So, So Tired
I am not so-so tired, I am so, so very tired. Just as I finished my deposition yesterday and wrapped up a three month expert witness blitz that had me putting in over 180 hours, a reasonably brisk pace for a semi-retired guy, I have not been able to just take a deep breath and relax in anticipation of my upcoming travels to Asia. What has stolen away my well-deserved “School’s Out for Summer” frame of mind is what’s happening in the world and national stage. There have been no extraordinary military flare-ups in Ukraine, Gaza, the Red Sea, the Straights of Hormuz or even the South China Sea. The weather, while not ideal here in Southern California, has not been littered with catastrophic loss anywhere I can find on the map. In fact, there is even talk about El Niño prematurely subsiding and being less troublesome than predicted. So, instead of some dramatic event that is galvanizing my mind with worry, I am suffering from the drip, drip, drip of reality starting to seep into my consciousness and eroding my general sense of optimism about the state of the world.
On the Ukraine front we have Vladimir Putin showing no signs of stopping his territorial quest to the west and, despite his weakened economic and military state, he is slogging on into the winter like Russians have always tended to do. While Volodymyr Zelenskyy is flailing to maintain his grip on his command and continue his perseverance in the cold of winter war, the forces of evil seem stacked against him. Victor Orban in Hungary (big pals with Tucker Carlson and praised by Trump) succeeded in delaying the EU aid package for Ukraine so that just now a trickle of those funds are being made available to restock their arsenals. But what they really need is the U.S. Congress to appropriate the funding and access to our sophisticated weapons to be able to drive their battle-hardened experience back at the weakened Russian resolve, but that is being thwarted with each congressional thrust and parry. Republicans want aid to Ukraine for the most part, but not enough to give in to it without damaging Biden for his presidential run this year. Bernie Sanders could have supported the recent Democrat-led Ukraine funding bill, but he hates the border compromise that Biden offered up to allow it to happen, and, oh yeah, the Republicans pulled that rug out from underneath themselves anyway. So Ukraine sits in its ice-caked ditch, and Zelenskyy, one of the great global heroes of our day, gets weaker and weaker by the day. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson is giving airtime to Putin by interviewing him in Moscow in a move that for most of my life would have put him in the ranks of Lee Harvey Oswald as a potential traitor to our nation. And of course, he is being aided and abetted in that exercise by Elon Musk, who has decided that free hate speech via X (previously known as Twitter) is the savior of the libertarian world.
In Gaza, another autocratic strong man ruler who can rival Putin and Orban and Carlson and Musk for headline grimaces, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is holding Israel and the world by the balls by insisting that he will persevere in bombing the shit out of all of Gaza until he roots out every drop of Hamas blood when it is mostly Palestinian children’s blood he is really shedding. Oh, and by the way, Palestinians need not maintain even a shred of hope for a two-state solution from Netanyahu because in for a penny, in for a pound with his absolutist River-to-the-Sea-Keep-Me-Out-of-Jail approach to life. Sigh….
I wish I could be buoyed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s cat and mouse game with Hamas, Hezbolah and the Houthi’s, getting lulled into thinking that they do not want a broader Middle East conflagration, but I fear they are reading our national news reports about our internal political squabbles and deciding that it is far more effective to drip Jihad acid on us than splash it into our face at one go. Our country’s military does know how to mobilize and kick-ass when it needs to, but our enemies have learned with Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine that when things get dragged out and we lose our resolve through the drip, drip, drip of conflict (external and then politically internal), we are not only beatable, but that we tend to beat ourselves up worse than any aggressor can do to us. That is where we are on several levels vis-a-vis Ukraine and Gaza at the moment. And here’s the thing, we are taking it in the neck from both sides of the political spectrum simultaneously. The right hates us for rejecting the strong-men of Putin, Orban and Netanyahu and the left hates us for allowing war to ravage children and innocents rather than full-throatedly repudiating these strong men. We seem to be waffling in the middle and suffering greatly because of it.
At the heart of all this weariness is the spirit-numbing situation on our political front. All three branches of government are in disarray simultaneously. Congress is largely dysfunctional with a House not only divided, but divided within the divides. Hakeem Jeffies seems to have the only caucus that is tight. Mike Johnson on the right can’t even do effective vote counts and get his slim majority to do his (or should I say Trump’s) bidding. The MAGA crowd seems building to another speaker removal program and cross-aisle trust is entirely non-existent at this point. The Senate is only marginally better with Chuck Schumer getting more and more tired as time goes by and likely end up somewhere in a assisted living mumbling to Mitch McConnell about the good old days when everyone knew how to filibuster with finesse.
We heard through livestream the shit-show at the Supreme Court where legal eagle technicalities seemed more important than an underlying truth that we are faced with a former president who incited an insurrection in order to overthrow the constitution and remain illegally in power. Fear of reprisals was more at issue than fear of the loss of civility and the rule of law. All of this from a Supreme Court that was questionably constituted at the margin (I’m talking Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett) and questionably retained (the ethical issues surrounding Thomas and Alito) and perhaps even more questionably led by Roberts, perhaps the weakest Chief Justice we have ever had. This gang seems more worried about not losing their internal civility and jamming up their docket and interfering with their summer vacations than resolving the pressing constitutional issues that are facing the nation in this most impactful election year of our time.
But by far the most depressing and tiring situation exists in the Executive Branch. Joe Biden has done an amazing and wonderful job as President and I will stand by that feeling until my dying day. If more of our world leaders cared as much about his people, and actually all people, as Biden does, we would have a much better world to live in. But his performance yesterday when the Special Counsel Report on his documents situation was released (and it was admittedly over-the-top derogatory and denigrating to Biden), he did not shrug it off effectively as a younger and more vibrant politician might. He made matters worse by yelling at reporters to get off his lawn and reminded even those of us who admire what he has done that he should be put out to a well-deserved pasture. So, here I am heading to Asia next week for the better part of a month and wondering what I will return to on the American political horizon. I probably need a break from it all because the only truth that I am sure of at this moment is that I am so, so tired of it all.