Two hundred days remain until the presidential election that will shape America’s destiny for the balance of the 21st century. The time will pass quickly.
The magnitude of the decision cannot be overstated, nor can the threat to the American way of life that is imperiled by MAGA/fascism. A great test is at hand.
What is the nature of the test? What must be overcome?
We live in an era of obnoxious, transcendent and ubiquitous cynicism.
American politics and media are the white hot molten epicenter of our cynicism meltdown. We are besotted with some of the most unprincipled, craven and morally corrupt Americans in our history, who roam the MAGA range spitting venom, sputtering idiocies, and immolating previously stated unshakable principles for THE DONALD. They do it all for power and fame.
Whether it be Tucker Carlson, the 2020s version of Father Coughlin, a thousand religious hustlers like Pastor Paula, a million Covid grifters, slews of access journalists whoring for clicks, gaggles of media c-suite executives looking for a buck, insiders turned Saudi agents, Bitcoin hustlers and social media monarchs who poison society and target children with algorithms, we live in an age of taking. The ethos of the locust is immoral and self-defeating, but there are no practitioners of the philosophy who measure up against the Aristotles of our age, who are the MAGA politicians like Elise Stefanik, Bill Barr, Lindsey Graham, and hundreds more who have abdicated decency, Americanism and their oaths for a low man and lower cause.
Here is what Bill Barr has previously said about Donald Trump:
In May 2023, when asked whether Trump is fit to be president at a City Club of Cleveland event in Ohio, he responded:
If you believe in his policies, what he’s advertising is his policies, he’s the last person who could actually execute them and achieve them. He does not have the discipline, he does not have the ability for strategic thinking and linear thinking or setting priorities or how to get things done in the system. It is a horror show when he is left to his own devices.
Barr told NBC News in July 2023 that:
I have made clear that I strongly oppose Trump for the nomination and will not endorse Trump.
In an August 2023 interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Barr said this:
At first I wasn’t sure, but I have come to believe he knew well he had lost the election. Someone who engaged in that kind of bullying about a process that is fundamental to our system and to our self-government shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office.
During the Republican presidential primary, he said this about voting for Trump:
Voting for Trump is like playing Russian roulette with the country.
Yesterday, the former attorney general announced that he thinks the felony defendant, who raped
, deserves four more years with the nuclear codes, while the world spirals out of control. The insurrection, violence and mayhem have been cast aside because, according to Barr, who wrote a book called “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General” denouncing Trump, it is Joe Biden who threatens the republic. Wow. Just wow. Here is what he said on Fox News:I’ve said all along, given two bad choices, I think it’s my duty to pick the person I think would do the least harm to the country, and in my mind, that’s — I will vote the Republican ticket. I’ll support the Republican ticket.
I think the real danger to the country — the real danger to democracy, as I say — is the progressive agenda. Trump may be playing Russian roulette, but a continuation of the Biden administration is national suicide in my opinion.
There are no words for this type of infection and infestation beyond “fatal” that are necessary.
When the most craven among us are able to group together in sufficient numbers nobody should underestimate their capacity to create a catastrophe for the ages.
Bill Barr isn’t just a disgrace, he is a warning. People look back on catastrophes from rebuilt rubble, and ask the question, “How?” And, “Who knew?”
No one who is paying attention today will ever have to ask. The answer will be simple. We had too many people like Bill Barr in power.
A SubStack poster earlier today referred to Michael Cohen as a “sleaze”. Bill Barr makes Cohen look like a saint; in a fair world he’d have been disbarred for any number of offenses long ago. And the “progressive agenda” about which he claims to be concerned has a focus about which he isn’t: humanity. Bill Barr has all the integrity of a Mitch McConnell or Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham or Chris Sununu or virtually the entire Republican Party. Beneath contempt, all of them.
After everything I have heard Barr say, we come to this. Another batshit Republican. Kool-Aid stock must be going through the roof.