Slow news day

A lot happened in the news today. OK, well, one huge thing happened and a bunch of things in the ultimately inconsequential world of baseball happened and there was something about a new COVID booster vaccine.

But the Orange Menace being indicted for a third time is big stuff. I can only hope it gets reported on properly and sinks in to the public at large just how big, because the Republican strategy to "flood the zone with shit" works. The former president of the United States has been indicted for conspiring to overthrow the duly elected government, for intentionally ginning up discord among the public, for lying to basically everyone all the time in furtherance of election fraud while convincing a not-insignificant portion of the American public that he was a victim, not the perpetrator, of said fraud. It's a scathing indictment, and though the laws he's alleged to have broken are not as easily understood as the ones in his last indictment—that's three and counting, folks!—they're arguably much more important.

Yet, I got a text from a friend this afternoon that said, in effect, "this seems like old news."

And she's right, it does seem like old news. Because to anyone who has been paying attention, everything Mango Mussolini was charged with is stuff we knew about already; it's just now been thoroughly vetted and examined and formally charged and on the path to criminal trial. Also, because it's the third indictment so far (with a fourth coming maybe next week out of Atlanta), and if one isn't the sort to pay attention to the news closely, the headline "Trump Indicted" looks like a rerun.  But it's not.

It's huge new news. Knowing everything that went down in the leadup to the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, knowing (or presuming) the motivation for same, knowing the unparalleled capacity for bullshit that the defendant-for-life has, all of that is not the same as having it formally charged by a grand jury.

Indictment number 1 was small potatoes, relatively speaking, concerning hush money to keep a salacious story out of the newspapers. Indictment 2 was bigger potatoes, national security stuff, theft of government documents and possible dissemination of same for unknown purposes. Indictment 3 is every potato in Idaho, conspiring to shred the Constitution and turn the United States from a democracy into an autocracy.

It's not old news. When the next indictments come (and they will), they will not be old news either, they will be additional crimes added to the heaping pile of crimes the ex-president is charged with.

The rubes of the Republican party may never admit they've been conned, may never realize that their cult leader is in fact a lifelong criminal that uses them as his personal ATM, may never wake up to the reality that Donald Trump is an un-American wannabe despot that cares nothing for them whatsoever beyond their usefulness to his greed and keeping him out of jail.

But the rest of us need to understand.

To paraphrase the current President, this is a Big Fucking Deal.