Power Games

I'm amazed at the seeming naivete of so many journalists and bloggers covering the current developments regarding corruption in the high places of DC.  So many of them act so amazed, so dumbfounded, so...shocked, just shocked!! at what's come out.  I'm amazed and dumbfounded too (but not shocked).  My amazement is for a different reason, though.  I'm amazed that all this is actually coming out in public view!  If it hadn't been for the election of Donald Trump which, politically, was a black swan event, NONE of this would have surfaced.  It was that political miracle which enabled this one.  Before the election I had resigned myself--for several years, actually--to the election of Hillary Clinton as our next POTUS and to business as usual in DC.  But the election of Donald was truly earth-shattering, and made so many previously unthinkable things thinkable.  Donald Trump is like a chlorine molecule inserted into an oxygen slot in an organism--fits right in and totally disrupts the chemistry.

NOW--what we see playing out in DC and around the nation is a raw game of power.  To be sure, there's still subterfuge involved, but so much more of the raw power is exposed for those who observe.  The left is in full-attack mode.  They seem to be operating on the assumption that rhetoric, not truth, will ultimately carry the day, and they have a nuclear arsenal of rhetoric at their disposal.  The right seems to have some very powerful evidence of official wrongdoing, but they don't have the left's powers of persuasion.  Who will win?  It remains to be seen.

But here's the deal: This battle is being fought strictly along partisan lines.  This greatly favors the Democrats.  They have the luxury of being intensely partisan while accusing the Republicans of being partisan.  It's a double standard which they've enjoyed for decades.  This also weakens the arguments of the Republicans.  After all, if they really had truth on their side, you'd think that at least SOME democrats would join them in their battle, wouldn't they?  But the Dems' not breaking ranks focuses attention not on THEIR partisanship, but on the Republicans'.  It's a weird phenomenon.  And the Republicans aren't helping matters by being so overtly joyful, gleeful even, at having discovered such incriminating evidence on the part of Clinton supporters.  They really make this look like a partisan battle, don't they?  And the sad part is, in light of their recent vote to give the government even greater surveillance powers, it may very well be for many in the GOP.

So--let's see how this plays out.  Like I said, this is a power game now.  The sides have been drawn up, the battle lines are formed.  There are only a few neutrals out there.  Most Americans are in one camp or the other.  Whose will shall prevail?  Most commenters, left and right, speak of "the will of the American people" as though it were a monolithic thing aligned, naturally, with the party the speaker endorses.  But it seems to me that the electorate is pretty much divided 50/50.  People in one camp are very, very unlikely to even listen to any argument put forth by the other.

The LORD God help us, especially His chosen ones.