Scenes from an idiocracy
The nation has gone bat guano crazy. Or at least 40% of it has.
It's been hard to avoid that conclusion for some time. The last four years have been an experiment in surrealism that has left it hard to deny. Facts no longer matter. Evidence no longer matters. Truth no longer matters. We live in the era of "alternative facts," to use Kellyanne Conway's unfortunate phrase. The more sophisticated might consider it the triumph of Post-Modernism; the more sensible, on the other hand, might simply interpret as meaning that a great many people are full of it, and believe pretty much any ridiculous thing they want to, particularly if it puts our current president in a good light and they find it somewhere on the Internet.
This morning, when I opened my email, I found the usual insightful column by Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark. I'd already heard about President Trump's prediction about climate change, but the other three items were new to me. Or at least the incidents were; the depressing reality they make all too clear about our nation has, after all, been a fact we've all had to live with for nearly four years now.
1. An article by Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute in the Washington Post which includes the following absurdity:
I fear Trump’s erratic, personality-driven decision-making. His contempt for NATO is alarming, as is his delusion that he can manage rogue leaders. I don’t doubt that his eagerness to withdraw U.S. troops from their stability missions in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq will encourage conflict and terrorism. And I fret that his bizarrely isolationist attitude toward international trade will hurt the U.S. economy and splinter the global trading juggernaut that over the past half-century has brought the world amazing prosperity, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty.
But I fear the leftward lurch of the Democratic Party even more.
2. A news report on this rally- which, sadly, is not a skit from SNL;
3. This tweet, from one of Mr. Trump's most loyal supporters- apparently with no sense of irony whatsoever- issuing a challenge: 
4. And finally, a word that the President of the United States believes that we're not only going to wake up one morning and find that the coronavirus has vanished, but that the same thing will happen to the problem of climate change.
Mr. President, I don't think you really know about anything much at all. Many of your supporters seem to know even less. And the bunch of you scare the living daylights out of me.
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