A Confederacy of Dunces

I watched as he opened the sixth seal.

There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red.

And it looked a little something like this...

Erick Erickson lauding Ron Fournier...

.@ron_fournier has the must read of the day. https://t.co/V9OSSgQkL8

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) June 15, 2016

While Matthew Dowd cheers from the sidelines.

Another good one by friend @ron_fournier https://t.co/06uLrhkaIt

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) June 15, 2016

There is a valley where a bustling town is in the process of being destroyed by flood waters from a dam that has burst. From a distance you can still see the steeple of the church. the tops of the tallest trees, the roofs of some houses and the upper floors of a few office buildings, all of which are crowded with survivors hanging on for dear life.

But the thing is, the dam that held back the floodwaters did not collapse from natural causes. Far from it. In fact, for decades a group of committed and well-funded lunatics have been hard at work every day trying to weaken, undermine and destroy the dam.

Their catchy motto: "The Dam Isn't The Solution To Our Problem. The Dam Is The Problem".

For decades, another. much smaller and much-less-well-funded group of citizens have tried to stop the fanatics from blowing up the dam. This groups has used a variety of tactics, but since they're few in number and poor in resources, much of their effort was devoted to trying to get the residents of the town and the local newspaper to wake the fuck up to the problem of the saboteurs who were trying to smash the dam and level the town.

But no one listened or cared very much. 

The dam blower-uppers paid really well, and had lots of think tanks and white papers "proving" that the dam wasn't really all that important. Besides, at a very basic level the townspeople simply could not imagine that the dam would ever really be at risk, no matter how tirelessly the fanatics worked. And anyway, the fanatics couldn't really be serious, right?  I mean, as a theoretical construct -- as an abstract governing model -- what they said about the river water gently "trickling down" and making everyone in town as rich as pirates once the dam was blown up sounded kind of exciting...in an abstract way...but these fuckers couldn't possibly, really mean it, right? 

So since the threat wasn't real, why worry about a few Liberal lefty alarmists who no one of importance took seriously anyway?

On a high hilltop nearby there is a tony little members-only tavern with a commanding view of the flooding valley below.

At one of the cafe's tables, three idiots are toasting each other's sagacity and insight. 

One of them has been militating for blowing up the dam his whole professional life, and is basically just pissed off that some other madman got to plant the final charge. 

Another of these three idiots actually worked for the dam blower-uppers most of his life but recently quit to become an "Independent" and take a lucrative job writing about how dam-blower-uppers and anti-dam-blower-uppers were both equally terrible. 

 And for years, the last of these idiots has been not-so-secretly hoping that some devastating aquatic force (hint!hint!hint!) would come sweeping in (hint!hint!hint!) and "disrupt" the "corrupt duopoly" (hint!hint!hint!) of the dam-blower-uppers and the anti-dam-blower-uppers.

Now the three idiots look down at the shattered dam, the drowning town, the ordinary folks clinging for  to tree limbs and rooftops, the raving orange manic who finally, really blew it up and his cheering mob of dam-blower-uppers.

They look down and shake their heads and -- loud enough so that everyone can hear -- very dramatically make like Charleton Heston at the end of Plant of the Apes --

-- and wonder how in the world did this terrible situation ever come to be.