Lunatic Politics (Part 2) – It’s Becoming Impossible to Have a Conversation

More and more people are becoming aware of and concerned about the level of political dialogue going on right now. We’ve gotten to a point where I’m seeing almost no intelligent debate about any serious issue. Russiagate now consumes such a massive amount of our collective energy, it feels we’ve become nearly incapable of discussing anything else. Even worse, Russiagate has morphed into a creepy D.C. establishment religion where merely demanding evidence for the wild claims being made gets you labeled a traitor or Putin agent. Ironically, average Americans don’t care about the issue.

When Gallup recently asked Americans what the most important (non-economic) problem facing the country today is, the amount of people saying Russia was so low they couldn’t even attribute a number to it.

Think about that. We’re being divided into two camps of increasingly insane and angry people because of hysteria surrounding an issue nobody even cares about. As usual, we can thank mass media for turning this topic into its singular obsession as well as promoting an environment of cultural insanity and stupidity.

As a result, people aren’t having intelligent conversations with one another. They’re just yelling at each other. The dialogue feels more like a political hunger games where people see everything as a linguistic competition of kill or be killed. Language itself has become debased as individuals try to one up each other with name calling and hyperbole. Demonizing and dehumanizing the other side appears to be the primary goal, which will only lead to a very bad place if we don’t take a collective deep breath.

One of the more discouraging and sad parts of the current environment is watching many of Trump’s opponents, who define themselves by being ethical, completely toss this aside in their furor at Trump. A recent tweet by liberal hero Shaun King perfectly proves the point.

“It’s absolutely treasonous.” No, it absolutely isn’t. But don’t take my word for it. Let’s examine some excerpts from a recent article published by Steve Vladeck, a professor of law at the University of Texas School of Law whose teaching and research focus on federal jurisdiction, constitutional law, and national security law.

From his NBC article, Americans Have Forgotten What ‘Treason’ Actually Means — And How It Can Be Abused:

Treasonous acts may be criminal, but criminal acts are almost never treason. As Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution specifies,“Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” The Founders went out of their way to define treason narrowly because they knew how it had been repeatedly abused in the past…

Thus, to ensure that treason could not likewise be co-opted for political or personal purposes, the Constitution’s drafters not only defined it precisely (it’s the only offense specifically defined in that document), but also specified that “No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.” (Article III also limits the punishment that can be inflicted, even with a conviction)…

By those metrics, it should be obvious why it is not treason to either refuse to applaud the president or to collude with Russia to influence the outcome of a presidential election. To be sure, the latter, if proven, is light-years worse than the former. But treason is not defined by the gravity of the offense; it’s a crime indicating the clear support our enemies during wartime, period…

To be sure, there’s no law against the colloquial misuse of a legal term — nor should there ever be. But the more we use the t-word to refer to conduct that doesn’t remotely resemble the constitutional definition, the more we are — willfully — turning a blind eye to the sordid history of treason that led to its unique treatment in the U.S. Constitution.

Shaun King considers himself both an ethical human and a journalist, but his tweet was just lazy and stupid. Lazy because it’s very easy to search what treason means, and why it’s one of the most loaded and well-defined terms you can use. Stupid because he must know that flippant accusations of “treason” have historically been used by right-wingers against leftists. Normalizing such a tactic will only end up hurting the marginalized people he’s dedicated his life to protecting. It’s incredibly dumb and shortsighted, but just another example of what Trump Derangement Syndrome can do to you.

I don’t mean to pick on him. We’re all extremely flawed human beings that could benefit from self-reflection and humility. We all need to get down off our soapboxes, look in the mirror and she what wild-eyed lunatics we look like. I try to do this as often as possible, yet recognize that I’m far from the person I’d like to be. There’s no destination in life, only the journey.

A major problem with today’s charged political environment is too many people have become too attached to outcomes. Whether that outcome is removing Trump from office, or reelecting him. If you’ll do anything to achieve your goals, anything to grab power, or deploy any tactics to prove your point then you will become the monsters you claim to be fighting. Too many of us are becoming passionate, engaged monsters and it won’t lead to anything good.

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20 thoughts on “Lunatic Politics (Part 2) – It’s Becoming Impossible to Have a Conversation”

  1. Part of the issue with the extreme nature of American politics stems from the collective narcissism on both sides – we all believe we should get exactly what we want all the time. This is “hard baked” into the concept of “American Exceptionalism”. The antidote to this self concept is humility and compassion – these are needed now more than ever.

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    • And the other answer is to put celebrities in their place. Boycott them. Especially the Kardashians. The mere fact this show exist is incredible to me.
      The country used to be smarter. More civil. Yes we had race riots and paid the price. But things were better after that. More people valued morals. We didn’t have thugs walking around with their pants down past their butt cheeks. Oh but don’t you say anything lest you be labeled a racist. And politics could be talked about. Now it’s liberals just on a constant rant. It’s worse because they think physically showing up at the homes of people they don’t agree with is ok. It’s NOT. It’s chickenshit. But that’s what the libs have become. No class and proud of their selves. Hell these people showing up at protests are rather uneducated. Youtube has shown interviews of these protest and the people there doing the shouting couldn’t answer simple questions on their cause. Maybe because they’re being paid. Maybe they’re stupid or both.

  2. This emotional chargedness and the culture of being offended is a bad mix already.
    But it is further exacerbated by the neo-NewSpeak they call political correctness.

    Just today i met pro-international-dialog people spreading a meme about Putin’s “influencing elections” in USA.
    The meme was sarcastic and pro-Trump.
    Still it was repeating “Putin influenced elections” even if giving another emotional charge to the claim.

    And i was seeing not the emotions, but the phrase itself.
    I saw the political correctness killing human speech, by spreading words so wide they started to encompass everything and denote nothing.

    Words no more mean a thing. Hint at thousand things, aim at none….

    What does it mean “influence elections” ?

    I read your posts and comments – and you influence me.
    I write this comment – and i wish people would read it and be influenced by me.

    Everything we say or do does influence someone.
    Communicating means influencing!

    Of course Putin did influence the elections.
    By the very fact he exists, lives and breathes.
    By the very fact American media mentions him.

    Accusations of “influence”, if to be honest, are accusations of the very existence.

    Words had lost their meaning under political correctness tyranny…
    We are loosing human speech and some orwellian NewSpeak is forced upon us.

    Even if there would be no that hysteric Russia-hate, Orwell envisaged that when there is no words in the language, people can not communicate about those concepts.

    They could not wipe the dictionaries, but they could and did wiped thr meanings of the empty shells that once were words…

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  3. I have been in a war. Not by choice. It is not so much that everyone is heading anywhere in particular, it is just harder to keep honor if not dead yet. I do not understand how the pathology of sentience in our species can be so twisted into this kind of madness.

    I guess that is easy when humans go collective. Never much trucked in that. Seems like the same thing.

    I guess probably due to easy money. Poor ones just live like animals.

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  4. Recently saw Wolf Blitzer relentlessly badgering Rand Paul, who was bravely (and coolly) saying that every country wants to influence foreign elections, and if they can, they do… in point of fact. But, Wolf insisted that Paul say that what Trump said was ‘bad’. It was a pathetic, barefaced effort to enforce the plutos bipartisan ‘Putin is Bogey’ mantra.. (echoes of ‘Hussein is Hitler’!!)… without a new ‘cold war’, what will the neocons, defense contractors, and Netanyahu do! PNaC will fail!! (Oh, how short memories are… especially in the MSM)

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  5. during 1850s in run up to civil war violence in the halls of Congress was fairly common with one northener almost beaten to death. are we on the verge of a repeat?

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  6. In December 2016 Obama signed a Presidential order making it legal for the State Dept and the Dept of Defense to supply ALL terrorist groups in Syria with weapons (there had been restrictions previously)

    Now THAT was treasonous !

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  7. This polarization of the country has to be intentional. It’s become a glaring issue that everyone talks about at least occasionally, but the entire political media still has the pedal to the metal. Seems we’re supposed to eventually follow in the footsteps of Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc and have a permanent civil war. That’s the modern blueprint, spreading far and wide.

    As for Krieger’s last Twitter quote, yeah, we’re all starting to see how societies go down. I have to hand it to TPTB for pulling this off in the internet age, where people have tons of information at their fingertips. Besides encouraging people to become victims and turn their brains off, the masterstroke was to create news “echo chambers” for people so they rarely stumble across differing viewpoints. Once they’re entrenched far enough into the red/blue divide, or any other cause celebre, they become unreachable.

    All that’s left is to wait and see when this enmity finally boils over.

    Reply
    • Did you ever heard about Vraidevka, little town in Ukraine where local cops almost killed a woman? And then media started a craze how *every* cop is enemy and justified target for *every* citizen.
      It was about a year before EuroMaidan launched.

      When i heard about Ferguson and how American MSM spin it, I said it was Vradievka. Like with Russia in 1990-s, Ukraine in part became a testing ground for the methods that would be used over America if any “dictator” would be getting off the leash.

      Good thing, you have better immunity and the process goes much slower. Bad thing, it goes.

    • Yes, the polarization is intentional, and has been intentional for decades.

      That is how the Dialectic is fed and maintained.

      But Trump winning was a major Black Swan for the establishment. So they are ramping it up to new levels.

  8. But there is a difference between those “two side” it seems. I think it’s dangerous not to distinguish between the controlling nature of the TDS sufferers and their “leaders” and those who believe, rightfully so, that the election outcome should be recognized enough that the “other side” doesn’t try to use unelected mechanisms of the state to alter that outcome.

    The left…in much larger numbers than the right ever do…hasclaimed every Presidential election NOT won by a DEM has been illegitimate since the first Bush election. Think about that. And now it’s built into this!! They’ve already started a soft civil war don’t you think? And they are much more “pure” ideologues and will publicly use force physically and verbally against their own even to keep “pure”.

    I’m not trying to exaggerate and I don’t think I am…But analyzing this problem in a context of a false equivalency just to look “objective” is not a realistic way to resolve it it seems. Just my opinion .

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  9. If there were any fence-sitters, who were still uncertain as to whether the media and establishment were not co-joined twins, the orchestrated hysteria surrounding Trump’s Helsinki Summit should have left no room for doubt. The wizard’s curtain was not only pulled back, but ripped down for this “all media hands on deck” emergency. A behaviorist would say it had all the earmarks of desperation, a last-ditch effort to sabotage any chance of Russian rapprochement. The cost in media credibility is yet to be paid, but you can be sure it’s waiting in the wings.

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    • It was oh so telling, yes.But I think that there was already very little legacy media credibility left. I am watching a J School collapse from the inside as we speak. Enrollment at “this one ” is down from 370 to 70 in a decade…that’s quite astonishing wouldn’t you day and a data point I have yet to see used in analysis of this larger crisis of legitimacy the legacy media is experiencing. We are not the only J School experiencing this either.

      The School’s are hard left cultural Marxist incubators and jave been planned that way since their inceptions IMO. But they are horribly slow to change with technology and suffer amazingly high levels of dissonance among faculty and admins.

      Of course the legacy media isn’t the only traditional institution of power to be suffering this crisis, but it is possibly the most viable along with traditional political organizations.

    • Thank you, Liberty, but from my perspective there are still plenty who still trust television news and traditional print journalism, even though newspapers have been financially devastated since the rise of the internet. Most are from the older generation, who were raised without the internet and therefore do not have the computer skills or wherewithal to find alternate online sources.

      I meet them at the coffee shop after they have had their daily dose of hysteria from CNN or some other morning news show, and can’t help but notice how their opinions (and emotional outrage) fall right in line with their news source. And please don’t try to reason with them, because Putin is a murdering thug who invaded Crimea and then stole the election from HRC.

  10. MK doesn’t understand. He insists on viewing this issue through a legal lens. But the media and public have grounds to be suspicious of Trump’s relationship with Putin. And if the suspicions are true, the consequences are potentially dire and irreversible, even if the elements of Art 3, sec 3 are not yet met. In the big picture, it is hardly notewothy that people use the word treason when the President maybe have conspired with Russia; a two hour private meeting is not at all reassuring. Yesterday, the Senate voted 98-0 to do something for the good of the country that Trump would not. Rather than trying to make sense of these complicated events, MK resorts to calling people lazy, stupid and insane. I am sure he will disagree sincerely, but he is not a voice of reason in this time of distress; he is simply a naysayer hiding behind legalese. I hope that he is ultimately right not to be alarmed and while I think improved relations with Russia are long overdue, the path we are on is neither the only nor the best way to that goal, and that’s what concerns me most.

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    • “But the media and public have grounds to be suspicious of Trump’s relationship with Putin.”

      Exactly why? As in, either provide hard verifiable evidence that proves there is good reason for anyone to be “suspicious” of the “relationship” between the President of the United States and the President of Russia, or STFU. If all you have is the same wash, rinse, repeat, rumor and innuendo that has been repeated over and over again by the completely captured MSM, then you’ve got nothing.

      Monday was hardly the first time that the leaders of both countries have met in private over the past 50 years.

      “Yesterday, the Senate voted 98-0 to do something for the good of the country that Trump would not.’

      “The word bipartisan usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.” – George Carlin

  11. Here is a line from a yet unpublished song I have written ” We are fighting wars that can never be won it’s the Schizophrenic nature of Man”.

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