Tuesday, May 09, 2017

So Why Isn't Anything A Big Deal Anymore?


So asks the great bard Charlie Pierce in his latest column about  Comey and Flynn.  Read the column.  I did and then shed bitter tears of venom for not having Pierce's gift of the gab.

Never mind.  Charlie correctly frames* that uncomfortable whole-body itch I've had ever since the horrible elections of 2016:

Publicly expressed "values" are upside down, with greed now dressed as prudence and lies as alternative truth.  The powerful on their sky-high gilded balconies pee on us and we call it rain, carefully analyzing which of us truly voted for a rain of urine (but only if it falls on the Others) or a rain of green Pepe frogs, and which  among us foolishly voted for the status quo in this era when any change is better than none, even change from chronic acne to metastatic malignant melanoma.

Thus we get the Flynn farce and the Comey comedy, the latter with its last or latest act only played today. 

You don't have to be a goddess to see that Comey's decision to publish largely fake facts about Hillary Clinton's emails just a few days before the presidential election was aimed at getting Trump elected, and you would not be normal if you didn't feel that this decision was especially disgusting in the light of what we now know about the simultaneously ongoing  investigations into Trump's possible Russian connections.

And whoever you are it's impossible not to ask why Trump decided to fire Comey today, in a letter which stated:

“While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau,”

It's the timing of the firing which is suspicious, given that Trump has been aware of all pertinent Comey-facts for a long time and, indeed, had praised Comey for having the "guts" to reopen the Clinton investigation right before the elections.

So what could possibly have changed?  And is the answer to that question a big deal or not?  Does Trump protest too much in the above quote?  Was Comey shown the door because he is investigating Trump?  Will we now ever know?

And is that a big deal or not?


Sigh, almost nothing is a big deal anymore**.  It's not a big deal that Trump's administration still includes Sebastian Gorka, a man with pretty clear fascist tendencies.  It's not a big deal that Mike Cernovich -- who once wrote about how truly manly dominant men should go around choking women -- now has a White House press pass.  It's not a big deal that the Rasputin behind Trump's throne, Stephen Bannon, wants to demolish the administrative state.

It's not a big deal that we have a president who loves women the way I love spaghetti with pesto and who changes his wives the way some of us change our cars or our fashion wear, and it's not a big deal that white fundamentalist Evangelicals voted for that very un-Christian president in overwhelming numbers, because the real Christian values for them are not in charity or good deeds but in the control over women.

It's not a big deal that the Russians in 2016 hacked into the voter rolls in several American states.  It's not a big deal that the president of the United States refuses to show us his tax returns or an accurate picture of his health, and it's not a big deal that the Trump corporations are fairly openly trying to benefit from the official position of our Dear Leader.

And it's not a big deal that the countrywide Republican attempts to suppress  voting by people of color and other groups likely to vote for Democrats have been shown to be successful.

Finally, it wasn't anything to get upset about that president Obama's Supreme Court nominee could not get a hearing, for reasons that had nothing to do with the old-fashioned rules of democracy, and it was perfectly ordinary to suddenly find that thousands of our fellow-Americans sincerely believed that a Washington, DC, pizzeria was the den of pederasts, led by Hillary Clinton or at least by someone on her staff.



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* The over-extension of Pierce's  explanation to my own itches should not be attributed to him.

** With two possible exceptions:  Trump's attempts to ban Muslims from entering the United States which has been seen as a big deal by both the courts and by large numbers of protesters, and the killing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), to be replaced by tax cuts for the rich and higher death rates of the poor.