In the Middle Ages, the court jester or fool was often the person who said the wisest, truest things, for the simple reason that if anyone else said them they’d soon find their head being separated from their body.
The tradition continues today in The Onion.
Mind you, that’s not to say there isn’t a discernible difference between the two sides, or that I’m not pleased the neofascist movement no longer has a complete grip on power, only that it’s still very much two sides of the same coin.
Not to be overly pessimistic, but I’m getting an increasingly bad feeling that you are going to be a complete disappointment.
Look, I have no misconception that you will somehow instantly convert to the left-anarchist views I personally hold. This is not a gripe about not having my pet beliefs put into action. (Which would be impossible to do via elections and governments, anyhow.)
No, it’s about whether you’re a cooperating enabler of neofascism or not. It’s about whether you care about what the American mainstream — even some fairly conservative parts of that mainstream — that elected you cares about. We’re not talking about bold new social initiatives here, we’re talking about nothing more earth-shaking than upholding the rule of law.
More than one opinion poll has said that the main reason why voters swung to the Democrats’ side this time was their concern about corruption. Pay attention, Democrats: you have a mandate to deal with that problem.
That includes impeachment-level corruption. If you think there may be a skeleton in that closet, it’s your duty to look in that closet. If, in the traditional bourgeois liberal psychopathology, you choose not to look in that closet because you’re afraid the closet’s owner might not like you for doing so, you’re betraying the public who elected you.
In that light, I find remarks about impeachment being “off the table” to be more than a little bit worrying. Instead of exhibiting this pathetic neurosis over whether or not the Republicans will love you (trust me: they won’t, and they never will; get over it), you should be talking about the mandate you have. You should be talking about your duty to the American people to uphold the Constitution.
It’s well and fine to be diplomatic and dismiss impeachment questions as premature because the answer depends on investigations that have yet to be started. But you should also be clear that if impeachment-level offenses are uncovered, then you consider it your duty to both the Constitution and the people to impeach.
Anything less means you care more about kowtowing to Republicans than either the American people or the Constitution you’ve sworn to uphold.
News reports of the Litvinenko assassination (such as this one) are full of assertions that Polonium-210 is somehow a restricted substance that only a few have access to. In a word: bullshit. Anyone can buy some online in the guise of the active material in brushes used to neutralize static charges on film.
Thus, the common assertion that there must have been a government behind the killing (because who else could have access to such a rare substance) is likewise bullshit. There may indeed have been, but not necessarily.
Maybe I shouldn’t call it that, because it’s obviously not “obvious” to most newcomers. While it definitely is unusual for a cold wave to hold high temperatures in the twenties in November, it is also definitely not unprecedented. It seems to happen once every decade or so. And while it was a stroke of bad luck for a blast of snow to be perfectly timed with a blast of arctic air that froze slush into ice precisely during the afternoon rush hour, that’s not unprecedented either.
Though I do confess to being disappointed that the city proper was slighted in favor of areas both to the north and the south in the snowfall department.
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