(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



Musings on this "Day After" at My Breakfast Greasy Spoon [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-05-31  

My wife and I went to our favorite local greasy spoon for breakfast this morning. From the looks of the place on the outside you’d never suspect that they serve the best damned country breakfast anywhere on the island for the best price — nor would you suspect the goings-on inside with the early breakfast crowd. The usual regulars all showed up right on opening time - Dave and Larry and John and Marty, and the rest of the community’s participating morning contingency. It didn’t take a heck of a lot of imagination to suspect what the morning’s topic of conversation was going to be either: Trump’s conviction from yesterday. The clutch of citizens who frequent this otherwise nondescript eatery are decidedly well-educated, older people - most of them are retired or about to become so… the kind of people mockingly referred to by ageist muttonheads as “Boomers”. Except that if one of those people were to sit a few booths away from the conversation without knowing who was speaking, they might believe that he was listening to four graduate school college students arguing the merits of banning the country’s conservative political groups as domestic terrorists.

We have joined in on their past roundtable discussions occasionally, usually at Dave’s behest. The oldest of them, he apparently has a keen eye for spotting retired old engineers with Progressive inclinations who have clear complexions, smile a lot at their own wives and don’t smoke, and he has enthusiastically encouraged us to join the party. But given our schedules with doctor appointments, shopping and whatever else the wife needs us to get done, we typically take our leave of the place soon after finishing breakfast. Otherwise those round table conversations usually take up a minimum of 2 to 2-1/2 hours… entirely too long a time commitment for extemporaneous conversation when life is happening all around us.

Anyway, I spent an inordinate amount of time following the news, commentary and rebuttals from the injured snowflake Nazis yesterday afternoon after Trump’s verdicts were announced - both from the national media and the comments of ecstatic jubilation on Kos; and later in the evening I took a break from the news and finished a book I’ve been slogging through for a few weeks now… Underground in Berlin by Marie Jalowicz. It chronicles her first-hand experiences of a 20 year-old Jewish woman doing what she had to do to survive in one of the most dangerous, deadly places on earth such a person could find themselves - early 1940s Berlin.

After the course of the day’s events and as the contents of that book settled in to ripen in my mind, I drifted off to sleep with a keen sense of dread.

So after overhearing the commentary from The Greasy Spoon Round Table forum at breakfast this morning, on the drive home I got to thinking about how, to a very large extent, most of everyone’s comments and arguments are so tightly compartmentalized that obvious facts and historic precedents are lost in-between the jubilation from our fellow progressives on the left and the abject dismay and retributive disgust on the right.

As I see it, Trump’s felony conviction on those 34 counts of malfeasance - while legally formalizing his already recognized penchant for felony behavior - is but a symptomatic pimple on Lady Justice’s nose that, in today’s contemporary regard for the rule of law, managed to get accidentally popped when compared to everything else he’s done these last 8 years, amounting to large, infected and festering boils. Why this conviction happened isn’t so much a “...triumph of justice that shows at least one part of our system still works” as Larry at the breakfast Round Table forum declared earlier, as it is an inadvertent reveal of just how far down the rabbit hole our country’s people have gone. It wasn’t all that long ago when a fair majority of the population considered moral turpitude to be an anathema to honorable citizenship and positions of leadership. Back when it happened, I immediately knew when that standard took such a hard hit that its foundations were shattered and led to its collapse: that day when Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon. Certainly, before that dreadful miscarriage of justice, there were smaller examples of the same kind of criminality largely ignored by both the Media and the general public. But when it became public consensus that a criminal occupied the highest, most powerful office in the world, committed an egregious Federal offense and got off scott free without any legal consequences, that was the red flag that fascists needed to start their infiltration of our government and formulate both their intellectual and, later, their material insurrection. Today, that message inscribed in the pediment of the Supreme Court building - “Equal Justice Under Rule Of Law” - has become a cruel, sarcastic joke from those who wear the robes therein, the causative effect laid squarely at the feet of Mitch McConnell. Reality Winner’s 5 year sentence for disclosing a few classified documents amounts to a misdemeanor compared to the sheer volume of top secret documentation that Trump stole… and yet the very judge that Trump himself appointed to the bench while in the Oval Office now has the responsibility to adjudicate the case, throwing up procedural roadblocks to his trial every step of the way. And a good many people are perfectly fine with that, because when the law that everyone else is expected to obey and comply with is attempted to be applied to those with desirable luminary status, such laws evaporate into thin air.

So why is that? Moral turpitude is no longer exclusionary to perceived leadership ability in 45% of America. Such numbers promote fascism, support Klanners and Nazis, cripples our justice system, corrupts the ability of Government to serve and protect our people and exist in peace among nations. And that is why America will never be made “Great Again©” until that number takes a nose dive in the direction of zero. And I don’t have the slightest idea what it will take for that to ever happen; I just hope it won’t take what Germany and Italy had to experience.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/5/31/2244017/-Musings-on-this-Day-After-at-My-Breakfast-Greasy-Spoon?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/