When I got home from work and turned on MSNBC-TV, anchor Chris Hayes was sharing his basic response to the indictment, which he summarized by saying, “If these acts were not crimes, then there is no such thing as a crime.”
I share that opinion. What our “mob-boss President” did was completely egregious. He’d already said, way back in 2016, when asked if he would abide by the results of that election, “Only if I win.” If your eyes see, your ears hear, your mind construes and your heart feels something different, what can I say? That is your right.
Neal Katyal on the value of Truth
I was also taken by a moving speech a bit later. It was made by Neal Katyal, the former Solicitor General of the United States, and someone about whom I feel a strong spiritual sense. He spoke about how, for some people nowadays, there is basically no distinction between true and untrue. Many people believe anything they want, without regard to evidence.
A vast swath of our nation doesn’t even receive access to much of the evidence, hearing only an “alternative view,” which I’m told, in this case, consisted of, “He’s being deprived of his free speech!” (The indictment itself carefully distinguished between the “free speech” protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and ACTION that crosses another line, the line between legality and illegality or crime.)
Katyal eloquently discoursed on the subject of Law and Truth. He said that the very purpose of Law and the courts is to enforce what is true in the government and the body politic. I hope his talk is published somewhere, so it can easily be accessed. I have a good friend who (many years ago, when we were starting out in the adult world) went to law school, and has been a practicing lawyer now for possibly five decades. I asked him once what drew him to his profession, and he said, “Something about the idea and value of Truth and Justice.”
Can democracy be saved?
What will be will be, from here on in, of course. In the race to the finish line of these prosecutions, will any of them be finished before the November 2024 presidential election? As Laurence O’Donnell cautioned last evening on MSNBC, even if one or more verdicts are in, there is still the appeal process, which could take a couple more years. There will be no clear finish to unravelling the mess that all of this has created in American society and within the government, before that election.
The true hope is that a substantial enough bloc of American voters will be able to maintain the standards of American democracy in this next election, and soundly reject a man who appeals not to the better angels of the public, nor to the values of unity, inclusion and opportunity for all, but to pitting factions against one another, slandering opponents (for instance, by using the epithet, “deranged Jack Smith” in his public comments about these cases and investigations), and… you can read all about it in The New York Times, folks… he announced it within the past couple of weeks: Donald Trump’s plan to bring executive power, and that alone, to all branches of government—and, it appears, all facets of U.S. society.
In a democracy, the people’s will is paramount.
Let’s hope “the people” are still sane enough, clear-sighted enough, to… well, to know the difference between a relatively benign candidate who honours (imperfect though he and all of us are) the traditions that have, in spite of the nation’s imperfections, made it a positive example and a model for fostering human potential over the past two and a half centuries—and the wolf who really doesn’t even bother to wear sheep’s clothing that disguises him very well—his protestations that “I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for you” ring transparently false, like so much that he says.
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изображение 1: Викисклад/Викисклад; изображение 2: Викисклад; image 3: Викисклад
