Lots of monochrome in this thread.
If you took pretty much all of the finger-pointing positions to which individuals are stubbornly clinging to the exclusion of any and all other positions and strung them together with "and"s, you'd have the closest approximation yet to the reality.
Civilizations are born, then they live, then they die.
The US is critically ill, and at this point, it looks terminal. It might not be, but the odds are that it is.
And that, as they say, is that.
I presume as an alternative to paying him...
Entirely typical.
Republicans have already dicked veterans over so hard that private charities have to try to make up for all of the broken promises.
And it's still not enough for them.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard." - H.L. Mencken
Hey c'mon - it's either save the world for our descendants or make sure a handful of corporate executives, stockholders and bankers are able to afford more houses and bigger yachts. The choice is obvious, right?
Does that matter?
I'm toying with the idea that we're all wrong, and it was actually widespread fraud that "won" the election for Trump.
And that's the entire point really.
Behind all of the sturm und drang and all of the Christian nationalist noise and all of the hate and all of the furor is, and has been from the start, a handful of fabulously wealthy psychopathic fuckwads who recignized in Trump an opportunity to protect and even expand their entirely undeserved and grotesquely destructive privilege.
While there are strategic advantages to that - if he wins, it'll feel more like a mandate that will justify whatever horrifying shit his administration intends to do and if he loses, it's an instant objection - I tend to think that the real foundation of this whole attitude is just Trump's delusional narcissism.
Trump's reality isn't rooted in actual objective reality. It's based on himself and himself alone - if he believes it, then, to him, it is and can only be true, and he believes whatever serves to assuage the squalling demands of his titanic ego and his childish greed and need for attention.
I have no doubt that in the fantasy universe in which he actually lives, he really can't possibly lose. It's just in the real universe - the one the rest of us live in but he does not - that he can (and hopefully will) lose.
Rather obviously, there's one and only one real reason why they would try to bar federal monitors - because they don't want any witnesses to whatever they're planning.
Junkies'll do some crazy shit for some o' that sweet, sweet righteous indignation...