Drained

Amazing to me that the thing everybody knew they were totally lying about turns out to have been a thing they were totally lying about. Yesterday, the Justice Department sought to dismiss their case against David Hearn for vandalizing the Capitol Reflecting Pool, now correctly blaming “faulty installation” for the pool’s algae blooms and failed pool liner instead of their original theory, that the 67-year-old former Olympian somehow managed to cut a 350-foot gash on the bottom of the pool, in full view of security cameras and God Almighty, without detection.

The case was laughable from the start. But that didn’t stop Jeanine Pirro and her band of flunkies from bringing charges against an innocent man without evidence. Those charges carried a potential penalty of 10 years in prison.

Of all the various indignities foisted upon the nation by the current cabal running the joint, this stupid case demonstrates, perhaps better than any other, that there’s no limit to their depravity. The stakes could not have been lower, yet they were willing – and wanting – to put an innocent man in jail for a substantial proportion of the rest of his life in order to save the president from mild embarrassment.

They’ve treated other people far worse than they treated Hearn – Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Rümeysa Öztürk come immediately to mind – but Hearn’s case didn’t spring from the ginned-up racism and xenophobia that befell those two. It had nothing to do with questions of the First Amendment, immigration law, questionable policy positions, or anything having to do with anything.

They arrested him. Indicted him. Smeared him. Held a press conference. Trotted the Secretary of the Interior onto all the Sunday talk shows. Over nothing. So how far are they willing to go when money and power are on the line?

The question isn’t rhetorical. The Trump presidency operates under two overlapping rubrics. We already know they’re willing to murder people on the open seas and on the streets of American cities. We know they’re willing to kill hundreds of thousands of the “undeserving” in nations far from home. We know they’re willing to throw innocent people into domestic concentration camps. We know they’re willing to start a war. All of that falls under the rubric of “bad policy.”

There’s also the rubric of “endemic corruption,” under which the Hearn case fits more comfortably. The billions of dollars in cryptocurrency, diamonds, jets, business deals, donor largesse, and fraud. Coupled with that, however, is the thing about which I’m currently more worried – the midterms elections and beyond.

If they will defraud, deceive, and defame, if they do not even respect the sanctity of life, why would they respect the sanctity of an election? Already, they’re doing everything in their power to tip the scales in their favor. Among other steps, they’ve already fired the Democratic members of the Federal Election Commission, passed (and attempted to pass) redistricting efforts in red states, reduced staff at the agency that monitors elections, claimed without evidence that LA’s mayoral race was “rigged,” and are currently doing everything they can to pass the SAVE Act, which election experts claim will disenfranchise millions of voters, in particular women and minorities, both of whom tend to vote Democratic.

Drained. Photo by Rahmat Gul for AP.

That’s just what we see on the surface. What foul machinations are buzzing just below? Do we believe that the man who personally called Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” 11,780 votes hasn’t developed a more sophisticated strategy for ensuring his own political survival this time around?

The lynchpin is elections, where bad policy and endemic corruption find their most obvious overlap. That is the juncture where this whole miserable exercise can be halted. Both sides know this, of course, and both sides are doing what they can to ensure a November victory. I’m not naïve enough to believe that some Democrats wouldn’t cheat if they could, nor am I so cynical to believe that both parties are the same; the current Republican party is not only willing to cheat, they’ve made it their entire brand.

I’m not an election expert myself, so I don’t know how possible it is to actually rig an American election. I’ve been assured time and again that such a thing is impossible, but I’ve been told many such things were impossible right up until the moment they happened. I’m just saying, consider the resources they deployed to ruin the life of one innocent man when nothing was at stake. The good news is that the other thing the Hearn case demonstrates is the administration’s continued ineptitude, but I don’t like counting on stupidity to save American democracy.