“This is political Jihad perpetrated by the Democrats.” James Woods of 80’s movie character actor fame and more recent but less entertaining conservative tweet fame tweeted.

He’s right.

Though, I’ve been through Jihad up close a few times. And it’s a little different. I think the word he’s searching for is actually opposition. But I’ll give him a pass because Against All Odds still holds up. 

The Wall Street Journal thought this through for about an hour before they responded that “Democrats and their media allies finally got their man. After weeks of political pressure, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein blinked…”

They’re right too. The Democrats finally did get their man.

Everyone claiming that the Russia probe is politically motivated is correct. And everyone who wishes it would all go away should probably have figured out a way for someone else to represent their message to the world besides Donald J. Trump

I don’t have any idea if President Trump colluded with Russia to influence the election. My guess is he probably didn’t. I’m from Atlantic City and I’ve watched him for a long time. Outright criminal activity isn’t really his thing. Slimy business practices, discrimination, general dishonesty and low character behavior are more his style. Some of the people he used to gain power and didn’t vet properly may have done some real live illegal things. That’s more his speed, sloppy and undisciplined. You can afford to be when you live on the float of your real estate empire. A little less so when you’re President. That’s all conjecture though. And it doesn’t matter. We’ll find out sometime over the next one to two years as we waddle through an even more paralyzed federal government that won’t be able to get anything done, good bad or indifferent, because the guy who has to lead it is a punch line.

That’s actually the point. We elected Donald J. Trump to be The President of the United States of America. And if I told anyone this two years ago, they would have picked this outcome at least as commonly as they would have picked any other one. And you can’t say that about anyone else who ever seriously pursued the office.

Somewhere, in a delusional political haze, a large portion of America got it in their heads that the only man alive that could drive the political change we so desperately needed (and we do) was Donald J. Trump. I don’t know how that transformation actually happened. I can’t explain how a guy whose best quality was being rich and whose worst one fluctuated between confirmed pathological lying and the worst sensitivity to criticism I’ve ever seen on any human being in the public eye, was supposed to deliver us from our inevitable dark end. It’s not obvious how he was to magically turn over a new leaf after 70 years on earth and stand in the flaming kitchen of the oval office, keep his cool, stay on message and build the trust that the American people have to have in order to live through hard change.

How in the world did we ever think that was going to happen?

It was the greatest collective self-deception I’d ever seen. And it made me respect the power of political ideology over the politically minded more than I ever imagined I would. The lies we needed to tell ourselves to believe this was a good idea are some of the greatest ever told.

I tried. I didn’t want to vote for Hillary Clinton. We just had a Democrat for eight years. We needed to reform what we ask of our government. And that wasn’t happening with her. I tried to get people interested in Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. But no one gave a crap about third party candidates. And if they didn’t this go around, they’re never going to. So this is what we got. We got Donald J. Trump as the President of the United States doing exactly what you would expect a reality TV star to do if you put him in charge of the world.

He formed a cabinet that’s the political equivalent of changing your Facebook profile picture to a selfie with your new girlfriend the day after you leave your wife and kids. He tried to jam some executive orders out, except they were struck down because no one trusts him and they weren’t written well enough to overcome it. The worst of his staff got pinched for being a foreign agent. Then he fired the Director of the FBI while there was an active investigation into his campaign going on. These are all things that I would have expected a President Donald Trump to do. And he did them. And he didn’t make it to June before the first reasonably credible discussions of impeachment are taking place.

Because of politics.

Nativist, xenophobic rhetoric aside, I don’t disagree with the message that carried Donald Trump to the oval office. We invest poorly in our government. And after 240 years, we’ve learned too well how to game it to do things for us we never intended for it to do. But I disagree vigorously with the messenger some chose to carry it. My reasons why are playing out on the world stage for all of us to see as I write this. Political opposition is a mathematical constant. The multiplier for its effectiveness is a function of who you trot out there to stand in against it.

One other thing.  And it’s a big one. While we were arguing about how bad our president is, North Korea is telling us they are now able reach the United States with a nuclear weapon and Russia is testing our response by flying jets near American airspace. Those new behaviors aren’t a coincidence. You thought the last guy was weak? Wait until the world gets used to an American president who no one will follow. Democracy has consequences. We’re living through a tough one right now.