Politics

I played my share of video games when I was a kid and there was nothing quite like getting to the last level. You’d fought your way through various sewers and hideouts, past a series of increasingly bullet-resistant guards, encountering a couple cheesy plot twists along the way. But for the last level, you had some idea what was coming. It had been alluded to in the game story, previewed in the instruction manual. And so you felt a rush of awe as you wandered around, having finally made it to the end, even as you hunted for that body armor you desperately needed. That was how many of the dipshits who stormed the Capitol in Washington DC on Wednesday seemed to behave.

If the people who stormed the Capitol building in Washington, DC on Wednesday accomplished one thing, it’s that they effectively killed any legitimate inquiry into voter fraud. Spurred by concerns over in-person voting during the pandemic, Democrats successfully changed local and state voting rules at the last minute and pivoted to allowing the bulk of voting to be done via mail. Any major change to the voting system in such a short period of time deserves a full and comprehensive audit, even if the outcome does not change upon its completion. However, because some pro-Trump demonstrators resorted to violence in order to have their concerns heard, politicians will refuse to ever again discuss any voting irregularities.

When he was in his twenties, Missouri’s precocious junior senator Josh Hawley authored a biography called Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness. Might he have been projecting?  Sen. Hawley chases moralizing populist causes like Wile E. Coyote following the Road Runner straight off a cliff. The difference is that the cartoon coyote only ended up hurting himself. Hawley, in his antics worthy of the ACME Dynamite Corporation, could deal a blow to American democracy. Hawley has managed to make a lot of enemies, or at least caused a lot of eyes to roll, over the past few years.

Enough is enough. There really is no other way to contextualize perhaps the darkest day for America since airplanes hit the World Trade Center in 2001. Donald Trump is not going to quell his mob and odds are his followers aren’t going to listen to him anymore anyway. As rioters stormed the Capitol building, several Republicans and pundits demanded Donald Trump speak up and 'call it off’. Who are they talking to? It’s not Donald Trump’s responsibility, apparently. He had his opportunity earlier in the day as he addressed a crowd in a long rambling grievance-fest. Now it’s time for Congress to speak up and use its constitutional authority to end this. Congress has the absolute power to do so. Make it final. Make it unanimous. Make it known.

Two things seem to be agreed upon by most reasonable people debating the November 3 election. First, there was election fraud. There is some degree of election fraud in every cycle. Second, the presidential election of 2020 was susceptible to more than the usual dosage of deceit because of the large number of mail-in ballots. Whether or not you believe that enough fraud existed to change the election results, these realities seem to share consensus. So does the lack of interest in doing anything about them. Republicans care only about election fraud on a scale that would tip the results to President Trump. Democrats care only about election fraud on a scale that might tip the results to President Trump too.

Steve Bannon’s plan to build a great populist ‘movement’ in Europe hasn’t quite yet come to fruition. But the former White House chief strategist has formed an interesting relationship with Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, who these days talks as if he’s been avidly listening to Bannon’s War Room podcast instead of reciting the rosary. The two men have just released an extraordinary interview, in which the prelate describes the connections between what he calls the global ‘Deep State’, that serves China’s interests, and the ‘Deep Church’, led by Bergoglio — or, as most the world knows him, Pope Francis I.