Sorry—am I missing something?
Did we or did we not all learn last Friday that the previous president of the United States of America, in his last weeks in office, tried to strong-arm the Justice Department to falsely declare that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent, and even threatened to fire the acting attorney general if he didn't?! Didn't we read that a sitting president of the world’s greatest democracy told the nation's top law enforcement official: "Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the [Republican] Congressmen"?
Does that ring a bell? I seem to recall something along those lines, and I have a few questions:
- Why isn't this the most outrageous act of political corruption in American history? I'm old enough to have lived through Watergate; isn't this orders of magnitude beyond Nixonian corruption?
- Why didn't every newspaper and news website in America display that headline in 60-point type? Why, instead, did the nation's two newspapers of political record, The New York Times and Washington Post, give the story only mid-level importance on their front pages, outweighed by the Olympics and infrastructure negotiations? And why, by that evening, was the story not even visible without scrolling down a page or two?
- Why haven't we seen a single follow-up story from any news source in America, and, apparently, only this one op-ed by Robert Reich in The Guardian (a British paper)? No one thinks it's worth more reporting? No one wants to get responses from Democratic leaders, constitutional scholars, or historians? No editorial board has anything to say about a U.S. president conspiring to end democracy as we know it in America? No other pundit wants to opine about the greatest act of political treachery in our nation's history?
- And where, in God's name, are the Democrats? Why (to my knowledge) haven't we heard a single word from any Democratic leader? A U.S. president commits actual, genuine sedition and no Democrat has anything to say? Really?
- Forget, for a moment, the moral outrage; on a purely crass
political level, why aren't Democratic leaders pressing the advantage on
this?
- Why haven't they called a mass press conference to demand Republican leaders renounce their spiritual overlord for his monumental betrayal of America?
- Why hasn't every Democratic member of Congress written angry op-eds to their hometown newspapers decrying this unspeakable outrage?
- Where is the Democratic Party's message machine? (I know. Don't get me started.) They can't even issue a DNC press release? Not even a fucking tweet from their (strictly aspirational) "War Room"?
- Is it some kind of strategy? Is it because they're at a delicate stage of the infrastructure deal and everyone's afraid to piss off Republicans right now? Are we in a new era of bipartisanship and we just don’t do that anymore?
- Is America's bizarre national disinterest just outrage fatigue?
- Or because it's just one more thing—just one of a million ways the sociopathic POS tried to ratfuck America and subvert our democratic way of life? Yeah, the guy tried to get the Justice Department to help him overthrow a free and fair election—what else is new?
- Is it because he's not president anymore, so, really, who cares?
- Is it because the House Oversight Committee will probably hold a hearing or something on this, so let's just wait a few weeks?
- Or because it happened on a Friday and this is, well, Tuesday, and haven't I heard about the relentless 24-hour news cycle?
- The silence is stupefying. For most of my career I've worked in magazine and newspaper journalism. I think I have some sense of news value. Why do I seem to be alone in thinking that a U.S. president trying to enlist an attorney general in a seditious conspiracy to destroy American democracy is more than a one-day news story?
- WTF? WTGDF? Am I making way too much of this? Am I just being a hysterical liberal snowflake?
- Have I mentioned yet that this is THE GREATEST POLITICAL CORRUPTION SCANDAL IN AMERICAN HISTORY?
- What am I not getting? Somebody, please—tell me.If one picture can ever say it all, this is a strong candidate. Lock the traitor up and swallow the key.
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