Tuesday, February 06, 2024

Survival advice from the analytical trenches

Marcy Wheeler aka @emptywheel has been explaining the intricacies of the unhappy intersection of American law with conspiracies involving grift and national security for several decades. She studies and maps all the documents and holds a ridiculously complex web of bad actors in her head. Remember when the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney regime was trying to sell us that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was hiding nuclear weapons? Probably not, but Marcy was on that case. These days she is sorting through Donald Trump's many legal entanglements, in particular the nefarious Russian ones. Her web grows and grows ...

But she's not just in this for intellectual fascination of plots and perversions. Yesterday she broke away from analysis and offered frustrated advice to most of her readers that touched my activist heart and nerves: 

Stop Treating Rule of Law Like a Magical Sparkle Pony and Get Busy ...

... [That's] self-inflicted impotence.

No judicial outcome will ever be sufficient, by itself, to beat Trump. No realistic Democrat should be staking their electoral hopes on one or some guilty verdicts — not because they wouldn’t help, but because you can’t control that.

Every single person reading this has in their power the ability to do something — whether it’s local electoral work, repeating discussions of Trump’s corruption so much that it begins to drown out stories about Hunter Biden, or educating your neighbors about Trump’s central role in rolling back reproductive choice — to help defeat Trump. Every second you spend worrying about Karen Henderson [a federal judge currently sitting on Trump's claim of absolute immunity for misdeeds] is time you’re not doing whatever it is that will be most useful in defeating Trump.

Stop making yourself impotent by worrying about the court cases. Stop hoping that any court case is going to be the Magical Sparkle Pony that makes this easy. Stop wallowing in provably false conspiracy theories about the January 6 investigation that ignore a bunch of public things the TV lawyers don’t talk about.

This is not going to be easy, I promise you. Find some way to make yourself useful to make it, at least, easier.

Marcy's advice does my tired heart good. Don't just stew; do what you can.

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