Casey Baskin Aneurysms, Best of, Donald Trump, politics, Trump

We Have Met the Enemy, and It Might Be Us… Maybe. Probably Not.

Hello, world.

Goodbye, cruel world!

The great Daddy Mueller is the God that failed, the idol we killed, the whimper not the bang. Constitutional democracy had a good run, I guess. We might as well put the chairs up and turn out the lights, folks.

The ToM gang has made no secret of our disdain for the Democrats’ obsession with Russia and Bob Mueller. Where are the Dems now on their journey of grief? Denial, anger, negotiating, acceptance? The fiasco of Mueller’s House testimony shows signs of all of the above, except of course for acceptance.

When people have traumatic experiences, they sometimes need to construct a narrative in their own minds, however unrealistic or inaccurate, to make sense of and live with the insensible and unlivable. For our liberal friends, Russia seems to be the needed mythology. The catastrophe that has befallen us was not our fault; it wasn’t Hillary Clinton or the Democratic Party’s fault; it wasn’t even our Republican friends and neighbors’ fault, because they were duped, somehow. The threat came from the outside, a sort of nefarious Deus Ex Machina.

To think otherwise — to realize that we did this to ourselves, that our sclerotic political institutions made this possible, that we laughed at Trump and didn’t take him seriously, that almost half of voting Americans were all too happy to abet the Russian psy-ops because of their own stupidity and bigotry — all of this is too much to take. We have met the enemy, and they are us. But we would rather forget.

And Democrats, being Democrats, look in vain for someone else to do the work for them — in this case, Mueller. This is, quite palpably and evidently, not going to happen. As a successful Democrat once said, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. And as a successful Republican strategist once said, why have we been keeping ourselves waiting?

Here are some of our favorite pieces from recent media. Enjoy!