/p>\n

I moved away from Alabama about as far as America would let me. If we land in the United States of Alabama, no matter who\u2019s President, I don\u2019t think I\u2019m going to want to stay very long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have described last November\u2019s election, and its aftermath, as being like a death in the family. It\u2019s not an idle comparison, the way my father passed: you knew he wasn\u2019t in perfect health, but certainly there was never a reason to think his life was at risk, and then suddenly he\u2019s in the hospital, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “After the funeral”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2477"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}