I'm drawing a kind of fine and possibly meaningless distinction here. I think Ford made the best decision he could at the time. Garland had the benefit of hindsight: he saw the way the corruption had become far deeper than the President himself. Garland should have known better.

Not saying it wasn't a miscarriage of justice. Rather, that "justice" is, to me, just one part of making a good world.

Nixon-ism went on to form a truly despicable Republican party, but I think that would have happened whether Ford pardoned him or not. In fact I think pardoning him was the best chance to put that "win politics at all costs" mentality behind us. Turns out that didn't work out, but prosecuting Nixon wouldn't have made it any better.

If that means a ton of literal insurrectionists go free, that's fine with me. We elected someone precisely to do that. It's on the voters if we elected someone who was literally treasonous himself.

I hope the insurrectionists take the opportunity to get on with their lives. I gather that quite a few have already been banned for other crimes, and that's too bad.

I don't want prison to be vengeance. I want prison to make us all safer. I'd like the President to take a lot of leeway in finding people who are going to be productive citizens if they were given that gift.

It's more than just his opinions, which are easily duplicated. It's more than just audacity; anybody can lie boldly. He's got a supreme talent for failing upward that I do not comprehend, but I don't see anyone else with it.

Not that I see it turning out well. At best we return to two more-or-less equally unlikeable parties, except this time with one having a massive thumb on the scales.

It would be great if people chose not to do business with the former, but many simply do not care. They may think only other people get screwed. They may not take the time to think about it, especially if the company spends a ton of money obfuscating their misbehavior. Quite a few actively defend the right of companies to screw them.

Technology multiplies that like a lever. We weren't prepared for capitalism before LLMs and we're massively under-prepared now.

Congress spent decades ceding power to the executive because it realized it could not do anything itself. And now it's stuck.

He didn't need to attack Iran to get to Lebanon. True, Iran would have helped Hezbollah if it weren't kept busy, but he's not going to get his "buffer zone" anyway. It's just an opportunity to harass Lebanon.

He certainly doesn't need to attack Iran to expand in the West Bank. He's building settlements as fast as he can.

Attacking Iran punishes them for October 7th, and delays the next one of those. (Gaza is quiet for the moment, but nothing has actually changed.)

It seems too optimistic to believe that this would get the EU to focus more clearly on Ukraine, and perhaps even turn the tide there. Still, here's hoping.

It was more than just "a bunch of lies", but an entire parallel media ecosystem. Fox News is the most visible part of it, but there are also newspapers, local TV channels, radio, and eventually their own social network. They spent the 60s and 70s building up the network of evangelical preachers.

In addition, they've been systematically destroying other sources: the Washington Post, Twitter, NPR. When they cannot destroy it, they devote a constant barrage of pressure on their other media to discredit it.

Plus guest appearances from a shadowy network of Russian trolls. I think it's a relatively small influence, but it has been a persistent goad in that direction.

There was a careful political plan to take over the majority of state governments and the Supreme Court. Each of those led to more ability to control the narrative and the outcome of elections.

This wasn't minor and it wasn't an accident. It wasn't exactly centrally planned, but a lot of very rich people put a lot of money in the same direction, and this is the result.

That was known and expected. We could not continue to put sulfur in the air; it causes acid rain.

The fact that we also cannot afford to put CO2 into the air is a separate problem. That goes beyond temperature: even if additional sulfur would mitigate the temperature increase, it would also make ocean acidification worse.

Things had been kinda quiet for the last couple of decades. We continue involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan but didn't start new ones. We even pulled out of those by five years ago. So yes, definitely, we did a lot more warring with the Department of War.

Longer term, the "Department of Defense" got into an awful lot of wars from its name change in 1947. The Department of War might have more wars on a per-day basis in its short time under that name, but not a lot more.

But really, the answer to your question is "yes". We decided we wanted to do a lot more war, and we branded the department to go along with it.

I'd be really grateful if it stopped.

All he had to do was say "I did that", and he would have won the election back in 2020. Instead, he doubled down on his insistence that it was never a problem at all, despite having spent so much money to fix it.

I don't think he knows or cares about vaccines one way or the other. He just likes to judge what infuriates some people, and how much that fury will please others. He came down on the side of the anti-vaxxers, because the impotent outrage of scientists and intellectuals is always a big emotional win.

They may suffer a loss this November, but it won't be a massive repudiation. It will be a swing of just a few points, which makes a difference only because the two sides are closely balanced. It won't be because the people have changed their minds en masse about being cheated.

The US has always believed that might makes right, and that wealth is proof of your virtue. "Corruption" is just good business sense, when it benefits your side.

They would, of course, throw a massive hissy fit if it had been their opponents. But that's less about the corruption in itself, as that it was one of those "lesser" people taking advantage of his betters.