There comes a time when it’s hard to know the difference between a banana republic and the greatest system of government devised in human history. Sometimes it’s just a Thursday. Dictionary.com defines a banana republic as “any exploitative government that functions poorly for its citizenry while disproportionately benefitting a corrupt elite group or individual.” Gee, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

There are any number of biases we have to sift through on a daily basis. The worst one is what I would lovingly call the superlative bias. In short, it is the concept that whatever event we are currently going through is the best or worst event of its type in history.

In some sense it makes perfect sense. Sensationalism sells and nothing kills the sensationalism like the admission that we have been through this before. Just this week we saw reporting that pointed to what most people would call treason during the Iran hostages scandal of the late 1970s and 1980. Americans back then would have been flummoxed to hear that news if it had immediately come out. Fortunately or unfortunately we did not hear about those events until long after they actually happened. If American voters had known Richard Nixon was conspiring with North Vietnam then maybe he doesn’t become president.

The job of the media is becoming increasingly more difficult as these stories become news instantaneously. We learned about Russian interference in the 2016 election almost virtually as it was happening. We learned about various Trump scandals almost immediately. We had all of the evidence we needed. Hell, it was all on tape. It has to be difficult when things are that simple. In a nation where conspiracy theories reign (and rain), it seems impossible to believe something so simple. We keep getting told that arrests and indictments are imminent. We saw that in 2017 and 2018 with the Russia scandal. We saw that with the first impeachment following Ukraine. We saw that with the second impeachment and January 6th. We have seen it since the bloviating moron left the White House.

Every time an arrest or indictment doesn’t happen it makes you doubt the story itself. The press is just crying wolf again. Maybe this is another “trumped” up charge. It’s really not that serious. Someone that is such an accomplished businessman would never do something so blatantly obvious like that. Except he did at every turn.

The current and former jackass in chief is even leaning into it. He is releasing his own rumors that he will be indicted. Why? It leans into the narrative. If he gets indicted for Stormy Daniels then it is proof in his mind that he is being persecuted. He did all this other stuff and it is a one night stand with a porn star that gets him? He must not have done any of those other things.

Political prosecutions are tricky business. If you overplay your hand then you guarantee the other side will do the same when they get the opportunity. There was talk from day one about impeaching Joe Biden. What’s the charge? They don’t know and couldn’t explain it if they did. They just know that it’s not fair that you busted our guy when he obviously broke every law in the book. Just rest assured that this latest scandal will be the worst of all. At least it will be until the next one.

Apparently, the 1/6 committee has evidence that someone from the White House actually placed a call to one of the rioters on January 6th. The call lasted for nine seconds and while the committee knows who the recipient was, they do not know who in the White House actually placed the call. The call was placed to someone named Anton Lunyk. This is how I envision it going down. Feel free to throw your own scenarios in the comments.

Donald Trump: Hey, Anton are you in yet?

Anton Lunyk: Yes sir, we are about to…

Mark Meadows (to Trump): Use the burner phone dammit….

DT: Click

Of course, we are limited by the relative brevity of the conversation, but I figure there are any number of permutations we could come up with for a nine second conversation. Either way, the idea of using an actual phone in the White House that can be tracked is the criminal equivalent of walking into the bank and your bag has a hole in the bottom. I’ll let everyone else do the heavy lifting from here. Everyone have a great weekend.

I wrote two books which essentially broke down players’ qualifications for the baseball Hall of Fame. I went through a number of different tests and statistical gymnastics to determine whether particular players were a good fit. One of those tests is what has often been called the Player A and B test. I certainly didn’t invent it. I couldn’t tell you who did, but it has come in handy more than a few times. Essentially, you simply look at two players’ numbers and remove their name. From there, it becomes pretty easy to figure out which player was the better player.

Baseball is a peculiar sport where numbers become sacrosanct. Spit out enough numbers and most of us could identify the player anyway. However, the methodology is important. We develop emotional attachment to guys in a positive or negative way. If we can remove that emotion we can make better decisions with the ballot and we can make better arguments in the sports bar.

WWHG stands for What would Hillary Get. Hillary is no longer relevant in our politics. At least she shouldn’t be. She will never run for public office again and so she should not be particularly relevant. Of course, certain people will try to keep her relevant for their own purposes. For our own sanity, you can replace her with whoever you want. Essentially, we can turn our politics into a Player A and B test.

So, when we consider what to do with ex-presidents we can ask the simple question: what would Hillary get? If she (or Bill) had brought home boxes of confidential documents and stored it in their attic what would happen to them? Even more important than what would happen to them is the question of what should happen to them? What would you argue for?

Obviously, this is where the concept of “but the emails…” will come up. Let’s keep in mind, the FBI not only investigated that multiple times but announced less than a week before the election that they were still investigating. Nothing came of it because it was determined that she did not have any secret or sensitive information that she shouldn’t have had on the private server. Was that the right ruling? I’m not an expert on email servers or confidential documents. However, we can easily apply the same test in reverse.

Our politics has become so tribal that we reflexively defend or accuse based on which team we play for. Criminalizing politics has always been distasteful for that reason. However, sometimes you have to do it in order to protect the sanctity of our nation. WWHG needs to plastered on every billboard. We need those rubber wristbands. Some people need it tattooed on their chest. If you are willing to excuse a guy taking home boxes full of sensitive documents that he had no legal right to then you better be ready to excuse the same for those on the other side.

Juanita has done a great job covering this as she obviously has an inside track. So, I will not add any details here. It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Besides, I usually get long-winded here. So, I will offer two rhetorical questions that the beloved community here can chew on if they like. Some of these have obvious academic answers, so this is more on a philosophical level.

1. How is it that people like Alex Jones exist?

Yes, I took Abnormal Psychology and Psychopathology. I know the literal textbook definition of this. This is usually where “well actually” guy comes busting out the DSM-V with the textbook definitions of psychopathy and sociopathy. Yup, we all know that. What we also know is that those conditions really aren’t curable. That makes the second question easier to answer in his case.

However, on a personal or philosophical level it is quite disturbing. He made up to 800,000 a day knowing full well that he was not only lying but also really hurting those people. That takes a special kind of cruelty. I’m not a psychologist and I can’t practice counseling outside of a school setting, but it produces a vexing question. How much do people like Jones really know? He knows that his lies were in fact lies. He knew he was making money off it. He willfully spurred his minions on those poor families. I can’t tell you how the psychopathic brain works exactly. I don’t know how much they are really cognizant of and how much they are able to compartmentalize away from whatever humanity they actually have.

2. How do we decide exactly who gets redemption and who doesn’t

I know two things. First, I know that sociopaths and psychopaths cannot really be redeemed and it is dangerous to try. Alex Jones doesn’t deserve to be redeemed. Donald Trump doesn’t deserve to be redeemed. Tucker Carlson doesn’t deserve to be redeemed. These are people that know exactly what they are doing and are aware on some level of the damage they are doing. As I said above, I don’t know exactly how much they know, but at least a large part of them knows.

The second thing I know is that some people can be redeemed because they already have to a greater or lesser extent. People have turned on these folks after the fact. Usually, they need a little legal pressure to do so, but they have done it. So, how do we draw the line between the redeemable and the unredeemable? If they can be redeemed then what does that redemption look like?

The best analogy I know comes from my own religious education. Forgive me for those not religious. Yet, that word is the very word we are concerned with. In order to get absolution, we first have to admit what we have done wrong. Then. we get some sort of penance depending on the offense. I think a number of people skip one or both of those. Some people admit they are wrong, but expect immediately to be welcomed in without atoning for their sins. Others pull the “why don’t we all just get along” without actually admitting they’re wrong. Both of those need to be present for it to work. Yet, none of that answers the question above. We can’t redeem everyone and yet we also can’t write everyone off either. So, what gives?

We’ve discussed this before to the point of obsession. It’s the space between what people want and what they ultimately get. It is the space between popular opinion and what actually happens. I simply don’t have a good name for the gap. Describing why it happens is the easy part. People simply vote against their own interests and beliefs far too often. Sometimes they don’t know what their beliefs are as presented in the political realm. Sometimes they are led by their emotions to become captive to their fears and prejudices. Sometimes they know exactly what they are doing and simply want to punish their own side for their failures to implement the policies they want.

Reports are that nearly two million people that normally would have voted Democratic in 2016 refused to punish Hillary. Add almost two million votes to her ledger and she likely would have won five additional states. Plus, it’s harder to ignore an election where she won the popular vote by five or six million instead of three. The simple fact that we have seen this happen twice in the span of 16 years and that it happened to the Democrats both times kind of tells you something.

If you do nothing but add the judges that George W. Bush appointed along with Donald Trump and then add in the judges blocked by Senate Republicans during Obama’s presidency the results are quite frankly staggering. That literally flipped the Supreme Court from 6-3 one way to 6-3 the other way. What it has done to the entire federal bench is overwhelming.

That’s just the judiciary. Imagine what it has done legislatively. Imagine what it has done in the day to day mechanisms of government. Bureaucracies have been impacted. Day to day regulations have been impacted. Executive actions on weather and natural disasters have been impacted. Just imagine competent assistance during Katrina and Maria. Imagine better assistant during the California wild fires. Imagine what might have happened during the COVID pandemic. What would have happened had we handled the pandemic as most of Europe and Asia did?

It is quite simply a ripple effect. A plurality of people identify as Democrats. Again, national elections are fairly close, but under a parliamentary system Congress would have been under consistent Democratic control. These are just facts. The current exploits of Joe Mancin and Kirsten Synema certainly demonstrate that majorities aren’t a guarantee of anything and yet they highlight the problem. We have a 50-50 Senate. If the Senate reflected even the advantage in the House it would likely be a 52-48 Senate. That’s simply assuming the Senate goes as people have actually voted nationwide. Imagine if we add the million here or there that wanted to punish the Democrats.

This all pays off with the gap. We look up and we get the 21st century version of the apartheid. We get climate change unabated. We get gross incompetence in times of crisis. We get a larger wealth gap. We get fewer consumer and employee protections. We get a cold and uncaring world that most of us can’t recognize. The gap between the world we want and the world we see is real. We should be angry. We just need to remember who to be angry at.

The January 6th commission is finally releasing its work. They chose to do it during prime time over the course of several days. We seem to be following this pattern day after day, week after week, and year after year. We know exactly what happened. We’ve always known exactly what happened. Hearing it again is both shocking and familiar. Either you will hear it and nod in agreement or you will think it’s fake news. I’m not sure anyone will actually see their opinion change.

This has all been mentioned before, but here we are. So, let’s add up some things and put it all together to see if we can paint a picture. In the entirety of his life, Donald Trump has successfully done only one thing. He’s cultivated an image that he is a successful and a smart businessman. That’s it. If you look at any success he’s had it is all connected to that one thing. The Apprentice, frauds like Trump University, the presidency, all of this can be traced back to that one thing.

The fact that he’s a failed businessman hasn’t really sunk in with the people that support him. So, when you look at his failures as president, they all get laid at someone else’s feet. They are someone else’s fault or they didn’t happen at all. Naturally, it also manages to seep into the natural defense he is able to use when any of these horribly illegal activities get brought back to his door.

All of the fraud over collusion, the attempting strong arming of the Ukrainian president, the attempted overturning of the 2020 election, and the attempting coup on January 6th all didn’t work. They failed spectacularly. Not only did he not meet his objective, but he failed in such spectacular fashion and did such a horrible job covering it up that it all seems so unbelievable.

How does someone so successful fail so miserably? If he really is that smart and that successful then he must not have done it. There really is no other logical explanation. After all, a smart and successful businessman would have clearly succeeded somewhere along the way because he had done so all those times before when he was making billions of dollars.

Except, that was all a fraud. Any success he may have had he stumbled into. Trump Steaks? Trump Vodka? Trump Airlines? These were all spectacular failures. Not only did those businesses fail, but they failed in spectacular fashion. The reality of Trump is as a failed businessman. It is the reality of a blowhard that really is empty when you get past the bravado.

The reality is that when you attempt to collude with the enemy, attempt to overthrow the government, attempt to circumvent our laws to get dirt on an opponent, attempt to strongarm someone into committing election fraud you have broken the law. The attempt is still breaking the law. The fact that all of these were unsuccessful doesn’t matter.

The defense that a brilliant and successful businessman wouldn’t fail so spectacularly is the fraud. Strip everything down and Trump is the guy that holds up the bank without a mask, a bag with a hole in the bottom, and a carrot in his pocket in place of the gun. It’s stupid to the point of being comical. It’s still a crime. It’s haphazard, laughable, and pathetic, but it’s still a crime. Yet, if the commission’s obvious breakdown of these events don’t lead to arrests and convictions then it will be just another episode of the Keystone Cops. Those that know he’s an idiot will know he’s guilty. Those that think he’s brilliant won’t. Those are the facts of the case and they are undisputed.