A State of A Union.
Feb. 7th, 2020 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptThe Constitution of the United States demands that from time to time the President inform the Congress of the state of the union and lay out goals and policies the administration plans to pursue.
Given the current administrator, it's very tempting to sum up everything simply as "Lies, Dammed Lies, and Statistics" and call it a night, there's always the possibility that something useful will be present and need commentary.
This is also in the context of the impeachment process still occurring at that moment, although the day afterward would be the vote to acquit the current administrator of the charges bright against him. By this point in time, the Republicans of the Senate had already signaled their complete unwillingness to treat the charges as anything other than partisan decisions. Because of that decision, and all the other ones that have been made that prove the Republicans put their party and their selfish interests above that of that nation, I wouldn't be opposed to that group of Republicans obtaining the title "the treacherous Republicans" or possibly even "the traitorous Republicans." (With the exception of Willard "Mitt" Romney, who did more than lip service to his professed faith in a speech and then voted to convict on the abuse of power article.)
In any case, let us begin. I'll be using the annotated transcript provided by Politico as I read the speech.
Mostly because they point out that right at the beginning of what is usually a speech has traditionally been about a vision for the country reading on policy decisions and honoring specific persons, the presumably Republican members of the Congress began chanting "four more years" after the Administrator was introduced. And the Current Administrator's decision to turn away from the hands extended by the Speaker of the House. So the setting is already more obviously partisan and tense than usual.
The opening talks about the economy recovering, with no understanding of when it started and the reality that the indicators you use to judge whether things are going well or not will shape your understanding of whether things are actually going well or not. And then segues into the idea that this administrator has done great things for standing up to other nations and regaining nationalist destiny, with special pride for the economy and for military strength. Which sounds much more like an autocrat's list of pride than a republic's or a democracy's. His idea of inclusiveness is solely economic rather than cultural or individual, despite claiming his agenda is "pro-worker, pro-family". Unsurprising for someone who says the borders are secure as part of his reasons why the state of the union is strong, giving no acknowledgement to the treatment of migrants, refugees, and citizens alike if they don't look like him, including the separation of families with no intention of ever reuniting them if they should all pass through the border. And who clearly is more interested in culture war and enriching the richest than in attempting to provide equity to all.
A long litany of how unemployment is the lowest for everyone, including women, minorities, and those without diplomas, which he claims is the result of reversing the failed policies of the previous administration, and then declaring that things are better, as well, because less people are on supplemental nutritional aid. Which is more due to trying to make less of the poors eligible for the program than in people having less need for it. This leads into some statistical comparisons of differing tree fruit: the number of people who left the workforce in the last administration versus the number that have joined in the current, as if there weren't plenty of jobs created in the last administration or people leaving the workforce in this one, and that the rate of worth growth is much faster for the bottom part than for the top, conveniently eliding the very real and growing disparity of the absolute numbers of worth between the bottom and the top. Similarly, wages going up has no direct comparisons with profits or costs, although the performance of the stock market is mentioned, so we can guess that companies are doing much better than their workers and their retirement accounts. (And confirm this as the Administrator touts special zones created where companies that invest in them won't have to pay as much in taxes in return.)
After a quick mention about criminal justice reform accomplishments (which look pretty dubious in the face of continued police actions and decisions that still disproportionately affect minorities, as well as legislative decisions in states about denying released felons their franchise unless they paid an exorbitant cost), the Administrator touts as a positive that the United States produces the most in oil and natural gas, which is not a thing to brag about if you acknowledge the reality of climate disasters and their causes. Much, much later in the speech does he talk about a tree-planting initiative for a very short time.
On trade, after more chicanery about factory losses and gains, the Administrator touts that for once, "repeal and replace" worked for NAFTA, even though the new deal is mostly the same as the old deal. (And, as is noted, it needed a lot of love and work from labor unions before they would endorse it.) The Administrator very much wants to portray the United States as having been treated unfairly by everyone else, even though it's pretty clear to most that the United States is not generally negotiating from a position of weakness on most trade and economic matters, and the Administrator is very keen to get his jabs in at China, so that he can set up a trade antagonism and paint them as villains who were stopped by the power and might of the United States telling them to.
"Reversed the failing policies of the previous administration" is one of his favorite phrases, with as much as he wants to be seen as a partisan champion who will usher in a golden age of dominance and not having to care about what anyone else thinks. He also is very keen on making sure that anyone who disagrees with him is a socialist that leads the country to ruin, as opposed to his conception of "freedom" that seems to be "freedom for the wealthiest, penury and ruin for everyone else."
Which comes into sharp relief when he talks about the greatness of the military and in getting other countries to spend more on their militaries, and then touts the Space Force, using a Tuskegee Airman and his grandchild as the frame, before proclaiming "failing government schools" and advocating for more ways to continue starving those schools of resources, while those who can afford private education remain unaffected. The bone thrown to this is the idea of vocational and technical education for all high schools and mentioning better funding for HBCUs, but there's precious little time spent on the details of that compared to using a child and their school choice scholarship as a prop.
The Administrator then lies that he and his administration intend to always protect the most vulnerable through keeping protections for pre-existing conditions (which they are suing to remove), protecting Social Security (which they want privatized), and protecting Medicare, which he then goes on a tirade against those who want to extend Medicare to all people, calling them socialists who want to destroy the choice of doctor and insurer and extend care to people who are in the country illegally. The reality is that plenty of people would happily ditch their insurer for a system that didn't try to bankrupt them, got them the care they actually needed, and gave them the opportunity to have a practitioner that actually listened and supported them. And that might have the extra capacity to support people who are in the country and keep them from getting more sick because they can't afford or access care. The Administrator wants you to think that it's a zero-sum game between vulnerable seniors and greedy lawbreakers and that his opponents would prioritize the lawbreakers, force the country to subsidize their care, and leave the vulnerable seniors to die. Unsurprisingly, those same seniors are probably more likely to vote conservative and will have less barriers in place for their voting than the people that want a fair system for everyone and for outcomes not to be dictated by how much money you have and what color your skin is.
This is also in conjunction, though, with praising what he thinks will keep migrants out, so it would seem to be a contradiction to set up both of these scenarios so close together.
On what the Administrator could say was progress on health care and costs, if he needed to cite sources, it would be his predecessor, and his championing of one bill was met with the House Democrats reminding him that they have already done the work, if only his Senate would let the bill in and do debate with it. What he wants and what he will fund are not always the same thing, and on public health, the tough stance against China disappeared with talk of cooperation between the two nations with regard to coronavirus.
Using a baby born prematurely as his prop, the Administrator fed his dominionist supporters well by calling for a nationwide ban on "late-term" abortions before touting parental leave policies, tax credits, and additional investments in child care. It's at least internally consistent, even if it's not actually a large part of the speech.
And there's a few pittances of sentences about rebuilding infrastructure (focused on car travel) and bringing high-speed Web access to the country.
Regrettably, this would be the last portion of the speech devoted to public policy objectives and accomplishments. The next large segment is praising ICE by very specifically framing them as heroes against a teeming mass of undocumented immigrants with violent crime records, specifically eliding all of the undocumented whose sole crime is being undocumented in favor of gorn stories that completely misrepresent what sanctuary city laws actually do. To hear him tell it, being undocumented is a "Get Out of Jail Free" card that trumps any other reason why authorities would detain a person, and the inevitable results of death and assault the complete fault of the sanctuary laws that discourage cooperation with an entity with a known track record of harassment, intimidation, violence, and deception. Using a family member of a victim of violent crime as a prop, as the cherry on top of this particular piece.
He can't resist proclaiming how tough his borders are now, saying he stopped the release of people awaiting immigration court from coming into the country, and how there are far fewer people attempting the trek thanks to his policies. In that regard, he is correct, but it is not because there is less demand for immigration or because his wall policies are somehow working, but instead because there is a far greater chance of suffering violence, either at the border or while waiting for one's case to resolve, and the demonstrated inhumanity of the conditions in which immigrants are kept and families separated. Because he wants a very specific kind of immigrant, one that looks like him, has wealth like him, and has similar contempt for others like him.
Then comes more culture war platitudes about judges who will "uphold our Constitution as written", defending the right to pray in public schools (which is only under siege if you believe that a student or faculty member being told they have to pray on their own time and they cannot coerce or force anyone else into praying with them is attacking the right to pray on school), the right to own and use guns that have no purpose apart from killing other humans, and the insistence that Christianity is the only true morality against Islam, the religion of terrorism.
(There's also a small bit here about wanting to kickstart the next space race, which, in light of the Space Force, sounds much less like it's about science and more about military applications and shouting "first!" for various situations.)
The Administrator uses a captured, tortured and then killed soldier as his prop in describing the killing of a high-level ISIL operative ("ended his miserable life") and a different killed solider in describing his decision to kill Qasem Soleimami of Iran when given the opportunity. (Even though it became immediately apparent he had no idea what the possible fallout from that would be.) He then has the audacity to tell Iran they need to stop proliferation (after removing the United States from a deal that was working) and that if Iran decides to become a puppet state, the United States will remove the sanctions the Administrator claims is crippling the country. But the military is not, of course, interested in being the world's police force.
Right before using his address to stage the "Surprise! Your spouse is home from deployment!" in a move clearly meant for the cameras and the audience at home, and that the Republicans provide the requisite "USA! USA!" chant I would expect of any studio or stadium audience exposed to this particular bit. I can't really fault them for good execution of something, but it seems like this kind of thing should be used in advancement of an announcement that many more troops are coming home, rather than our apparent shift from Iraq and Afghanistan to Iran as the site of endless war. And since this particular heartstrings tug is right at the end, before the insistence that the country has always been great and is being made greater and greater, it's clearly meant to be the thing we remember about the speech, instead of all the other things that were mentioned in it. Instead of the policy (or its lack thereof) which is nominally the point of the address.
There's one last thing that deserves special attention: During the speech, when talking about wanting to defeat childhood cancer and the HIV-AIDS crisis, the Administrator used Rush Limbaugh as the prop, given that he has recently received a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and then the Administrator proceeded to award him one of the highest civilian honors that can be given, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Rush Limbaugh is a bigot, a peddler of lies, the person for whom the Dittoheads are named, and otherwise a person who is distinctly unqualified for the award, according to its stated criteria, but this is coming from someone who believes they deserve to have been awarded the prize paid by Alfred Nobel's legacy, so their lack of care and consideration in the award is not surprising. For as much as they might complain about the practice elsewhere, this medal seems very much like the participation trophy that someone gives to another so that everyone has an award, or the kind of thing where someone gets first prize because they were buddies with the award committee and not because of the quality of their entry. As with everything this Administrator does to try and burnish of otherwise turn into something profound, it instead ends up cheapening and making the award crass.
To say that the Speaker of the House felt strongly about the speech would betray the action taken at the end of it. Faced with the alternative, the Speaker expressed her contempt for the speech and its speaker by physically ripping a printed copy of the speech apart. The action itself overshadowed the official rebuttal by the Democrats, delivered by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Governor Whitmer used the time alloted to explain the difference between words and actions and to show that the actions of the administration have been harmful to the people he most desperately wants to court again, at least economically. And that they haven't actually done a whole lot of anything, despite the clear need and the passed legislation from the House that sits untouched because it came from Democrats. Well done, Governor.
And now, now that we know there's no accountability present in the Republicans, now is the time where there has to be yelling and helping and fighting back against those who now feel they have an even freer hand to do whatever they want. One hopes that there are many things under seal waiting for this Administration as they exit. And that their exit is as soon as possible. What I have concerns about is once again people will be seduced by promises to only hurt the people they hate, despite having spent four years learning that asking the government to hurt others usually means you get hurt in the process.
Given the current administrator, it's very tempting to sum up everything simply as "Lies, Dammed Lies, and Statistics" and call it a night, there's always the possibility that something useful will be present and need commentary.
This is also in the context of the impeachment process still occurring at that moment, although the day afterward would be the vote to acquit the current administrator of the charges bright against him. By this point in time, the Republicans of the Senate had already signaled their complete unwillingness to treat the charges as anything other than partisan decisions. Because of that decision, and all the other ones that have been made that prove the Republicans put their party and their selfish interests above that of that nation, I wouldn't be opposed to that group of Republicans obtaining the title "the treacherous Republicans" or possibly even "the traitorous Republicans." (With the exception of Willard "Mitt" Romney, who did more than lip service to his professed faith in a speech and then voted to convict on the abuse of power article.)
In any case, let us begin. I'll be using the annotated transcript provided by Politico as I read the speech.
Mostly because they point out that right at the beginning of what is usually a speech has traditionally been about a vision for the country reading on policy decisions and honoring specific persons, the presumably Republican members of the Congress began chanting "four more years" after the Administrator was introduced. And the Current Administrator's decision to turn away from the hands extended by the Speaker of the House. So the setting is already more obviously partisan and tense than usual.
The opening talks about the economy recovering, with no understanding of when it started and the reality that the indicators you use to judge whether things are going well or not will shape your understanding of whether things are actually going well or not. And then segues into the idea that this administrator has done great things for standing up to other nations and regaining nationalist destiny, with special pride for the economy and for military strength. Which sounds much more like an autocrat's list of pride than a republic's or a democracy's. His idea of inclusiveness is solely economic rather than cultural or individual, despite claiming his agenda is "pro-worker, pro-family". Unsurprising for someone who says the borders are secure as part of his reasons why the state of the union is strong, giving no acknowledgement to the treatment of migrants, refugees, and citizens alike if they don't look like him, including the separation of families with no intention of ever reuniting them if they should all pass through the border. And who clearly is more interested in culture war and enriching the richest than in attempting to provide equity to all.
A long litany of how unemployment is the lowest for everyone, including women, minorities, and those without diplomas, which he claims is the result of reversing the failed policies of the previous administration, and then declaring that things are better, as well, because less people are on supplemental nutritional aid. Which is more due to trying to make less of the poors eligible for the program than in people having less need for it. This leads into some statistical comparisons of differing tree fruit: the number of people who left the workforce in the last administration versus the number that have joined in the current, as if there weren't plenty of jobs created in the last administration or people leaving the workforce in this one, and that the rate of worth growth is much faster for the bottom part than for the top, conveniently eliding the very real and growing disparity of the absolute numbers of worth between the bottom and the top. Similarly, wages going up has no direct comparisons with profits or costs, although the performance of the stock market is mentioned, so we can guess that companies are doing much better than their workers and their retirement accounts. (And confirm this as the Administrator touts special zones created where companies that invest in them won't have to pay as much in taxes in return.)
After a quick mention about criminal justice reform accomplishments (which look pretty dubious in the face of continued police actions and decisions that still disproportionately affect minorities, as well as legislative decisions in states about denying released felons their franchise unless they paid an exorbitant cost), the Administrator touts as a positive that the United States produces the most in oil and natural gas, which is not a thing to brag about if you acknowledge the reality of climate disasters and their causes. Much, much later in the speech does he talk about a tree-planting initiative for a very short time.
On trade, after more chicanery about factory losses and gains, the Administrator touts that for once, "repeal and replace" worked for NAFTA, even though the new deal is mostly the same as the old deal. (And, as is noted, it needed a lot of love and work from labor unions before they would endorse it.) The Administrator very much wants to portray the United States as having been treated unfairly by everyone else, even though it's pretty clear to most that the United States is not generally negotiating from a position of weakness on most trade and economic matters, and the Administrator is very keen to get his jabs in at China, so that he can set up a trade antagonism and paint them as villains who were stopped by the power and might of the United States telling them to.
"Reversed the failing policies of the previous administration" is one of his favorite phrases, with as much as he wants to be seen as a partisan champion who will usher in a golden age of dominance and not having to care about what anyone else thinks. He also is very keen on making sure that anyone who disagrees with him is a socialist that leads the country to ruin, as opposed to his conception of "freedom" that seems to be "freedom for the wealthiest, penury and ruin for everyone else."
Which comes into sharp relief when he talks about the greatness of the military and in getting other countries to spend more on their militaries, and then touts the Space Force, using a Tuskegee Airman and his grandchild as the frame, before proclaiming "failing government schools" and advocating for more ways to continue starving those schools of resources, while those who can afford private education remain unaffected. The bone thrown to this is the idea of vocational and technical education for all high schools and mentioning better funding for HBCUs, but there's precious little time spent on the details of that compared to using a child and their school choice scholarship as a prop.
The Administrator then lies that he and his administration intend to always protect the most vulnerable through keeping protections for pre-existing conditions (which they are suing to remove), protecting Social Security (which they want privatized), and protecting Medicare, which he then goes on a tirade against those who want to extend Medicare to all people, calling them socialists who want to destroy the choice of doctor and insurer and extend care to people who are in the country illegally. The reality is that plenty of people would happily ditch their insurer for a system that didn't try to bankrupt them, got them the care they actually needed, and gave them the opportunity to have a practitioner that actually listened and supported them. And that might have the extra capacity to support people who are in the country and keep them from getting more sick because they can't afford or access care. The Administrator wants you to think that it's a zero-sum game between vulnerable seniors and greedy lawbreakers and that his opponents would prioritize the lawbreakers, force the country to subsidize their care, and leave the vulnerable seniors to die. Unsurprisingly, those same seniors are probably more likely to vote conservative and will have less barriers in place for their voting than the people that want a fair system for everyone and for outcomes not to be dictated by how much money you have and what color your skin is.
This is also in conjunction, though, with praising what he thinks will keep migrants out, so it would seem to be a contradiction to set up both of these scenarios so close together.
On what the Administrator could say was progress on health care and costs, if he needed to cite sources, it would be his predecessor, and his championing of one bill was met with the House Democrats reminding him that they have already done the work, if only his Senate would let the bill in and do debate with it. What he wants and what he will fund are not always the same thing, and on public health, the tough stance against China disappeared with talk of cooperation between the two nations with regard to coronavirus.
Using a baby born prematurely as his prop, the Administrator fed his dominionist supporters well by calling for a nationwide ban on "late-term" abortions before touting parental leave policies, tax credits, and additional investments in child care. It's at least internally consistent, even if it's not actually a large part of the speech.
And there's a few pittances of sentences about rebuilding infrastructure (focused on car travel) and bringing high-speed Web access to the country.
Regrettably, this would be the last portion of the speech devoted to public policy objectives and accomplishments. The next large segment is praising ICE by very specifically framing them as heroes against a teeming mass of undocumented immigrants with violent crime records, specifically eliding all of the undocumented whose sole crime is being undocumented in favor of gorn stories that completely misrepresent what sanctuary city laws actually do. To hear him tell it, being undocumented is a "Get Out of Jail Free" card that trumps any other reason why authorities would detain a person, and the inevitable results of death and assault the complete fault of the sanctuary laws that discourage cooperation with an entity with a known track record of harassment, intimidation, violence, and deception. Using a family member of a victim of violent crime as a prop, as the cherry on top of this particular piece.
He can't resist proclaiming how tough his borders are now, saying he stopped the release of people awaiting immigration court from coming into the country, and how there are far fewer people attempting the trek thanks to his policies. In that regard, he is correct, but it is not because there is less demand for immigration or because his wall policies are somehow working, but instead because there is a far greater chance of suffering violence, either at the border or while waiting for one's case to resolve, and the demonstrated inhumanity of the conditions in which immigrants are kept and families separated. Because he wants a very specific kind of immigrant, one that looks like him, has wealth like him, and has similar contempt for others like him.
Then comes more culture war platitudes about judges who will "uphold our Constitution as written", defending the right to pray in public schools (which is only under siege if you believe that a student or faculty member being told they have to pray on their own time and they cannot coerce or force anyone else into praying with them is attacking the right to pray on school), the right to own and use guns that have no purpose apart from killing other humans, and the insistence that Christianity is the only true morality against Islam, the religion of terrorism.
(There's also a small bit here about wanting to kickstart the next space race, which, in light of the Space Force, sounds much less like it's about science and more about military applications and shouting "first!" for various situations.)
The Administrator uses a captured, tortured and then killed soldier as his prop in describing the killing of a high-level ISIL operative ("ended his miserable life") and a different killed solider in describing his decision to kill Qasem Soleimami of Iran when given the opportunity. (Even though it became immediately apparent he had no idea what the possible fallout from that would be.) He then has the audacity to tell Iran they need to stop proliferation (after removing the United States from a deal that was working) and that if Iran decides to become a puppet state, the United States will remove the sanctions the Administrator claims is crippling the country. But the military is not, of course, interested in being the world's police force.
Right before using his address to stage the "Surprise! Your spouse is home from deployment!" in a move clearly meant for the cameras and the audience at home, and that the Republicans provide the requisite "USA! USA!" chant I would expect of any studio or stadium audience exposed to this particular bit. I can't really fault them for good execution of something, but it seems like this kind of thing should be used in advancement of an announcement that many more troops are coming home, rather than our apparent shift from Iraq and Afghanistan to Iran as the site of endless war. And since this particular heartstrings tug is right at the end, before the insistence that the country has always been great and is being made greater and greater, it's clearly meant to be the thing we remember about the speech, instead of all the other things that were mentioned in it. Instead of the policy (or its lack thereof) which is nominally the point of the address.
There's one last thing that deserves special attention: During the speech, when talking about wanting to defeat childhood cancer and the HIV-AIDS crisis, the Administrator used Rush Limbaugh as the prop, given that he has recently received a stage 4 cancer diagnosis, and then the Administrator proceeded to award him one of the highest civilian honors that can be given, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Rush Limbaugh is a bigot, a peddler of lies, the person for whom the Dittoheads are named, and otherwise a person who is distinctly unqualified for the award, according to its stated criteria, but this is coming from someone who believes they deserve to have been awarded the prize paid by Alfred Nobel's legacy, so their lack of care and consideration in the award is not surprising. For as much as they might complain about the practice elsewhere, this medal seems very much like the participation trophy that someone gives to another so that everyone has an award, or the kind of thing where someone gets first prize because they were buddies with the award committee and not because of the quality of their entry. As with everything this Administrator does to try and burnish of otherwise turn into something profound, it instead ends up cheapening and making the award crass.
To say that the Speaker of the House felt strongly about the speech would betray the action taken at the end of it. Faced with the alternative, the Speaker expressed her contempt for the speech and its speaker by physically ripping a printed copy of the speech apart. The action itself overshadowed the official rebuttal by the Democrats, delivered by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Governor Whitmer used the time alloted to explain the difference between words and actions and to show that the actions of the administration have been harmful to the people he most desperately wants to court again, at least economically. And that they haven't actually done a whole lot of anything, despite the clear need and the passed legislation from the House that sits untouched because it came from Democrats. Well done, Governor.
And now, now that we know there's no accountability present in the Republicans, now is the time where there has to be yelling and helping and fighting back against those who now feel they have an even freer hand to do whatever they want. One hopes that there are many things under seal waiting for this Administration as they exit. And that their exit is as soon as possible. What I have concerns about is once again people will be seduced by promises to only hurt the people they hate, despite having spent four years learning that asking the government to hurt others usually means you get hurt in the process.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-08 04:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-08 04:35 pm (UTC)State of The Onion
Date: 2020-02-09 12:55 pm (UTC)I am still bewildered by last week's deafening silence at *The President of the United States* being fined two million dollars for defrauding charities and...
...Nothing.
No outcry, no new Impeachment, barely any mention in the media and everyone's "Yeah, whatever. Wednesday".
I could try "This is not normal" as if it mattered: but actually, it's normal.
Conversely, any Democrat who gets so much as a parking fine will be hounded out of office, but we knew that: normal, too, these days.
You live in a failed state, and the place I live in - but no longer work in - is bending over to praise and emulate the USA: someone here likes the political and media environment you've got, and we're getting it soon.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 04:47 pm (UTC)Re: State of The Onion
Date: 2020-02-12 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 05:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-12 05:39 pm (UTC)Jumping into the Dumpster
Date: 2020-02-12 07:18 pm (UTC)Ireland, so far, is escaping it.
However, the United States still has a legal system with real teeth, and it does occasionally bite the powerful.
Among other things, pretty much anyone who has ever given or received money to or from Paul Manafort is in the frame for sanctions violations; likewise, Jack Cohen is a walking tarball for historic racketeering charges; and any crime affecting or transacted on the financial markets in New York - or New York Real Estate - is a target for the *state* prosecutor, whose actions are entirely unaffected by a Presidential pardon.
The failure of the media to investigate the moral character of prominent Republicans has done them no favours: it has emboldened them, and this has - for now - enriched them; but a failure to weed out the stupid and dishonest earlier in their careers has now resulted in them being 'free' to commit far larger and more serious crimes, while still being stupid.
That will cast a long shadow, and some of them will almost certainly end up in jail within the next decade.
Re: Jumping into the Dumpster
Date: 2020-02-12 09:24 pm (UTC)It has been interesting watching the Republican Party become the preferred choice of people who want to see others hurt and people who want to see their own beliefs enshrined to their benefit (and everyone else getting hurt), such that they are willing to look the other way on so many other things that would otherwise be dealbreakers, just for the possibility of their own gain, or, more likely, that someone else gets hurt.