There's nothing quite like laughter

[Mamorien]

We allowed him to be elected.  Those who, like myself, voted against him nonetheless didn't do enough to prevent his election.  Therefore we share a measure of the guilt for every wrong he commits.

If we wanted to prevent his election, we needed to start in 2010 when Mr. Justice Kennedy, in re Citizens United v. FEC, determined that "independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption." Or in 2000, taking to the streets to counter the Brooks Brothers Riot. Or in 1976, when the groundwork for Citizens United v. FEC was laid by the ruling, in re Buckley v. Valeo, that the rich had an absolute right to the best politicians their money could buy campaign contributions were protected speech under the First Amendment. Or maybe in 1886, when J.C. Bancroft Davis, railroad executive turned clerk of the Supreme Court, wrote the decision in re Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad that it was unconstitutional to deny corporations any of the rights the Fourteenth Amendment had recently granted to freed slaves and reaffirmed for other natural persons.

"There must have been a point, somewhere at the beginning, where we could have said no. But somehow we missed it."
-- Guildenstern

My one comfort in this is that Germany, seventy-odd years after the downfall of its "strongman," is again an at-least-somewhat trusted and respected nation, possibly even the "leader of the Free World," if that's not France.  So perhaps the U.S. can eventually come back.

Maybe, but consider what it took to make the German people conduct a searching and fearless moral inventory. Now consider whether the U.S. will conduct its own without a similar level of pressure being applied, whether by the Old World riding (in God's good time) to the rescue of the New, or (less likely, but I fantasize about it sometimes) by the forces of galactic justice, led by The Shining One, breaking the blockade on this dead whistle-stop planet. (Explorers moving in whole armies.)

I no longer believe it'll be in my lifetime, and I doubt either of my nieces, thirty years old and twenty, will live to see it, either.

My nephews are 17 and 15 (the older one was a day shy of five months old when the towers fell). I hope they live to see the day when America goes sane, but I'm assuming nothing.