I have had better weekends in my time. This one would've been perfectly lovely had the snow-blowing crew NOT demolished my outdoor spigot with the fancy upper turn-off, causing water for flow for almost 24 hours down the front of the house and into my basement. I thought it was the drain plugging up again...but stopping to get the mail on Sunday, I noticed the front of the house was wet. At least Spartacus had the presence of mind to run down and shut off the water main. The plumber had already been called and I was waiting for him at that moment. I shan't go into the gory details, but let's just say I got lots of exercise using a push-broom to get the water to the drain which didn't help for the first 20 hours since the spigot was running and I didn't know that part. But, it's frickin' cold in Minnesota this time of year which means it's also suck-the-moisture-outta-yer-face-and-eyeballs dry which in turn means the basement floor is reasonably dry at the moment, although it does smell increasingly funky down there. My HOA president is on board, the insurance claim has been filed, the snow-removal people have been notified, the property management group has already tried to blame me...and failed, bids are being solicited for water mitigation, and my buddy Curt-the-floor-guy...yeah, the same one from the old house...is stopping by tomorrow to see what's left of my basement floor. We have pictures of the spigot, not much to see in the basement, but I am pretty confident this will all be covered. And it's still frickin' annoying. Almost as frickin' annoying as the fact that I have a cold. I am cold. All I want to do is crawl into bed.
But no, I have a blog to write.
I had a bit of a cosmic disconnect with the Senate this past week. See, Moscow Mitch and his buddies were gleefully announcing on the telly that their minds were made up and they didn't need no stinking trial to know Feckless Leader is innocent of all charges. It was the claim of innocence that really got me into a lather...it was saying never mind the Constitution; we don't need no stinking Constitution to tell us how to think:
I'm not impartial about this at all. I'm not an impartial juror. This is a political process. There is not anything judicial about it. Impeachment is a political decision. Senator Mitch McConnell December 17, 2019
On January 16, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts administered the oath to 99 of the sitting Senators of the United States (One was to be sworn in later due to family emergency) The oath was taken:
Do you solemnly swear that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald John Trump, now pending, you will do impartial justice according to the constitution and laws: So help you God? administered by Chief Justice John Roberts
followed by the Senators' signing of the oath book. Signing. Like a contract signing.
Lawrence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, told Newsweek:
There really is no mechanism for enforcing the oath that senators take before an impeachment trial.
I guess that means it's a playground oath...you cross pinkies, say something scarily unbreakable and then completely forget about it until you're in a Hallmark movie or being chased by aliens. It has absolutely nothing behind it to guarantee those senators will actually listen, pay attention, and/or even think about the good of the many versus the good of the 1%.
This is the part where I get into trouble with the ALL the senators, right and left together.
If the president tells a lie, extorts favors from another government, lines his own pockets with rental/booking fees from housing guests of the US government in Trump property, and other emollumentative actions and no one in Congress actually cares, has a crime been committed?
You can easily make yourself crazy lining up statements from the same people about the importance of impeaching Bill Clinton versus Feckless Leader. Makes you wonder about the following:- What planet are they on?
- How is the air on their planet?
- Is there any way they could just stay there and not return to earth in this lifetime?
All joking aside, the deeper we get into this, the less I believe there is a sanity path in there somewhere. The divisions seem only to be getting deeper, and not just in the usual ways. There are plenty of folks out there who think the issues facing this country are a joke, that two sides spitting and hissing at each other is a form of entertainment. Personally, I have trouble with that if only because I cannot view the vitriol as amusing, or the espousing of hatred as showmanship.
This feeds into the social media stream quite easily. Once the hate makes the news, it's automatically infotainment; all pretenses of veracity disappear. Add freeze-frame and the creation of memes, and you've stepped it up a notch. The gravitas of reality slips away into a punchline. Gone is the need to make sense of the news; we only need to be able to laugh at it.
And as much as I laugh with/at Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and John Oliver, they are, if not the root, the leafy canopy of this genre. And it's not a good look for either of us..
We do ourselves and our future a disservice when we stop taking it seriously. Laugh all you want, but will you still be laughing when misguided North Korean nuclear test explodes sending massive amounts of radioactive particulate into the air we breathe? Or when FDA "misses" a bacteria in the milk processing supply that kills thousands of children? Will it still be funny that the inspectors were pulled off and the standards were reduced or removed?
My late father-in-law, a big-animal epidemiologist for the USDA, used to rail against the lessening of animal health regulations because he believed, after years of experience in the field, that if farmers believed if you can do it cheap it's better than having to live up to regulations, public health be damned. As he used to constantly point out,
we don't have the same immune systems we once had. Keep using that anti-bacterial crap and you, too, can die from an infected ingrown toenail.(He had a thing about ingrown toenails being the root of all systemic evil. )
Ultimately, the harm we do by not calling out the lies, the extortion, the abuse of power is subtle and hard to see in the short term, but we damage our moral immune system. We allow corruption and it becomes the standard, not the deviation. What will our kids and grandkids take forward about honesty and ethics if they are growing up in a world where they are little more than a joke? You need to be terrified by that thought in order to grok the whole life-is-comedy-fodder routine.
The impeachment process, quite frankly, is a national joke. It's a sham and red herring, a distraction for the real issues We, the People are facing. Senators on both sides took the oath, signed the book, and then will vote whatever way they decided to vote two months ago. They can call a million witnesses, but if those closed minds are made up, what's the point?
This trial isn't about Feckless Leader; it's about what We, the People, will tolerate. In the end, the behavior of the Senators is a reflection of We, the People, not the occupants of the West Wing. If we have elected a body to represent the interests of the citizens of these here United States and those Senators vote to permit the continuation of rampant narcissism to rule, then our anger may be misplaced. They are voting as the vox populi.
Maybe We, the People are best served by being angry at ourselves...and then actually doing something about it.
The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week
This week's tip comes from Professor Lawrence Tribe:
The argument that only criminal offenses are impeachable has died a thousand deaths in the writings of all the experts on the subject, but it staggers on like a vengeful zombie.
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