Rules

I'm getting some thoughtful comments by one or more people who are trying to comment anonymously. Again, let me repeat -- and it's on the sidebar -- that is not allowed. I'd like to publish your comments but you must choose a handle.

Turning to other rules, a lot of people are saying some of what needs to be said right now. I'll gift you Jamelle Bouie, for starters. President Musk is blatantly violating the law and the constitution, and the only people who can do anything about it -- the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress -- are apparently more than happy to sit back and watch. As Bouie says, there's no going back. Now that the method has been shown to work, we'll need new and different institutional arrangements if we're ever to have a functioning liberal* democracy again. That's a difficult, complicated problem and I'm not going to try to pull the answer out of my hat.

That said, our other problem is that the nominal president is clearly a raving lunatic. The corporate media decided that Joe Biden was not fit to run for re-election because he appeared feeble and tired in the presidential debate and lost his train of thought. They excoriated his close associates for allegedly covering up his incapacity. However, it was perfectly alright with them that his opponent was, and is all the time even more so, a demented lunatic. Why is that not equally newsworthy?

*The word liberal in this context does not mean "as opposed to conservative." Liberal democracies can and often do have conservative governments. Also, the term "liberal arts" has nothing to do with political orientation. I'm not going to try to explain this now, if you don't already understand it you'll just need to do your own research.