Accountability???

And I’ll ask you a very simple question: how long will you (and others taking the same tack of reiterating that building cases takes time) continue to give the Trump admin – and it’s DOJ specifically – an out for it’s failure to aggressively prosecute these cases? Is the midterm election cycle the hard cutoff? Keep in mind his term (and that of his cabinet level staff) is half over at that point, and wrapping a case up once underway also takes time, of which he has precious little. And if that “line in the sand” comes and goes with no real change, will you then move the goalposts even further back, and continue to offer excuses for why they need more time to get going before they can drop the hammer on so many bad guys who are still walking around free?

It strikes me that there is low hanging fruit that the DOJ could already have gone after to show they’re making a good faith effort, even if there are cases that need a lot more lead time to put together. Given previous patterns of performance – and lack of payoff for the forbearance of his supporters insisting that big action is coming – that we just need to give him “a bit more time” I find it highly doubtful a raft of prosecutions will suddenly materialize at a later date. It seems the modus operandi of this admin (just as it was in Trump’s first term) to set a goal, fail to meet it, and then quietly move on without so much as acknowledging the failure, as if nobody will notice. Oh, and then get mired in yet another new crisis to distract from all those previously left unresolved. Not that there is any real penalty for failure even if people do notice, and complain loudly about it. I mean, what is anybody really going to do? Show up in DC and force the government to do its job at gunpoint? Yeah, that what I figured.

The admin knows bringing cases against the well known (and even the lesser known) bad actors is a slam dunk in the court of public opinion, at least amongst Trump’s supporters. There is a huge appetite for seeing government criminals punished harshly. Therefore, there is no reason for the apparent complete inaction in that regard. The biggest PR moment we’ve gotten so far was the embarrassingly stupid “release of the Epstein files” circus that turned out to be a complete bust. Or perhaps I should more appropriately call it a fraud. Trump set very high expectations indeed. That being the case, I’m not going to give him an easy out and let him slide on stuff he made a big deal out of promising during the campaign. Sure, all politicians over promise and under deliver (otherwise known as lying their asses off to buy votes) but I’ll not excuse the abject failures just because “that’s the way it’s always been”.

The clock is ticking, and past a certain point, the excuse making is all that is left, because there will then be the excuse given that “we just don’t have enough time left to make these things happen”. And most people will just begrudgingly accept that garbage and convince themselves that “well, he tried, so what else can I expect”. And thereby the salve of low expectations once again provides cover for a admin that insisted it would do great things, and badly missed the mark. I tire of the eternal optimists even more than I do lying politicians, because their naivete enables failure on behalf of the pols they ceaselessly defend, by always having an excuse or explanation ready to diffuse the anger of those whose expectations aren’t being met. I’m sick of that, it’s do or die time.