A House Divided

The View from the Dark Side

A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 86% of Americans think that the United States is more politically divided than it has ever been. 

The atmosphere surrounding the election and inauguration of Donald Trump justifies that depressing assessment and foreshadows continuing and unending disarray is the body politic of the nation. The question arises not only how the day to day operations of a government can be conducted under the nearly obsessive demonstrations--with no apparent constructive goal--against the administration, but, more to the point, how any nation can exist as a rational entity with such enmity among its citizens.

The specter of a house divided against itself arises in the acrimonious slogans and insults hurled across the ideological divide. The one-time peace advocating liberals, seeking revenge for the defeat of their own flawed candidate, thirst for blood—some even hoping for an assassination. 

Conservatives, gloating in the “victory” of their flawed candidate, taunt the losers to “get over it”. Liberal progressives who supposedly support divergence and tolerance post a smutty photo of two naked women in an embrace, one of whom is identified as Melania Trump. Harley Davidson bikers gather on the Mall in support of Trump and vow to take law and order into their own hands if necessary. Probably the lowest smears are against a 10-year old boy who happens to be the Trump’s youngest son. One Hollywood celebrity purports to have video evidence that Barron Trump has ASD (autism spectrum disorder) and a SNL comedy writer quips that Barron would be the “first homeschooled shooter” although he goes to a private school, and so on ad nauseam.

It is a dilemma as old as history; societies corrupted from within implode as a result of their own corruption. The expression “a house divided” is at least as old as the bible. It appears in the Gospel of Matthew: “And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto him. Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.”

Photo of Lincoln by Abraham Byers

Thomas Hobbes said that “a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand” in 1651 in his Leviathan. In 1776 in Common Sense, Thomas Paine said in relation to the Monarchy: “this hath all the distinctions of a house divided against itself . . . “

Abraham Lincoln used the expression in an 1843 speech accepting his nomination for United States Senator by the Illinois Republican Party. Lincoln’s “house divided” referred to the free and slave States. He said the Nation could not remain divided but would become all one thing or the other—all free or all slave States. He would then fight a bloody civil war to ensure that it not remain ”a house divided against itself”. But today, once again, our house is divided against itself.

Are we going to need another civil war?

Who the hell dunnit, anyway?

The view from the Dark Side.

           More bananas for the Republic

No sooner had revelations from leaks indicated that the DNC had undermined the Sanders campaign in the primaries than a drumbeat of media blitz implicating Russia in the  hacking of the DNC computers was started in what looked like a deliberate disinformation campaign to divert attention from the actual malfeasance described in the leaked emails.

As everyone knows by now, Clinton, in one of the most astounding reversals in American politics, was defeated by Donald Trump. The liberal progressives of identity politics were unable to accept defeat in what they thought was a kind of “divine right” to rule, and seemed to seek to blame anyone and anything but themselves, their poor campaign, uninspiring candidate, a lack of believable domestic policies and a belligerent attitude toward foreign policy for that defeat. And so, Russia and Vladimir Putin became the boogeyman who stiffed the Clinton campaign and caused her defeat.

The FBI’s James Comey was also targeted by the Clintonians as another cause of her defeat by the timing of his letter taking another look into her use of a private server for emails while Secretary of State. Now the US Justice Department is going to undertake a probe into the FBI’s decision about the politically incorrect timing of Mr. Comey’s letter to Congress. I wonder if there is still some hope among the Clintonians that someway, somehow, Trump is going to get kicked out of the White House that Hillary apparently feels entitled to, is owed and has a right to?

The Justice Department seems not to be in the strongest position to be making investigations into political campaign manipulations. Does anyone remember a certain meeting on an airplane on the tarmac of the Phoenix airport when Hillary was under pressure from the FBI for her private emails during the campaign when Bill Clinton and the Attorney General met for half an hour to discuss their grandchildren and, oh, by the way, decided not pursue the issue?

Well, to give the Donald equal time in the halls of smoke and mirrors, according to his recent press conference and all the great deals he’s going to make with all those terrific people, I fully expect him to do wonders and shit sea cucumbers.

Bananas for the Republic

The view from the Dark Side

All together now, after me on the count of three: 1 - 2 – 3:  

PUTIN DID IT!

One has to wonder if the so-called “Intelligence” Services and the Mainstream Media realize what their drumbeat of unsubstantiated innuendos about “Russian hacking” of the US Presidential election makes them look like?

If their allegations are true, it makes the spies look like incompetent idiots as opposed to an effective spying organization that should have been on top of this “hacking” before it ever came near affecting the election results, and the media look like yellow journalists peddling their sensationalist stories on the supermarket tabloid racks.

If the allegations are deliberate “fake news”, then the only conclusion one can come to is that the “Intelligence” Services and the mainstream media are intentionally manipulating the American people and undermining what faith may remain in the governing integrity of the country.

Considering the new “(un)civil war” engulfing reportage in the American mainstream and alternative media there seems to be very little integrity left in the governance of the country. It has seriously begun to look as though the inmates are, indeed, in charge of the asylum.