In any other reality it would be the end of 'the president.' But I'm just not sure that any optics-based norm enforcement can be effective against the shameless liars anymore. The Cohen and Manafort guilt only served to suck the air out of the Omarosa claims of an "N-word" tape for doughfacedonny.
Nothing has really changed. The same brain-dead re-programmable meatbags that believed their god-emperor was simply the victim of a witchhunt by angry Democrats yesterday still believe that today and will tomorrow. The rest of the world knows he's a crook and that hasn't changed.
Republicans still chant "Lock her up!" at doughfacedonny's fascist rallies. Glassy-eyed true believer trolls commenting on Facebook news stories make sure to work Hillary and Barack Obama into their screeds. How many are actually Russian or 'bots created by them? It's a nonzero number, but these are your grandparents or your weird uncle. Sometimes it's your boss or your neighbor but living next to !shock! !horror! Democrats or worse yet brown people is something residents of Alt-America generally avoid. Self sorting and autosegregation is practically the rule in real life as it is online.
I had something of a meltdown over the reaction to Cohen and Manafort, and now soon-to-be-ex-congressmember Duncan Hunter. Who is now the second congresscritter in the last month to be indicted for financial shenanigans, after Chris Collins was caught insider trading. These two idiots, who believed they were now above the law, have something else in common: they were the first two congressmembers to endorse doughfacedonny. Amazing right? It's as though the republican party really and truly is rotten down to its core.
Optics just doesn't work anymore if the republican meat covered robots can be programmed to simply not accept facts. Now, why didn't the jury convict Manafort on all 18 counts? Answer, one robot snuck onto the jury and refused to believe any evidence of Paulie's wrongdoing.
The meltdown came from the optics-obsessed Chris Cillizza's "analysis" of these "two massive clouds hanging over Donald Trump's presidency broke open... and poured rain all over the president."
First, you need functioning eyes to see those clouds. Second, you need a functioning brain to process what clouds are and what they are likely to mean. Third, you need the sensory capability to register that rain is wet and unpleasant. Then you still need a functioning brain to process what that sensation means.
Which the reprogrammable republican meatbags do not possess. They are literally Aristotle's prisoners watching the world through shadows cast on the wall. All sensory information is filtered through fox news and right wing media and cast upon the wall in pre-chewed form to mean whatever authoritarian leaders want it to mean for these prisoners. Alt-America exists comfortably in its own self-imposed prison, they have no idea how the real world works beyond the cave wall. The pain from their republican leaders' actions certainly affects them, but they turn to the same people hitting them for answers. And those answers are always the same, "it's the Democrats fault, it's brown people's fault."
Optics mean nothing when there is no sensory processing to interpret meaning. So Cillizza can write about and interpret the meaning of disastrous weeks, days, hours for doughfacedonny but they don't mean anything. Laws of physics operate no matter what, if you knock the supports out from under a weight then gravity will bring it to the ground. But laws of social science cease to operate if belief in them is undermined by an alternate reality. The constitution established and centuries of application solidified a system of government institutions that functioned under laws of physics. Doughfacedonny's republicans have replaced it with subjective laws of social science which are malleable and largely insulated from the laws of physics.
Partisanship, tribalism, and authoritarianism have congealed the republican party into an occupying force that has at least momentarily suspended the laws of physics. Optics disappear into this black hole of republicanism like light waves, outside of the black hole we can observe where those optics disappear but we can't do anything about it.
So I ask again, what is the roadmap of making those laws apply again? How do real world events, like several republicans going to real world prison and doughfacedonny's own actual confessions to illegal acts (sorry, paywall) put rubber to the road? In other words, how do we make sure Cohen, Manafort, Collins, and Hunter among other things, stick and really get some traction towards prying these fucking ticks out of office?
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