By Rob Meyne
If you turn on Netflix or even broadcast TV, you would likely see something that would have been startling twenty years ago. Nudity, profanity, and main characters that identify as transexuals or ficus trees are common.
A similar situation has evolved in American presidential politics. Every week, something happens that would have been a headline-generating event in our parent’s generation. The unusual has become usual. The uncommon has become common.
The search for a decent journalist makes Diogenes’s challenge seem like a piece of cake. (It is not at all certain Diogenes ever said he was looking for an “…honest man.” If he were, he could steer clear of Washington and not reduce his chances of finding one.)
Digoense, by the way, was a founder of stoicism, and would be considered weird even if he was hanging out with the bizarre crowd at a waterfront sunset in Key West. Diogenes was known for doing all manner of things in public that one normally does in private – defecating, fornicating – all in a crowd. He sounded like someone you’d want to party with. If he lived today, he would livestream himself in flagrante delicto. Basically, he’d be Hunter Biden without the influence peddling gig.
Biden and Trump are the two likely nominees, but people are lining up in droves to say they wish they had another choice – anyone – hog, dog, or frog. Both candidates have high negatives and their average age is “deceased.” Trump at least still exhibits signs of life and mental acuity. Biden would likely lose a political debate if he had the gonads to accept one, unless he debated a kumquat or three-toed sloth, in which case it would probably be a push.
Never has a major political candidate been indicted for a crime while he was running for office. Certainly, never has a sitting president indicted his opponent. Never have the political machinations of state, local, and federal governments been coordinated deliberately to try to put a candidate, for whom they have expressed great disdain, behind bars. Never have the courts been used to try to throw a candidate off the ballot by claiming they were part of an insurrection.
If memory serves, the only significant political figure to run for president from prison was four-time candidate Eugene V. Debs, with home I share a hometown, who ran as a socialist. His highest vote total – something shy of a million – was when he was in prison. Somehow the phrase “Vote for Inmate 3994739 never quite caught on as well as the ”Hey, look me over” song used by Birch Bayh (also from Terre Haute) in his first run for the Senate.
On the Democrat side, the evidence that Joe Biden is a crook increases faster than Hunter’s bar bill at the Chateau Marmont.
The problem, of course, is not just that Hunter is a piece of human dung, although that is irrefutable. The PROBLEM is that this particular piece of dung routinely paid his father directly, as did other family members, paid him exorbitant rent, and even paid many of his bills for him. That Joe benefited financially from Hunter’s influence peddling is undeniable. Plus, courts have held that a person can be enriched in a way that qualified as criminal even if the actual financial largesse accumulated only for his close family. If a wife or son is “paid off,” does anyone really believe the husband or father does not benefit?
So we have a massive case of influence peddling, money laundering, and plain old-fashioned bribery that is being ignored or slow walked by a very corrupt Attorney General. On the other side, we have a former president who has been indicted in two jurisdictions with spectacularly weak cases that will require juries to accept legal arguments that are literally unprecedented. Another case is civil because the paucity of evidence against Trump would not sustain an actual criminal indictment.
So you have two possible or even likely crooks competing for the votes of people who loathe them. You have a complacent, lapdog media where true journalists are as rare as an honest Biden, and you have the entire political structure of one of our two major political parties doing their best imitation of a banana republic. Oh, and you have a credible third-party candidate taking votes from both of the major candidates.
You’ve got an economy on the brink and war breaking out on TWO international fronts with our allies involved and a non-zero chance we’ll have American boots on the ground. A cyberattack, EMP, or global nuclear holocaust is also a non-zero possibility.
And those are just the GOOD things happening.
If one tries to take the positive approach, that can help, but coming up with a rational reason to think everything is going to work out fine is more difficult by the day.
For now, I have to go buy a kumquat and see if I can talk a three-toed sloth into running as an independent. I’ll get back with you.
