Don’t you miss the good ol’days? When we could expect a crisis or two, maybe every few months, as who am I kidding, American politics has always had a dramatic element, and everything always seemed to be larger than life, with a healthy dose of scandal-plagued days and nights, not like this volley of bombshells one after the other, and from different crisis, hour after hour, where last weeks news seems like it all happened a lifetime ago.

So, another Mueller Friday began with a bang and a pre-dawn arrest of Roger Stone with a tv crew to capture the fluorescent FBI logo on their flack jackets making their way across his front lawn. Throughout the day more stories dropping like heavy footsteps down a corridor, wondering what is coming next, the sort of day when the president’s campaign manager in court to find out how long he’s spending in prison doesn’t even make the top 3 holy shite batman moments of the day.

Definitively I suppose we can state that quite a number of top individuals involved with the Trump campaign for some unknown reason or other have chosen to perjure themselves rather than admit any connection to Russia.

The 7 indictment against Stone involves lying and witness tampering and what he knew, who directed what, what when and whatnot, but what they do not provide is any clear links to not just how the Wikileaks documents were acquired, but from who. Basically, that Stone lied about his involvement is clear, and how he threatened a witness to not testify, even threatened the guy’s dog, and so forth.

This is crazytown, I mean the guy has a tramp stamp of Nixon, and in my not so humble opinion is guilty as sin, but nothing so far he knew were Assange got the documents. Although, speculation is that acquiring that information may have been the reasoning behind the whole jolting him out of a sound sleep at 6AM to FBI agents at his front door, but I guess we shall see.

SO, as the ol’rumpTus would say “no collusion”, yet, but can you smell it in the air?

That question that lingers, the direction the investigation is going, and who will be the next to fall, as those footsteps get louder.

Now, another, em, tidbit, or layer lets say, something to consider, that I learned from this piece I watched from the Maddow show last night, on how the GOP is dragging their feet on appointing members to the Intel Committee, which on the surface seems innocuous. Ah yeah, so apparently without those transcripts from the Congressional hearings the Mueller Investigation can’t lay more charges.

A delay could be crucial to some at the top the GOP may be protecting, perhaps, also the longer they can drag all this out the more chance Trump has of finishing his first term, protect their own arse, and the caveat being that he can pardon to his little heart’s delight and no one could do a thing to stop him, win or lose in 2020. Really, Stone and Manafort probably believe they just have to stick it out 2 years, max, and go down as heroes, least in their little-twisted world view.

You know, remember when these ultra-conservative wingnuts were out there on the lunatic fringe? You know, out there with the tinfoil hat crew tuning in alien vibes, rubbing shoulders with the Elvis lives folk, and then came the flat-earthers and birthers, remember those days? Well, now the lunatics are running the asylum, with news radio jockey’s and conspiracy theorists bending the president’s ear, and the deniers and liars slowly drain the Republican party morality away – drip, drip, drip – like a slow leak.

The GOP and POTUS have devolved into this sort of dysfunctional co-dependency, and neither seeing the inherent weakness in that relationship, for if one falls so will they all.

And that slow leak, costing them day after day, their integrity, and how they see this ending well for them is beyond me. It makes me wonder what the game plan is, or if there’s a game plan.

Personally, I bet they don’t have one.

Although my new fav thing of late has to be dejected prez, the hunched over lumbering oaf not getting his way walk, like that petulant child who is being dragged back down to the corner store to apologize and pay for the candy he stole.

I got to wondering though, and I found a podcast from Radio Atlantic that was taped just before Christmas, before the shutdown, that detailed the history that brought this neo-conservative far-flung freak show to the forefront of American politics.

Observing antidemocratic “power grabs” by state Republicans, George Packer writes that “the corruption of the Republican Party in the Trump era seemed to set in with breathtaking speed. In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter.”

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And his name actually was Goldwater, Barry Goldwater, back in 1964, prophesizing doom and gloom, and nationalist sentiment entered the national dialogue, using the old fascist fear tactics, but republicanism at the time waved him away.

Next comes Reagan, and although a far more militant conservative, still compassionate and more genteel in his approach, more moderately militant, though he was a sort of gateway drug to what came next – Gingrich.

Newt Gingrich just over a decade after Goldwater brought all those same flags of fear mongering to the fray, demonizing Democrats, without the constraints, all about labelling the enemy with no real cohesive platform, unless you consider fear-mongering a platform, and out pops the bimbo Palin, and the Tea Party is born. So now the fringe has a home, with the birthers and flat-earthers, the haters and hicks from the sticks, convinced of the corrupt decadence of the liberals destroying everything as they know it, opening the borders to evil fiends, giving every thieve and druglord the key’s to the gate, and who knows what other hogwash those poor fools lap up like mana from their god.

Not a day after he caved on the wall, we have the president of the United States not soothing his citizens with his moral compass, with leadership, his presidentialness. Nope, instead he’s busy fabricating this caravan of evil intent on its way to storm the borders, with gagged and tied up women, and good gawd all mighty what has this dude been smokin’?

As they said on the podcast, basically, this is the effects of ideology on politics, this power at any cost, and we see a GOP today perfectly ok with gerrymandering borders and bending rules in order to acquire and then keep that power, and democracy becomes inconvenient to those ends.

There are no forging of alliances, no compromising for the greater good, no hands across the floor, none of that, as the be all and end all is POWER, their way or the highway, and democracy be damned.

Yet, drip, drip, drip, as the corrupt heart of all this gerrymandering begins to pool around their feet, as more and more, one by one, more folks begin to realize they’ve been snowed, as the indictments land on the docket, and no wall is going to stop it. When do you imagine the GOP decide maybe it may just be time to save their own ass?

Guess my only other question is, I wonder who they’ll have play Stone in the movie?