Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap.

In the long run, The Toddler might end up having a beneficial effect on American democracy, assuming it, or the country, survive at all of course. We've all been watching the blatantly corrupt cabinet he is putting together with increasing unease I am sure, and Tillerson for SOC is perhaps the most blatant of all of them. He's also pretty much admitted he has no interest in actually pursuing a number of the things he said he would do during the campaign, which would perhaps be reassuring if he wasn't so corrupt and stupid that no one has any idea what he would actually do, besides steal as much as possible that is.

I'd like to think that if we survive this, protections and rules will be swiftly implemented so another Toddler can never get elected, what those might be I don't really know though.

The surprise the media and well, everybody has about this whole ordeal amuses the hell out of me though, how can anyone look at the man and everything he has done and said in the last eighteen months and think "This person is honest, trustworthy, and has no shady connections or scandals"?
There's a level of false equivalence at work here that is working in his favor obviously, not just the whole emails being the same as, well, everything bit.

We have this weird sort of duality in our thinking about presidents, on the one hand we, or at least those of us who support them, have this idea that they are shining examples of virtue and the idea that our candidate might have made some shady decisions in the past is abhorrent, on the other hand we basically assume all politicians are corrupt to some degree or another.

The latter idea is the correct one of course, but since we assume that, we also assume that they are virtually interchangeable, which is stupid, there are levels of corruption to consider. Obama likely made deals that his supporters wouldn't approve of to become president that we will never know about, and by the end of his tenure he almost certainly developed contacts and resources outside the public eye that would be perceived as shady, Hillary Clinton absolutely did, but there are two differences here, the first is that they didn't brag about it, this is actually pretty important, it suggests that they might be able to control their sociopathy and narcissism enough to get things done and that they care at least a little bit about something other than themselves, the other difference is a matter of scale. They made deals so they could accomplish goals, reach positions of power, then do things with them, The Toddler makes deals for any reason at all, he would ally with Vladimir Putin for no better reason than to build a hotel in Moscow, he would blow up Iranian warships because they insulted our sailors, he would change the Constitution to prevent reporters from reporting on him. He would give millions of dollars in tax breaks to a company in order to get a week of good PR.

We know our presidents can be bought, most of them come pre bought, but The Toddler can be bought cheaply, and when you can be bought cheaply, you don't get much for selling yourself. Why should Russia bother with limiting its expansionist ambitions when it knows that it can get the backing of the US by cutting a property deal?

The next four years/the rest of our lives, are gonna suuuuck.