As I write this, the Graham Platner team, in Maine, is trying to figure out a way to surrender their darling candidate – the somewhat “rapey” Nazi sympathizer – in a way that allows them to replace him with someone else of their liking. Gads, what kind of people do these people like?
They are “Populists”, which is disheartening, because at heart we all feel like we are populists and we don’t like to think that raping Nazis represent our philosophical bent. That’s the problem with real, hardcore political populists: they always raise up their ugly heads when times are tough and when some feel extreme measures are called for. It is the sentiment that has given us criminal leaders throughout the ages, as we have in the White House now. And I feel like I am a populist, betrayed. (I just wanted we little people to get over.)
Doesn’t make any sense, does it? But that’s politics.
It wasn’t right that the Democrats pushed Joe Biden aside for Kamala Harris, after Joe had legitimately(?) won the Democrat primary. Somehow, for 2020, Biden was just elevated by invisible forces into a position he never should have had, and then was de-elevated by those very same forces. They hadn’t noticed that Joe was old until it was too late (as happens with the sudden onset of “oldness”.)
Republicans and Platner supporters are screaming foul, that the Democrats are doing it again, refusing the vote of the people to serve their own central-party manipulative ways. The Republicans would love to run against Platner, and Platner supporters would love to run a guy who comes off like a regular ole rebel.
Thank “goodess” – and I use the term advisedly – the Democrat party is insisting on Platner’s clumsy ouster because the integrity of the party is at stake. We Democrats can hardly call Donald Trump a sex offender if we are going to champion our own.
It is better that we lose to sitting Maine Senator Susan Collins than to lose what’s left of our soul over Graham Platner. Should the Democrats win both House and Senate in November, they could derail Trump’s agenda, and they could investigate his crimes in office, and they could impeach him again, but they will never have the votes to remove him from office minus a “come-to-Jesus” moment among elected Republicans.
Ironically, that isn’t going to happen. They already own Jesus. They have him locked up in a secured facility, where he’s not allowed to talk.
It is true that our systems are breaking down under the pressure of apparently unanticipated circumstances. We didn’t seem to imagine that a felon like Donald Trump could get elected twice to the presidency. We didn’t imagine a supreme court that would inoculate him from responsibility for his criminal actions.
In fact, we don’t seem to have systems in place to handle so much of the chicanery that is American politics today.
Two-hundred-fifty years in, has the United States of America rolled past our sell by date? That number – 250 – is the number of years that British general Sir John Bagot Glubb, in his 1976 essay “The Fate of Empires,” claimed was the length of time empires generally last before they peter out.
Glubb had apparently not heard about the Roman Empire, the Egyptian Empire, or the Chinese Dynasties, all of which lasted well-beyond a mere 250 years.
Glubb’s nose was in the present, the way things are today, when 250 seems like about as much as we can imagine before the wheels come off.
RAR