1. It is for sake of my own sanity, worth restating the obvious. On October 22 after JFK addressed nation at height of Cuban missile crisis, the 3 major networks went back to normal programming.
2. There is no return to normal programming anymore. What passes for the Trump presidency series of cascading and head spinning episodes -- see Singapore; Helsinki; and the clean up for both -- constitutes a moving panorama too fast to digest, let alone parse.
3. That bullet train is accompanied by temporary stops at every station where spin; manipulation of the truth, nay invention of a truth completely untethered from facts and reality creates a narrative believed by millions already conditioned for decades to believe it.
4. It is why no Trump Administration word or deed has yet proven so norm destroying; sor value crushing that it can stop or slow the train.
5. Folks ask whether Helsinki is a bridge too far; and I respond was Charlottesville, it's domestic equivalent a bridge too far? In one Trump knelt before a foreign adversary; in the other he knelt before hate group here at home..
6. No the rain will not be slowed. Some of us watch it pass with horror; others think it amusing; or entertaining, good for business, or even welcome it's crushing power. Can it be stopped or slowed. Sure, paradoxically by the same means by which it first started its run.
7.And that would be through the mandate -- however imperfect -- that all of us have to create change in this Republic.
8. I'll close with Lincoln. If danger "ever reaches us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."
