Somewhat honorable he may be, though Biden left his mind somewhere up near the top of the trees. Politically homeless I may be, but at least I can still see… That the real problem isn’t warming, but more basic than that. It’s division that’s harming everything we aspire to be.

Imagine a career politician who has failed to get all but the very basic of his agenda items through congress stands up and says, we’ll pass voting rights and bust down the filibuster to do it. If he hasn’t got the votes for anything else, how did he expect to bust down the filibuster and then do voting rights? 50 votes in the Senate doesn’t get you there, Mr. Biden. What planet are you from, anyway? Did you really think any Republicans would help you bust down the filibuster for that? This just makes him look even more ineffective than he already did. In my mind, though, Biden’s miss is worse than I could ever imagine.

The real problem is not so much the content. The substance of measure X or measure Y has barely any meaning. It’s the “who” of the matter more than the “what”.

Think about the situation of everything Donald Trump and his toadies have gotten away with for a moment. How can someone lie his rear off about winning an election when he clearly lost, call up the Georgia Secretary of State and demand that 11,780 votes be found, organize fake witnesses to testify to state legislatures across the country about imaginary election fraud, transmit fake electoral vote certificates to the National Archives, send an angry mob down to trash the Capitol, conspire to use military force to effect his will on individual battleground states, etc.… and more than half of the Republican Party doesn’t seem to be phased. What is the matter with them?

Some of it is demagoguery. Trump and those of his ilk know how to profit from a bad situation. But Trump is not the one who started this. He is a symptom – not the problem.

Having been around these people most of my life, I suspect I know where that little flame that became the raging inferno started. I was in the thick of the Tea Party movement when it began, many moons ago. Yes, it was insulting for Carl Rove, Mr. Silverspoon, to pick on a potential Tea Party GOP candidate for having once declared bankruptcy, you know, just being Jane Average. And sitting through the 2012 GOP convention was absolutely maddening, as every other sentence from the podium was something about the plight of the unemployed being self-created when most of us understand who and what created all that unemployment in 2008 that lasted for years. There was a real axe to grind with the establishment who did all of that, and then stuck their noses into the air as if negative demand shocks mean nothing at all – especially when you have YOUR government check to keep you afloat and donations from rent seekers for the rest. We won’t talk about how congress people go into congress middle class and come out millionaires – for now.

Republican establishment types have had trouble with narcissism since at least 2006. The Great Recession brought out what felt like the worst, as to be unavoidable.

But then, top it off with Democrats declaring that they won in 2008, and it meant they get to pass everything from their decades-long wish list while the rest of us must sit there and take it because that’s what democracy means. They forgot to ask themselves if “can” and “should” mean the same thing. I don’t think they do, yet the Democrats grabbed the whole enchilada saying, if you don’t like it, it sucks to be you, among other not so endearing things. I’ll never forget the image of Nancy parading around with the gavel saying insulting things about Tea Partiers and Republicans in general on the day Obama Care was passed.

It’s true that there’s always been some competition between Dems and GOP. But at the end of the day the differences could usually be hammered out and we got things that were at least bearable. But I have not seen that sort of good will in politics since before 2008. It’s been stripped away with more than enough hubris to last 10 lifetimes.

So, here with sit with unabashed seditious conspirators still running amuck. We have establishment Democrats acting like it’s still 2008 and consent of the governed is as strong as it has always been, while many Republicans are saying, screw this crap, I’m sick of it – Lets go Brandon! – if this is democracy, perhaps that is the problem. So, they go along with and perhaps appreciate Trump’s criminality because, in their view, it’s better than the alternative. They could not be more wrong.

I always dreamed of the day we’d have the states in the habit of nullification. But I didn’t expect it to come along as a byproduct of unwanted autocratic baggage and my heart aches. This whole mess is a huge tragedy and nothing is being done about it – by anyone – and it won’t fix itself.