We judge ourselves by the company we keep. If the power's out but I have more water than you, I'm fortunate. If the power's on but my flat screen is six inches smaller than yours I'm a loser. Unity is important, and the more disturbances we endure the more local that unity becomes. The shitstain with the MAGA hat up the street will absolutely pull your HOPE-stickered Volvo out of a ditch because whatever slogans you guys live by, you have the same mailman and check out each others' Christmas lights. That's really the tragedy of Facebook, it allowed lonely people to think strangers on the internet counted as friends. There's a really tedious, useless, pointless, toxic, relentless, bottomless hand-wringing from the New York Times about all things Republican because they're a fucking Republican paper. They pretend to be Democrats but they're not; their sources are all Republicans, their concerns are all Republicans, they've got this total Stockholm Syndrome thing with the Republicans and if you didn't stop reading the New York Times when they birthed Jayson Blair, you sure as shit better have stopped reading the New York Times when they defended Judith Miller and if that wasn't fuckin' enough you've got Brett Stephens and David Brooks and Maureen Dowd and fucking stop it already. ZOMFG a third of Republicans endorse violence to achieve their political goals. Guess what a third of Democrats do too! cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/23124.jpeg Fuckin' a third of Americans thought Bush didn't win legitimately in 2001 and the world continued in its goddamn orbit. Yes, absolutely, pissant Republicans are all about voter suppression and the only reason they weren't during the era of Jim Crow is they were Democrats back then. It's like the NYT woke up and said "let's pretend that all this is brand new since we ran the 1619 project" and every fucking liberal is at "oh my god you guys the sky? JUST started to fall" and I'm so fuckin over it. What's happening? Is that the rump end of the Republican Party is no longer interested in being Republican. The rump end of the Democratic Party is no longer interested in being Democratic but since they don't have guns and racism we care less. We had our goddamn Reichstag fire, y'all, and yet our VP is a minority woman. You know what I watched last night? I watched The Queen. They've got Lord Mountbatten, played by Tywin Lannister, being appealed to by the Bank of England to overthrow the government of the UK on behalf of the Tories. Did it happen? Kind of. Bottom line? If you're dependent on legitimacy to rule, you will be doomed by illegitimacy if you try to take control. in the show? Queen said no. IRL? Lord Mountbatten prolly figured fuckin' 60s england wasn't about to be ruled by the Bank of England and they all woulda been hanged. On Jan 6 Trump was legit. He had an excuse. There were legal justifications. There was a gambit. They had the goddamn senate, they had the judiciary, they had the presidency and they had no fucks to give. And Dan Quayle still told Mike Pence "sorry bro ain't how it works" and the fucking republic stood because bureaucrats live by RULES. Not because they like them but because they extract their livelihood from them. It's one thing if you're a country ruled by warlords and strongmen. It's quite another when the whole government grinds to a halt because the parliamentarian disagrees with your implementation of APA style. And the blessing and the curse of bureaucracies is there are enough bureaucrats whose livelihood depends on forms in triplicate to stop anyone who wants to cut through the red tape for their own benefit. Is there anyone in Trump's orbit who came out better for it? Hope Hicks? Maybe? She would have been better still if she stayed clear two years ago. Everyone else? Worse off than they started. And you can be the QAnon Shaman and taking a shit on Nancy Pelosi's desk is the highlight of your existence but if you're Ted Cruz? There are at least three boards of directors you are closing off from yourself forever because while yeah isn't it fun to sop the proles it's more fun to pull down six figures for showing up at four meetings a year. The political class is definitely suffering a crisis of legitimacy. It's a problem. But it is NOT the problem everyone wants - the amount of Godwin's Law that has been normalized by Trump is so fucking tiresome. He didn't win because he was a Republican he won because he was Trump. And he burned every Republican who touched him because he is Trump. Yeah there are lots of people out there who loved Trump? But let's be honest, they loved "none of the above" and any political class worth their weight in largesse ain't never gonna let that happen again because they are all, to a man, worse off than they started. There are legitimate problems of governance ahead of us. The country is not going to look the same as it did in 2015. But every single one of these "zomg what if TRUMP" chin/dickstrokes everyone keeps masturbating with won't solve a single goddamn thing. They're looking over a broad landscape of problems and pointing at the ONE thing they helped create in hopes that if they can create it again they won't have to do their fucking jobs and report on what's actually going on. And I'm so fucking sick of it.The fact you can survive wide scale economic collapse without a significant degree of civil unrest is a miracle to me.