CSotD: Under the Collapsing Windmill
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Ramirez gets us off to a good start today, because the Epstein issue is a strange thing to put at the top of the list of current crises, or at least it would be in a more sane world.
It ought to be easy to resolve: There was this guy, he did these awful things and we need to find out who was involved and throw them all in the clink.
We’re spoiled by TV shows in which police labs can prove just about anything with just about any tiny bit of evidence, but the fact remains that, even in the real world, we’re pretty good at fact-finding.
When we want to be.
If Jeffery Epstein had been running an underage bawdy house for poor undocumented migrants, we’d have rounded them all up long ago. But it’s more complex than that, isn’t it?
I do like the elephant’s long red tie.
Having taken hold of the Justice Department and stocked it not just with loyalists but with bootlickers, Dear Leader might have had reason to feel the Epstein thing was over and done.
However, the folks at his end of the political spectrum had been convinced that the scandal was a dandy place to trap Democrats and so drummed it up with reasonable outrage and absurd conspiracy theories, such that when it came time to shut things down and pretend it never happened, well, that’s when the boomerang swung back.
Molina offers a complex explanation for those who prefer to think of it as a complex issue, which, as the inner crossover portion of his graph demonstrates, it most certainly is not.
However, a large part of how simple it is depends on the tolerance that has always existed for Trump’s peculiar relationship with truth.
In Animal Farm, the windmill collapsed not because of poor planning by the rulers, but because Snowball had snuck back and sabotaged it. In America, anything that goes wrong is not because of the current government but because of Joe Biden.
It sounds simple-minded, but the link between Trump and professional wrestling is instructive: Fans recognize at some level that pro wrestling is a phony, scripted performance but they continue to embrace it as a real sport.
The bizarre effect of this is that a substantial number of them therefore assume that the NFL, MLB and NBA are also fixed, while, for that matter, they believe that their own unsatisfying place in life is also due to some sort of conspiracy.
Suddenly this simple worldview was disrupted by Dear Leader’s refusal to release the Epstein files. He’d promised to do so, but who cares? He’s promised all sorts of things, none of which have happened. None of which had to.
Byrnes makes a joke about it, because, as with pro wrestling, the audience cheers and shouts but knows, deep down, that none of this is real.
The fact that Trump himself, and all his acolytes, were shouting for the Epstein files to be released seems to have shaken some of the faithful, but they’ll get over it.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the political continuum, faith in the system is crumbling as well, though perhaps for more credible reasons.
After all, during the Biden administration, the court ruled that the president could not forgive student loans because Congress had passed no law permitting it, but now they’ve ruled that the president can dissolve the Education Department despite Congress having passed a law determining that it should exist.
Oh well. We’ll fix everything at the midterms, when furious voters go to the polls and replace the GOP majorities in Congress with legislators who have the public good in mind and who respect the rule of law and the provisions of the Constitution.
Assuming that we don’t go to the polls and find our registrations have been canceled and a group of strangers where once our neighbors sat checking in voters and counting the ballots.
Perhaps we won’t even realize that the windmill has fallen, but, if we do, we’ll know it was Snowball’s Biden’s fault.
Yesterday Congress reaffirmed their cutting of funds for public broadcasting, and Big Bird makes an attractive symbol for all this, but Sesame Street had long since crossed over into the commercial zone.
PBS matters, but it’s not crucial. Ken Burns will find another landing spot, and BritBox features English mysteries. People without cable or Internet can watch PBS if they’re close enough to a station to get it with rabbit ears, but that’s a small slice of the population.
Cuts to NPR are more troubling, because they are likely to lead to rural NPR stations shutting down, and that increases the lack of local news in those areas.
Commercial radio is largely automated with little to no live staffing, and newspapers in nearby cities barely have enough reporters left to cover their own city hall, much less to cover regional stories. Commercial television similarly tends to cluster in its hometown.
But the less people know, the easier they can be led.
Lao-tse’s advice to “empty their heads and fill their bellies” is a misinterpretation of his intentions, but remains a good way to maintain control, if not to establish justice.
As Horsey points out, we’re still operating on empty promises. In the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton promised to offer re-education and job training in coal country to help miners move beyond the fading industry.
They didn’t want to hear it. Trump promised to bring back coal production.
He really could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing any votes. He won that election on empty promises, and, despite all the obvious losses of jobs since, he won again in 2024.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Wuerker is correct that Dear Leader has spouted empty promises and downright lies, but perhaps, rather than deepening the credibility gap, he has filled it in and made it a non-factor.
As the MAGA loyalist in Deering’s cartoon says, it’s not easy to keep the faith, but that doesn’t make it impossible.
Pay no attention to the wreckage of that windmill. They cause cancer in whales.
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