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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCHARLES PIERCE: The Night the Capitol Did Not Sleep
Last edited Wed Dec 4, 2019, 07:14 AM - Edit history (1)
My sister posted this on FB. Wow, is all I can say. Mr. Pierce sure can write, as proven once again.
Edit to add link~
CHARLES PIERCE: The Night the Capitol Did Not Sleep
September 24, 2019, was an odd kind of day, in that this softening night never fell. The frescoes remained silent. The marble never gave way. The very air in the place was charged even though there were few people left in the halls to charge it. After three years in which each nightmarish news cycle followed another, on September 24, it became obvious there were not successive news cycles but one continuous rush that began on Inauguration Day in 2017. The corruption in the United States government was revealed to be a single foul organism, like one of those giant, three-thousand-year-old fungi that spread over a square mile or two. On the surface, you see only the mushrooms that pop from the ground. The immense scale of the organism is hidden underground. It feeds itself by tapping into the roots of trees, which it then drains of their nutrients until the trees are consumed by a dry rot.
September 24, 2019, was the day that the deadliest poison mushroom emerged, but the sweeping subterranean organism had been hollowing out the government for three years. It was all one great creature made of greed and crime and psychological death juice, and now everybody could see how far and how deep it had spread. Over the next two days, we all got a sweeping look at the malignant growth that is the corrupt administration of Donald J. Trump. It was the day the whistleblower entered the ecosystem, and the earth opened up, and the sheer scale of it was revealed.
The whistleblower revealed that, in essence, the president was trying to shake down poor Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukrainewho had been feeling the hot breath of Vladimir Putin on the back of his neck from the moment he took officefor the purpose of ratfucking the 2020 election. It was all there: the contempt for the rule of law and for constitutional barriers, the personalization of foreign policy for private gain, the narcissistic insistence that he alone can run the government and turn a buck on the deal, the tailoring of foreign policy to the benefit of his friends (at best) in many lands, and the pure authoritarian bullying tied up in all of the above. Those were all the surface blooms. But this event gave us a look at the vast organism beneath the ground that subsists on the rot of living things.
The Capitol is wide awake.
more...
https://classic.esquire.com/article/2019/12/1/the-night-the-capitol-did-not-sleep
This article appears in Esquire's Winter 2020 issue.
tblue37
(65,336 posts)malaise
(268,954 posts)Rec
Wawannabe
(5,656 posts)This is a haunting read.
H2O Man
(73,536 posts)Mr. Pierce is outstanding.
mobeau69
(11,143 posts)think4yourself
(837 posts)I always savor every word.
Pacifist Patriot
(24,653 posts)Love his writing and didn't catch that one yet. Thanks!
crickets
(25,963 posts)stopdiggin
(11,300 posts)the rotting fungal organism .. immense scale hidden underground ...
bronxiteforever
(9,287 posts)Kid Berwyn
(14,896 posts)Sums things up, PFW.
Karadeniz
(22,511 posts)Nitram
(22,794 posts)warmfeet
(3,321 posts)lagomorph777
(30,613 posts)I've got chills.
Lawrence O'Donnell should read this on air tonight.
Hekate
(90,658 posts)Excellent, excellent writing
MFGsunny
(2,356 posts)Read it and weep.
alwaysinasnit
(5,066 posts)Hermit-The-Prog
(33,328 posts)argyl
(3,064 posts)Bar none.
Joinfortmill
(14,417 posts)Pass this on.
lastlib
(23,220 posts)democrank
(11,094 posts)Atticus
(15,124 posts)lacerates the conscience of those who prefer to look the other way as democracy's flame flickers.
Goosebumps!
dem4decades
(11,283 posts)Or at least less visible.
NoMoreRepugs
(9,417 posts)Uncle Joe
(58,355 posts)Thanks for the thread babylonsister.
mr_lebowski
(33,643 posts)alfredo
(60,071 posts)burrowowl
(17,639 posts)Nice writing
Indykatie
(3,696 posts)Scurrilous
(38,687 posts)sprinkleeninow
(20,237 posts)something horrifying.
"After the 2016 election, there was a closed briefing given to members of Congress about the extent of the Russian ratfucking, and emerging from that meeting, many of the participants appeared to have looked down into their own graves."
Farmer-Rick
(10,163 posts)The kleptocrats have it from here on out.
Not to say we should stop fighting them, but I doubt we will ever be rid of this deadly tumor unless we rid ourselves of capitalism.