One of the things I've started to try to press as a bit of a meme is that "this isn't normal" but I want to emphasize that what I mean isn't that *Trump* isn't normal - the whole 25-30 year right wing media push has put us way into abnormal territory.
The right wing pushed the hounding of a sitting President until they found charges that a prosecutor would reject - no evidence of suborning perjury, and the perjury they claimed was of the form that it's widely accepted you don't *put* in front of a jury. They then gathered behind a clueless dolt, defended him for being asleep at the wheel during a massive terrorist attack, supported a pointless war based on lies, defended some of the lies as "see, we can blame someone else for that, even though we repeated it, knowing it was false," defended torture, false imprisonment, defended the ridiculous incompetence in the war, etc. hounded the next President tirelessly, and now are supporting a person who's so clearly and obviously incompetent that it's only the trust people have in the right wing media, and the Republican leadership, that has any hope of propping him up.
They've engaged in relentlessly partisan investigations, to the point that Benghazipalooza - a Congressional investigation clearly intended to keep attacking Hillary Clinton through the upcoming Presidential election - didn't even seem newsworthy, and that when they made baseless criminal accusations against a political opponent, everyone decided to discuss how it affected the horse race, rather than point out that there was no evidence of wrongdoing, that the laws were such that we have no basis to suspect wrongdoing, and thus, clearly a fishing expedition.
They've gotten rewarded for all of this, too. Sure, not always, not every single time, but, often enough, and with big enough rewards, that there's no reason they wouldn't keep doing it.
This isn't normal - this isn't how a representative democracy should be. And there's a mix of people who have seen the changes happen slowly (the proverbial frog in the pot, a metaphor so good we needed to invent it, in spite of its inaccuracy) and those who've never seen anything else. It's going to take other people to try to remind folks that there's a better way.
And yes, despair fatigue is probably much like compassion fatigue, and probably dangerous for the same reasons :-).
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The right wing pushed the hounding of a sitting President until they found charges that a prosecutor would reject - no evidence of suborning perjury, and the perjury they claimed was of the form that it's widely accepted you don't *put* in front of a jury. They then gathered behind a clueless dolt, defended him for being asleep at the wheel during a massive terrorist attack, supported a pointless war based on lies, defended some of the lies as "see, we can blame someone else for that, even though we repeated it, knowing it was false," defended torture, false imprisonment, defended the ridiculous incompetence in the war, etc. hounded the next President tirelessly, and now are supporting a person who's so clearly and obviously incompetent that it's only the trust people have in the right wing media, and the Republican leadership, that has any hope of propping him up.
They've engaged in relentlessly partisan investigations, to the point that Benghazipalooza - a Congressional investigation clearly intended to keep attacking Hillary Clinton through the upcoming Presidential election - didn't even seem newsworthy, and that when they made baseless criminal accusations against a political opponent, everyone decided to discuss how it affected the horse race, rather than point out that there was no evidence of wrongdoing, that the laws were such that we have no basis to suspect wrongdoing, and thus, clearly a fishing expedition.
They've gotten rewarded for all of this, too. Sure, not always, not every single time, but, often enough, and with big enough rewards, that there's no reason they wouldn't keep doing it.
This isn't normal - this isn't how a representative democracy should be. And there's a mix of people who have seen the changes happen slowly (the proverbial frog in the pot, a metaphor so good we needed to invent it, in spite of its inaccuracy) and those who've never seen anything else. It's going to take other people to try to remind folks that there's a better way.
And yes, despair fatigue is probably much like compassion fatigue, and probably dangerous for the same reasons :-).