Not long ago a friend of mine was complaining about MSNBC. “I don’t watch MSNBC anymore,” he said. “I’m tired of the blame game.”
I didn’t question the statement since I figured I’d already pushed the conversation to its limit. That means, I had already opened my mouth at least once. In this day and age, for me, that’s always once too many times.
I spent almost ten years living outside the country, missed the entire 80s, while this country was going through what another friend referred to as the “moving right show.” Most of the time, when I returned to the country, I refrained from talking about politics since my perspective was radically different from almost anybody I socialized with on a regular basis. And, I was a writer. You don’t need to talk to people about politics and law if you write about them. In fact, most of the time, you don’t want to talk about them. It’s the last thing you want to talk about.
The last four years, however, have not only pushed me further to the left than I already was (which was pretty far to the left), but made me believe that it was possible to talk to other people about politics since the Trump/Republican crime family was dismantling everything decent there ever was about the society.
But, what I quickly found was that even though people wanted to grouse, when you got right down to it, they didn’t want to do much more. What most people wanted was to 1) vent and to 2) “get back to normal.” They didn’t much appreciate it when I pointed out that “normal” was what got us Trump.
In the past four years I have been infuriated, disgusted, and repelled by Trump and the Republican party. But, my real rage has been provoked by Democrats. I suppose you expect the worst from your enemies, but when you see it coming from your friends, it is both disheartening and alienating.
Early on in 2016, after Trump was elected and people (even in Georgia) started to mobilize, I had an exchange with one of the group of women I call the “southern ladies” that summed up my dilemma.
We were at a street demonstration peopled largely by the elderly and women. (I am both.) An acquaintance said: Now, we have to be careful that we’re respectful. I looked at her and blinked. “Why?” I asked. She looked back at me and blinked herself. Neither of us could understand what on earth the other was talking about.
I have spent the past four years trying to understand what she was talking about, what the Democratic Party was talking about. I have been dumfounded, utterly dumbfounded by people who act like the worst thing in the world would be to be perceived by other people as “disrespectful.”
Now, I grew up in the South where being rude was a cardinal sin. But we are watching the destruction of democracy, the transformation of a country into an authoritarian kleptocratic state and people, grown people, are worried about whether or not they will be perceived by the people dismantling democracy as disrespectful. I don’t get it.
And, it’s not only regular people. I sit and watch hearing after hearing where Democrats are in a position to expose the utter corruption and rot that is characteristic of the Republican party and Senator after Senator, Representative after Representative virtually gets down on their hands and knees and apologizes for asking questions. It disgusts me and enrages me.
And, as if things weren’t bad enough, the week after Diane Feinstein goes out of her way to grovel at the feet of Lindsay Graham and possibly cost the Democrats a crucial Senate seat, Democrats have already started promising Republicans not to hold them accountable for the crimes that brought us to this point. Democrats, like my friend, might call this “the blame game” but in my neck of the intellectual woods we call it justice. And I am a believer in justice.
We would not even be here, on this precarious knife edge, if there was justice in this country for white collar, corporate and political criminals. Donald Trump, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and many others would not even be in a position to hold office if we had a criminal justice system that prosecuted the crimes of the wealthy. They would be in jail. Instead, they control the government.
And, already, even before the Democrats have won the election *, they are already trying to bow down and promise they will not hold accountable the people who have done everything in their power to steal and degrade democracy. On Nicolle Wallace’s show on Monday, Rick Stengel found it necessary to point out one of the things that he thought was “lovely about the Biden campaign.” This thing was that the Biden campaign talks about “bringing the country together [in a way that] is not about recrimination, not about punishing people who may have made a mistake.” We need, says Stengel to be “moving ahead.”
I have been saying for months that people who think that a Biden administration will do anything to hold the Trump/Republican crime family to account are delusional. Biden will do exactly what Obama did in the face of people who had recklessly and greedily brought down an economy. He will say that we need to “move on.” George Bush used the Justice Department to create a fictional legal foundation for the use of torture, but Obama said we should move forward not backward.
Every time leadership evades responsibility for holding criminals accountable for their crimes, it paves the way for more crime. Obama and Eric Holder paved the way for Trump as surely as if they had nominated him as the candidate of the Republican party.
*I do not believe that the Democrats will win this “election.” I believe the Republicans will steal it.
