Thursday, February 11, 2021

Maxed Out


 Wolf Blitzer declares Biden 46th President 


Before the pandemic and the election, you might have been one of those people who watched the ll:00 o’clock news before bed, primarily to get the weather. One of your pastimes might have been tuning onto The Weather Channel during one of the hurricanes which had done so much damage in the Panhandle. It’s always terrible to see the destruction which nature has wrought but you can’t help feeling smugly happy as you're entertained by other people’s misery from afar. It's schadenfreude. The past year has changed everything. Even though death has come to everyone’s doorstep, the primary entertainment for many is watching 24 hour cable news. With the comorbidities of plague and political unrest, it's, in fact, more entertaining than any police procedural or crime drama. Every day brings some new insult to either intelligence or simply to consciousness. Did you know that QAnon supporters believe that by March 4 Trump will be returned to The White House as the l9th president of the Republic? Were you aware the Republican Arizona legislature, which has censured the Republican governor Doug Dulcey for certifying the results of the election, was recently still demanding Maricopa county hand over ballots for yet another  recount in the hope that the state could be turned for Trump, as a first step in unseating Joe Biden? What form of entertainment could compete with this or the likes of Mike Flynn getting into shouting matches with White House advisors who were reticent to declare martial law? If this kind of stuff had appeared on an episode of The West Wing you might have assumed the popular series had become a sitcom. Or take the fact that one of the members of Trump’s impeachment defense team is former Montgomery county DA Bruce Castor who refused to prosecute Bill Cosby and that a former president would have to dig this deep to find lawyers willing to defend him. No wonder one of the conservative broadcasting networks is called Newsmax. Interestingly one of the few competitions to the Trump juggeraut is the team of Democratic house managers prosecuting the case to impeach him. In the course of arguing their case, congressmen and women Jamie Raskin, Joe Neguse, Madeleine Dean, Joaquin Castro, Eric Swalwell and Stacey  E. Plaskett have demonstrated that even that increasingly rarified commodity known as truth can make for compelling television.

Read "The Findings" by Francis Levy, The Evergreen Review

 

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