Whiny baby actually induced someone to ask if Biden would rescind the order:
And then … what the hell? Is he on drugs?
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
On serving honorably
With deep irony, Phil Klay, a novelist and a Marine Corps and Iraq war veteran, describes Donald Trump as “the least hypocritical president of my adult life.” The flag-hugging con man holds nothing sacred, defends no American values or principles. Asked about the nation’s military policy in Iraq, Trump’s response was “take the oil.” Twice.
“A dumb answer, but a clear one,” Klay observes. “What a thing to ask soldiers to fight for.” But it was “bracing cynicism” that was “almost refreshing.” Even if it repudiates Americans’ belief, despite our failings, that when the country goes to war it must conduct itself and fight honorably.
Trump famously considers those who serve honorably “suckers.”
Klay recalls his Marine training (gift link):
When I started Marine training, our instructors constantly harangued us candidates about the core military virtues and told story after story of past heroes who had lived them. For men and women to trust their lives to one another in combat, you need a shared set of values and commitments, which is why all great militaries teach their recruits something closer to religious devotion than business calculation.
[…]
So the incoming Trump administration isn’t offering our military a moral purpose. “People will not fight for abstractions,” Mr. Vance claimed at the Republican National Convention; they’ll fight only to defend their homeland. It’s a smaller vision, fitting for a country that has lost faith in itself.
Naturally, Trump’s Fox News choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, troubles Klay. Especially Hegseth’s advocacy with Trump on behalf of “three men accused or convicted of war crimes.”
Klay provides details you can read for yourselves about the case of Clint Lorance, whom Trump pardoned. Seeing Lorance’s depravity celebrated by right-wing media broke the faith of another veteran from his unit. Some of Trump’s skepticism of overseas military adventurism is justified, Klay believes, but “a military with neither moral purpose nor a commitment to moral conduct is a military that fights without honor.”
But what deepened the unsettled feeling in my stomach was a Klay statement that recalled the dystopian comedy Idiocracy (2006).
Yes, we’ve often betrayed our faith, “but that’s not the same as saying that it should be or that it always will be,” Klay explains:
I choose to believe in an America that might honor that faith…. How else to respond to an age of cynicism than to point out, steadily, without undue histrionics, that Americans have proved capable of more in the past and they can prove capable of more in the future?
Pvt. Joe Bowers: [addressing Congress] … And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn’t just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!
God help us. Yes, we can and should do better. But we’ll never get better without a reckoning over the Jan. 6 insurrection and other structural –isms, without a truth and reconciliation commission process, as some recommend (and not the sort Trump wants), that comes to terms with the dark place where Trumpism and its cultural underpinnings have led us.
What will you see?
Perhaps you noticed?
C-Span operator swept their cameras about the U.S. House chamber on Friday during the vote to reelect Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as Speaker. A huddle of white Republican men gathered here. A diverse cluster of Democractic women gathered for a selfie there. The cameras opened up the proceding, untethered from their normally fixed gaze. This is typical during a State of the Union Address but not House business as usual.
Heather Cox Richardson took note in her Letters from an American substack:
Today a new Congress, the 119th, came into session. As Annie Karni of the New York Times noted, Americans had a rare view into the floor action of the House because the party in control sets the rules for what parts of the House floor viewers can see. Without a speaker, there is no party in charge to set the rules, so the C-SPAN cameras recording the day could move as their operators wished.
They did. Limiting what the public can can see of the House chamber will return soon enough. Limiting what you can see is already happening elsewhere.
Over at The Washington Post, editors were deciding what their subscribers would see. Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes announced her resignation after the opinions page rejected a cartoon depicting Post owner Jeff Bezos genuflecting with a sack of money before a statue of President-elect Donald J. Trump. She’d worked at The Post for 16 years.
Telnaes writes on her substack:
I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.
The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.
Figures in the sketch represent Meta founder, Mark Zuckerberg; Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of The Los Angeles Times; Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI; Mickey Mouse, the official spokesmouse of the Walt Disney Company; and Jeff Bezos, The Post’s owner.
David Shipley, The Post’s opinions editor, told reporters he disagreed with her interpretation of events (The New York Times):
“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Mr. Shipley said in the statement. “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”
Owners of press outlets “are responsible for safeguarding that free press— and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press,” Telnaes counters:
While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.
Efforts are already afoot by Trump and MAGA Republicans to rewrite recent history the way Sourtherners spread the Lost Cause myth. The proliferation of disinformation via social media and gimlet-eyed lying into cameras by “Christians” like Johnson further threaten to dissolve external reality under Americans’ feet until “Democracy dies in darkness.”
Men like those Telnaes depicts are lining up to be accessories.
A new internet star is born: Tupi the baby capybara!
I co-sign this:
To all of you internet addicts like me, I hereby gift you with this marvelous piece by Chris Hayes in the NY Times. He talks about The Attention Economy”, which is the subject of his new book.
An excerpt:
In the wake of Donald Trump’s second electoral victory, a viral tweet from October 2016 once again started circulating: “i feel bad for our country. But this is tremendous content.”
That probably seemed funnier before child separation and Covid. (Indeed, in 2020 Darren Rovell, who wrote it, posted, “Four years later. There is nothing tremendous about this content. I’m just sad.”) But for many millions of Americans, perhaps including the crucial slice of swing voters who moved their votes to the Republican nominee in 2024, Mr. Trump is the consummate content machine. Love him or hate him, he sure does keep things interesting. I’ve even wondered if, at some level, this was the special trick he used to eke out his narrow victory: Did Americans elect him again because they were just kind of bored with the status quo?
I have no doubt about it! Yes, Trump voters are bored with normal politics (I think we all are to some extent, but most of us kind of like it that way.) That’s especially true of the “inconsistent” ones who only come out to vote for him, see him as a celebrity and they vote for him the way they would vote for “American Idol” or “Dancing With The Stars.” His star status is definitely a huge part of his special sauce.
But that’s not Hayes’ point. He’s talking about the feeling of boredom in modern life and I confess that I have never felt it in my life until the last few years and I think it’s solely a result of my massive amount of time spent on the internet. I can almost feel the neural pathways in my brain changing.
Yet we feel this restlessness; we lament our shrinking attention spans. But to focus on a relatively narrow question of technical measures of our attention span misses a deeper truth. The restlessness and unease of our times aren’t simply, in my experience, the vertigo of distraction and distractibility. No, that experience is itself a symptom caused by some deeper part of the unsettled self. The endless diversion offered to us in every instant we are within reach of our phones means we never have to do the difficult work of figuring out how to live with our own minds.
What follows is a rather beautiful, philosophical observation about the power that boredom has over us (and has had long before the advent of smartphones) and the benefit of learning how to find ways to feel comfortable inside your own head. Highly recommend. And I can’t wait to read the book. I have a feeling he has some interesting thoughts on how this relates to our current political predicament…
Gabriel Schoenfeld at the Bulwark makes a sharp observation about the impending nomination of RFK Jr. It’s not good:
At a moment when we should be thinking of this nomination in terms of the potential risk to human lives, all this muddled analysis about science and politics calls to mind a grim episode from the last century that is a cautionary tale for today: the career of the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko.
Born in 1898, Lysenko had accomplishments of great consequence to his name. Most of these occurred in the field of agronomy, where he advanced a revolutionary set of ideas—now known as Lysenkoism. His main contentions were that genes did not exist, that acquired traits could be inherited, and that heredity itself could be altered by “educating” plants.
One such form of education was called “vernalization”—the notion that crop yields would dramatically increase if seeds that usually died in harsh frosts were exposed to lower temperatures before sowing. “Insights” like that, derived ultimately from Marxist ideology instead of legitimate empirical research, were put into practice on a large scale, first in the USSR and then in Communist China. Widespread crop failures followed, and then famines in which millions perished.
Lysenko—a crackpot with the power of the Soviet state behind him—was the recipient of numerous awards, including, on eight occasions, the Order of Lenin, and on three occasions, the Stalin Prize. Lysenko died of natural causes in 1976.
This history of massive state-sponsored scientific fraud is pertinent to Trump’s attempt to install Kennedy to the highest-ranking healthcare position in the U.S. government. The secretary of health and human services has oversight of everything from food safety to medical research to private health insurance to epidemiology to Medicare and Medicaid and much, much more.
He points out that RFK Jr. likes to pretend that his views are based in science but like Lysenko, they aren’t. In fact, he explicitly rejects the proven scientific health benefits of things like pasteurization, fluoridation and especially vaccines. As he says, “a person with no medical or scientific training, RFK Jr. is evidently unaware that vaccines are one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments.”
Even if, unexpectedly, RFK Jr. did absolutely nothing to hinder the development and distribution of vaccines, the mere elevation of someone with such views to a position of national authority would undermine public confidence in vaccines and increase vaccine hesitancy, with severely deleterious consequences for public health. If vaccination rates decline sufficiently, diphtheria, measles, yellow fever, shingles, and many other infectious diseases now relatively dormant may roar back into prominence.
He notes that there are other Lysenko-esque figures being nominated, including Dr. Oz, an MD but also an actual snake oil salesman. The abandonment of reason can have serious consequences.
It may be hyperbolic to make any direct comparisons but tell me that this doesn’t at least seem a little bit possible:
The Soviet chiefs began to support Lysenko during the agricultural crisis of the 1930s. On the basis of rather crude and unsubstantiated experiments, Lysenko promised greater, more rapid, and less costly increases in crop yields than other biologists believed possible. Under Stalin, Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. (1940–65) and president of the then powerful V.I. Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. By 1948, when education and research in standard genetics were virtually outlawed, some geneticists had suffered secret arrest and death of undisclosed causes.
Lysenko’s doctrines and claims varied with the amount of power that he held. Between 1948 and 1953, when he was the total autocrat of Soviet biology, he claimed that wheat plants raised in the appropriate environment produce seeds of rye, which is equivalent to saying that dogs living in the wild give birth to foxes. His fundamental, continuing argument was that theoretical biology must be fused with Soviet agricultural practice. After Stalin’s death, this principle caused Lysenko some embarrassment, for efforts to improve Soviet agriculture brought the abandonment of measures to which his name and fame were tied. His “grassland” system of crop rotation was abandoned in favor of cultivation with mineral fertilizers, and a hybrid corn program based on the U.S. example was pursued (Lysenko halted the program in the mid-1930s, for he was opposed to the inbreeding with which it must begin).
During Nikita Khrushchev’s premiership, opposition to Lysenko’s programs was tolerated, and Lysenko lost titular control of the Lenin Agricultural Academy. After Khrushchev’s political demise, in 1964, Lysenko’s doctrines were discredited, and intensive efforts made toward the reestablishment of orthodox genetics in the U.S.S.R. Deposed as director of the Institute of Genetics early in 1965, Lysenko seemed to be at the end of his mutable career. He and his followers, however, long retained their degrees, their titles, and their academic positions and remained free to support their aberrant trend in biology.
And …
Soviet scientists who refused to renounce genetics were dismissed from their posts and left destitute. Hundreds if not thousands of others were imprisoned. Several were sentenced to death as enemies of the state, including the botanist Nikolai Vavilov, whose sentence was commuted to prison. Lysenko’s ideas and practices contributed to the famines that killed millions of Soviet people; the adoption of his methods from 1958 in the People’s Republic of China had similarly calamitous results, contributing to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961.
Obviously, that won’t happen exactly that way here. But allowing a phony like RFK Jr to further degrade people’s beliefs in vaccines and pushing the idea that climate change is a hoax is going to kill a whole lot of people. The right wingers are the Soviets in this new iteration of Lysenkoism.
The United States used to be held up as a great example of a mature democracy under the rule of law. We had our issues, God knows, (exceptionalism!) but we weren’t seen as a lawless autocracy.
Today we are an inspiration for autocrats around the world:
The legal team of suspended President Yoon Suk Yeol claimed Friday that Yoon’s impeachment trial does not warrant a ruling as he should have immunity from prosecution, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Donald Trump.
In a document presented to the Constitutional Court in Yoon’s impeachment trial, the legal team said Yoon exercised his due presidential power to handle a “national emergency situation” while declaring martial law on Dec. 3.
“As martial law was lifted in six hours, it did not restrict the people’s basic rights,” the document read. “Things were fully restored so that there is no need to judge the declaration itself.”
Yoon’s side pointed to the U.S. court ruling in July last year that said Trump cannot be prosecuted for actions that were within his constitutional powers as president.
The Supreme Court majority must be so proud.
Yoon’s supporters chanted “Stop The Steal!” as did the supporters of jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2022. Trump’s an inspiration for weird, red-pilled wingnuts everywhere.
I kind of doubt Pam Bondi or Pete Hegseth know how to spell it either. Not to mention Trump.
Update—
Lol:
After a short hiatus for the holidays, the circus is back in Washington DC and the high wire act of Speaker Mike Johnson and the Flying Republicans is going to attempt a dangerous new stunt. By the time you read this, it may be all over but the shouting or we may have already embarked on yet another House GOP spectacle as they struggle to cobble together a majority to elect someone to the most powerful job in the House of Representatives — again.
After his near faceplant before the break, in which Johnson had struggled to keep the government from shutting down (as it probably would have if it weren’t for the fact that it was just days before Christmas) the Speaker is in a very precarious position. Contrary to Republican braying about a mandate, the party actually lost a seat in the House last November and with the resignation of Matt Gaetz, R-Fl., Johnson can only lose 2 votes or he will lose the speakership.
He’s already lost one vote, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Oh., who told the Wall St Journal, “If they thought I had no Fs to give before, I definitely have no Fs to give now.” He’s always been an eccentric libertarian and an unreliable team player so no one should expect him to change his mind.
There are a handful of others who have not committed one way or the other so the vote today could have the same drama we witnessed during the long vote for former California Congressman Kevin McCarthy.
Johnson himself faced a similar challenge last spring. You may recall that Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene filed a Motion to Vacate the Chair in May over Johnson’s support for Ukraine funding. The motion was tabled with the help of Democrats but 11 Republicans voted against it, some of whom are among those who have not committed to vote for him this time. Democrats are not going to save him this time so it would only take one of the original 11 to decide to stick with their “principles” and deny him the speakership throwing the new congress into instance chaos.
If I had to guess I’d bet he’ll squeak out a victory. President-elect Trump has tepidly thrown his weight behind him telling reporters at his New Year’s bash at Mar-a-Lago that “he’s the one that can win right now,” more or less acknowledging that there is no plan B. If Johnson fails, it’s one more sign that Donald Trump just doesn’t have the juice anymore. And if he wins, all it means is that Trump and Johnson managed to eke out a temporary victory and the doomsday scenarios of a protracted fight leading tinto January 6th and an inability to certify the presidential election didn’t materialize.
What this shows is that for all of the GOP’s swaggering braggadocio about their alleged landslide, Trump’s win was razor thin in the Congress, indicating once more that he has no coat tails. Yes, he threatens and intimidates “RINOs” and others who defy him, and he likes to endorse MAGA primary opponents against them but his record of success in those cases is spotty at best.
Trump’s impending lame duck status was illustrated pretty clearly in the aforementioned pre-holiday crisis when he was more or less out of the loop and his best pal Elon Musk put the kibosh on the deal that Johnson had negotiated with the Democrats and all hell broke loose. He came in late to the game and backed Musk, adding a demand that they eliminate or extend the debt limit so he wouldn’t have to deal with it and they didn’t give it to him. The Freedom Caucus deficit hawks love their debt limit more than they love Trump.
Trump was so upset by this that he blasted off a Truth Social post on December 29th, insanely demanding that Mike Johnson call the House back in session immediately to extend it:
That was just five days ago and no one paid any attention to it because it was a ridiculous tantrum that just proved once again that he is not only addled but is politically much weaker than people commonly believe.
So regardless of how the Speaker vote comes out today, the Republicans are going to have a hell of a time passing any legislation. Unless the Democrats completely lose their minds (which is possible) they are not going to help them so they are on their own.
Consider that in the first 100 days the Senate Republicans will have to try to get Trump’s unqualified, unfit cabinet nominees across the finish line. The betting has it that they will eventually get there but it does not look as though it’s going to be a slam dunk which means they aren’t going to be doing much of anything else for a while.
Then both the House and Senate want to take a huge border security, defense and energy package through reconciliation but unless it’s offset by spending cuts the usual suspects in the House aren’t going to play along, especially since they are hoping to extend the Trump tax cuts and create new ones in yet another reconciliation bill. (They may try to combine them but that may make everything even worse.) Meanwhile, you have Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and their “DOGE” commission getting all those fiscal hawks in the House and Senate all hot and bothered with crazy plans to slash spending on programs that Americans rely upon.
Oh, and there’s that pesky debt ceiling coming up within a couple of months and a budget to be negotiated for the next year too. They have a whole lot on their plate with a tiny margin and an ageing lame duck president who seems to be more interested in playing golf than being a full-time president.
The presidency has a tremendous amount of power of its own, of course, and Trump is staffing his White House and cabinet with people who are willing to carry out the extremist agenda whether he’s engaged or not. But many of their plans have yet to be tested in the courts which takes time and nothing can get done without money, which is still in the hands of a Congress that has trouble even electing a Speaker without a huge amount of drama. Gridlock and chaos may be our best hope of surviving this mess with as little damage as possible.
Avarice and Artifice
Since before the days of traveling medicine shows, Americans displayed a knack both for peddling bullshit and for buying it. Cultural touchstone: Dorothy’s Professor Marvel. Paradigm case: the 2024 presidential election. But the latter is simply a more visible instance of the phenomenon. Let’s look at two cases of Americans’ willingness to believe that private capitalism is always superior at delivering services over collective, government, not-for-profit programs. As with snake oil, it begins with a con man. With avarice and artifice.
Timothy Noah this morning considers efforts to privatize Medicare. Donald Trump claims he won’t. (Trump also makes claims about his height, weight, and net worth.) Noah cites a Wall Street Journal report from Wednesday (I don’t have access) that shows that despite widely touted claims that the private sector is more efficient at providing health care, well, it does not. In fact, private health care for seniors is an extraction industry where Medicare Advantage policies excel “in the filing of fraudulent claims.”
Insurance industry whistleblower, Wendell Potter, cautions that the real “Advantage” is for insurers, not the insured. And not for the taxpayer, Noah explains:
Medicare Advantage looks to people over 65 like a better deal because it covers things traditional Medicare doesn’t, such as visits to the dentist or the eye doctor. Some plans even cover acupuncture! But if you get seriously ill and need to be referred to a specialist, Medicare Advantage isn’t so great. An April 2022 study by the Health and Human Services department’s inspector general found that 13 percent of the referrals denied under Medicare Advantage would have been approved under traditional Medicare.
Medicare Advantage also shows that health care privatization is a lousy deal for taxpayers. Medicare Advantage costs the federal government 7 percent more per enrollee than traditional Medicare, according to an August 2024 study by the fiscally conservative Peter G. Peterson Foundation. For enrollees with similar health profiles, Medicare Advantage costs 22 percent more, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.
Perhaps that’s because, as the Journal’s investigations found, Medicare Advantage insurers routinely pad their government reimbursement requests with spurious diagnoses. For example, an astounding 66,000 Medicare Advantage patients were diagnosed with diabetic cataracts even after these patients had surgery to correct them, making that diagnosis, in the Journal’s words, “anatomically impossible.” In other instances, patients whom Medicare Advantage insurers reported as HIV positive received none of the recommended treatments. If a doctor failed to furnish a desired diagnosis, insurers dispatched a nurse to the patient’s home to find one. Medicare Advantage insurers also conned veterans into enrolling in the program even though they were already covered adequately by the Veterans Administration health system, which has repeatedly been demonstrated to be superior to private hospital care (something else the public is reluctant to believe).
But then there’s a future electorate born every minute. “The challenge with all privatization schemes is that private sector doesn’t aspire to save the government money,” Noah concludes. “Why should it?” That’s at odds with maximizing profit.
Education Advantage
My friend Jeff Bryant, a public schools advocate, pointed on Thursday to The Progressive‘s critique of the movement to privatize public schools. Carol Burris begins with a 2017 “rightwing billionaire-funded documentary created by the late Andrew Coulson,” Schools Inc., which argued “that for-profit schooling, funded by parents without government involvement, is the best delivery model for education.” Detect a theme here?
The “school choice movement,” which Coulson’s documentary promoted, has always been a classic bait-and-switch swindle: Charter schools were the bait for vouchers, and vouchers the lure for public acceptance of market-based schooling. While narrow debates about accountability, taxpayer costs, and the public funding of religious schools raise important concerns, the gravest threat posed by the school choice movement is its ultimate objective: putting an end to public responsibility for education.
This goal is not a secret. The libertarian right has openly dreamed of ending public education for the past seventy years—the economist Milton Friedman advocated for school choice as early as 1955, and his acolytes have continued to do so ever since.
It’s a wonder that public school privatization advocates don’t call voucher schemes Education Advantage.
Burris continues:
The America First Policy Institute, where Trump’s Secretary of Education nominee Linda McMahon serves as board chair, states in its recent policy agenda that “the authority for educating children rests with parents.” As public responsibility for schooling shifts to parents, educational subsidies will be gradually reduced until Friedman and Coulson’s dream of a fully for-profit marketplace that competes for students is achieved.
This is a twofer for the Midas cult. As I’ve noted repeatedly, education spending is the largest portion of the annual budget in all 50 states and mandated in state constitutions from coast to coast and beyond. The Market demands its cut:
The impulse among conservatives to privatize everything involving public expenditures – schools included – is no longer just about shrinking government, lowering their taxes and eliminating funding sources for their political competitors. Now it’s about their opportunity costs, potential profits lost to not-for-profit public-sector competitors. It’s bad enough that government “picks their pockets” to educate other people’s children. But it’s unforgivable that they’re not getting a piece of the action. Now they want to turn public education into private profits too.
School deserts
Donald Trump once said, “I love the poorly educated.” So does the Midas cult. They’ve offshored jobs to countries with lower labor costs where those countries’ taxpayers pay to educate them, not ours. Thomas Wilson, former CEO of Allstate, explained offshoring jobs bluntly, “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business …” Higher-skilled workers they can import. Ask Elon Musk.
Burris continues:
And what about those who refuse to pay? Former Arizona legislator Paul Mosley wanted to end compulsory schooling in his state, claiming that what was once a privilege was now “being forced down everyone’s throat.” The Cato Institute has similarly signaled its approval of “unschooling,” a practice of eschewing formal education altogether in favor of informal learning. If education is governed as a marketplace, they claim, you have the right not to shop at all.
The implications of this approach are profound. In a pay-as-you-go system, few families will have the financial means to educate a special needs child outside the home. What’s more, families in rural areas will be left with few options, if any: In the for-profit marketplace, why go where customers are few and nonaffluent? If your Muslim or Jewish child lives in a town where the majority “choose” a Christian school, there may be no secular option. Schools opening and closing based on profit margins will be commonplace—more than one in four charter schools already closes by its fifth year of operation.
Can you say school deserts? That’s how it works with groceries, eh? Poorly educated workers desperate to do menial, low-paying jobs are a corporatist’s wet dream. And a countryside filled with them is a stake in the heart of a democratic republic. It begins with a con man. It ends with oligarchy, or worse.