Why is the real point so hard to see? in Journal of life stuff

There’s a youtube channel called Legal Eagle. The guy is apparently a really good lawyer and he breaks down various legal concepts or analyzes popular movies to say just how illegal they were. In one case, the Joker ended up with something like 20 life sentences, or around 2,000 years in prison, but Batman ended up with 31 million years in prison. The Dark Knight was the movie in question. In one of his most recent videos he talked about the Roger Stone conviction and sentencing.

The guy has a left slant. How much and how severe I can’t say. He’s also a good enough actor (all lawyers that see courtroom time are actors) to be able to act as though he’s a left-sympathizer for views. So I do keep in mind that his viewpoints could simply be those of a person playing to a certain demographic he knows is more popular in media and more advertiser friendly to the companies that run ads on youtube, so he could easily just be tailoring his content for maximum eyeballs. I can’t know.

Preface out of the way, there was one thing that bothered me about his Roger Stone report. Fundamentally, his view can be summarized that Trump tweeted about Roger Stone’s conviction and that was bad. But then that tweet lead to a retraction from the Justice Department that said the judge presiding over the case should use her discretion to sentence Mr. Stone, and that his was worse because the president shouldn’t be able to influence sentencing of criminals. He spent a good 5 minutes in a 26 minute video trying explain all the reasons that was bad, but he failed to point out the one good thing to come of it, or even fail to mention the entire point of Trump among people who can think beyond ‘orange man bad!’

A quote was included in the video from a group of former DoJ employees condemning this whole situation: “A person should not be given special treatment in a criminal prosecution because they are a close political ally of the President…” (quote unfinished and lacking context)

a different quote from the same group picks up: “Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies.”

These quotes bothered me and are the reason I decided to write this post. You see, for all the shit Trump does, the bafooning, the bluster, the lying, etc. For all of it, he is hopelessly obvious in what he does. When he didn’t like whistleblowers, he fired them publicly and tweeted about them being retaliatory in nature. But when Obama did it, we ended up with a top NSA mind IN FUCKING RUSSIA!? Yet the only outrage there is that “Snowden went to Russia!” no, he got trapped in Russia. That’s not the same thing.

Do you see what bothers me? No. Of course not. Let me spell it out: Trump, even with this Roger Stone thing, shows what nobody in Washington, right or left, wants pointed out: That this shit isn’t just possible, it’s common and has been done for years. Trump is simply applying sunlight to the dark corners, and whether that’s through his brilliance, lunacy, or stupidity doesn’t matter one iota. Why the sun shines doesn’t matter; only that it does.

The Legal Eagle guy goes at length to explain how A.G. Barr is firing anyone who disagrees with him or subverts his organization. Let me ask you, have any of you ever worked in an office? Have any of you ever seen a new high-level management person come in, and then a layoff follow in the next 3-6 months where lots of good employees were let go and it seemed to be ‘random’ but you always felt it wasn’t random? That’s exactly what has gone on in Washington for decades.

If the DoJ was actually supposed to be a separate entity, not controlled by the sitting president, then the people who worked for the Attorney General would not be able to be overridden by him. That is to say, the A.G. would have to lead by being an excellent leader and having compelling arguments, not by firing and laying off people he or she doesn’t agree with. Have any of you ever worked in an office where a new Director/VP/C-level came in and no layoff happened, but instead, there were many meetings where a vision was laid out and how/why that vision was a good idea wasn’t just explained, it was actively campaigned for. Up to and including the leader hearing criticism in the form of “Why don’t we go this way?” and actually saying “yea, that’s a better idea. We’ll go that way instead!”

It’s far more common and easier to lay off dissent than it is to convince cooperation. One requires a few strokes of the pen, the other requires genuine talent. How many government appointees have any meaningful level of actual talent? Their talent is kissing ass and keeping the shit stains off their noses, not mechanical skill.

What bothers me is that if the point, that the system is already broken, and this whole event simply shows how and why it is broken, were made the focus, then a conversation could occur into how we stop this going forward. But conversations don’t get eyeballs. Conversations aren’t clickbait. Conversations aren’t sensational, and build bridges instead of destroy them. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of hearing people say they want to fix something and then not even try to act the part. That’s what pissed me off so much about this video, that a golden opportunity to point out that the very fact that this happened at all is a sign of how fucked everything already is. That Roger Stone could have been the launching point for a historical video showing the slow corruption of a process over decades. That such a video would have applicability outside of just POTUS, but also to the small-and-medium businesses that are the backbone of our economy. There’s so much that this situation could have been used for to explain how and why people behave like dicks to each other and call it normal.

But no, instead, we get a video that says “Orange man bad. And it’s only going to get worse until something that isn’t orange makes it all better!” No, it fucking won’t. A precedent has been laid down: You can break any law as president and get away with it. This is going to get so, so much worse, no matter how gets the presidency next. Unless, by some miracle, that next president is a person with Kennedy levels of balls who doesn’t get shot in the head for actually trying to make good changes. Grr.

This is why I don’t pay attention to politics as much as possible anymore. It just makes me too angry because people focus on the wrong problems.