Just the first week...

Sure feels like the country is quite quickly going to hell in a handbasket.  The edicts from the White house are being implemented as efficiently as you would expect them to be given the speed at which they are being rolled out, the circus troupe running the show and any bit of intellectual honesty.  Let’s see, in the course of one week we have managed to go to such lengths to piss off our neighbors to the south that their President cancelled a state visit and driven the citizens to a point that they are calling for everything short of war.  We have shredded the moral standing of the country with this ban of refugees.  They have managed to target a single religious block with somewhere between limited and no entry to the country (except for those traveling from the country where the only outside “terrorists” to attack the US came from.) The only upside to that is that the courts have no particular agenda to be beholden to the chief of the circus and therefore will likely throw the whole thing, part and parcel, out as a gross breach of the Constitution.  And the fine party in charge, after feigning enough moral outrage when all these ideas where floated in the election, have either gone completely silent or have fallen in line for the clown brigade.  (I can’t begin to come up with a suitable political fate to wish on our noble Speaker of the House, the ideas man, the bridge between the establishment and the wackadoos.  He has done nothing short of selling his soul.  History seldom remembers the cowards which is unfortunate as Speaker Ryan will likely be a good cautionary tale of what happens when your positioning and brand vastly outstrip your abilities.)

I do honestly wish I had any guess as to how this is all going to turn out.  I have begun to worry however that at some point, with the near daily large scale protesting going on, that something is going to go very wrong.  A mistake will be made and it may be enough to set the whole powder keg off.  Let us not forget that the polls really were not wrong about the amount of support that this guy has.  (They were simply wrong on how that translated into electoral votes.)  The powerbase that he does have however is a volatile lot where they are not exceptionally old.  If things start to get worse, there is no telling what happens when one of his “constituent” groups decides to get overzealous.  Lord knows the bubble that is the WH will not do anything to stop them, even if they could.  And that is the scary part to me… the risk that protests and counter-protests meet up on the wrong street at the wrong time.  There are no inspirational leaders in Washington today, just those that will tell you that the country is going to hell and it is “their” fault and the only ones you can trust to tell you the “truth” is the group casting the message to begin with.  

The real risk we run is that the wrong people really start to believe them and then we will find out how slippery the slope really is.