Who'll Own All of This?

 "Love of country cannot exist where there is no pity."

-Camille Desmoulins

Day five of GLP-1 treatment. Depression. Montezuma's revenge. General listlessness. Lack of desire for anything, but especially food. But hey, I'm back down in the 180's for the first time in over a year! It reminds me of Billy Crystal's Fernando, a regular skit on SNL over forty years ago, whose catchphrase was, "It's better to look good than to feel good." We'll see if he's right, I guess.

Misty and not so cool this first day of October, already in the 60s out there.

The Wal-Mart delivery guy was relentlessly ringing the doorbell just now, and calling my phone (from an Orlando area code, oddly enough). Peg's twenty pound bag of rice had arrived, and he was afraid to leave it on our damp porch, given rice's tendency to absorb moisture and turn into a rather expensive starch blob.

Lots of happy talk in the news these days about an anticipated blue wave in November, or maybe a red undertow. And Trump, with these horrible government funded ads and decision to barnstorm for candidates who'd prefer that he stay home, seems determined to bring all of them down with him, every lickspittle who's said things he or she knew were empirically and morally wrong to get in the good graces of their trailer park electorate. The Republican death cult comes for its own.

I'll believe all of this when I see it--polls these days tend to register more than a few wide unscoreable misses, as we used to call them in my former vocation. And with all the gerrymandering and SCOTUS-enabled federal meddling in these elections, the potential for mischief makes the outcome that much more uncertain.

But what if it happens? What if the Ds take the House and the Senate? As to the latter, they almost certainly won't end up with sixty votes, and hence there's no path to clean house and use impeachment to remove the worst dregs of the executive branch, and maybe a few of the judiciary. So we'll have split government, often the best outcome for folks who want to see nothing happen, but maybe not-so-good with a politically castrated maniac in the White House.

And it's not like we get to shake the Etch-A-Sketch and make what's happened disappear. A war that can't be won and can't be ended with a return to the status quo, now that the Iranians have learned they have the power to trigger a global economic crisis by closing the Strait of Hormuz. A government so saddled with debt that it's created its own unvirtuous cycle, as interest rates go up and cause the cost of borrowing to increase and swallow more of the budget, causing interest rates to go up. Rinse and repeat. Where's the money to fix anything?

And the oligarchs have no ideology except maintaining their own power--it's like the country is being run by a cabal of teenage boys jacked up on Red Bull and Ayn Rand. If MAGA effaces, they'll just start buying Democrats, who are starved for the money.

Our reputation in the world certainly won't return to what it was before 2016. "Daddy went on a bender" isn't a valid excuse when a country this powerful goes on a vandalism spree against the very structures it spent decades creating.

So if in fact Congress flips blue, and if in fact the current congressional leadership allows that new cohort to be sworn in come January, they'll inherit an unfixable mess with the other two branches of government actively working to prevent them from doing anything about it.

And then comes 2028, and what do you know about that? We'll hear that the Dems held Congress for two years, nothing got better, maybe things got worse simply by continuing on the arc this kakistocracy initiated, and now it's time for the Party of Fiscal Responsibility and Military Strength (two concepts that, BTW, are almost impossible to reconcile in real life) to come to the rescue.

A win without sixty Senate seats is, then, a loss in the sense that it just gives the Dems a chance to share in the blame for the ongoing catastrophe. Without the ability to completely clean house in the other two branches, nothing's going to get fixed, even if the excesses of the last couple years may recede a little (at least to the extent the SCOTUS recognizes Congress as anything other than a duma there to rubberstamp the Czar's agenda).

On that cheery note, time to prep for my very first New York Supreme Court Zoom hearing, on a mundane bit of procedure I'm confident the judge won't understand. And so it goes.