The inability of governments to ‘get things done’ is what is on display in the drama being played out over the threat to the US and the world of an American president who is ‘unfit for the office’— whom the American political system should have never allowed to run. The latest revelation is that only a few months after Donald Trump took office, top officials at the FBI were discussing ways to take him down — one even proposing to ‘wear a wire’ to record his conversations with the president, to be used in a ‘25th amendment’ initiative to have him removed from office by congress.
Coming the day after the New York Times revealed an academic study that tried to ‘prove’ exactly how Russian hackers persuaded a significant number of Americans to choose Donald Trump over Hilary Clinton, I can imagine only one reaction of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and that is a great big belly laugh! Who would have thought that the most powerful political entity ever to exist could be brought down in a short two years without causing a single casualty?
The mountain of aggressive actions undertaken by that powerful entity across the globe, from ‘regime change’ (Ukraine) to threats of regime change (Iran, Venezuela) to military action (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya,) to sanctions levied against any government that ‘moves’ without permission, to trade wars, to backing terrorists (Syria, Iraq) and the state of Israel, which has usurped Palestinian land, keeping its inhabitants in a territorial prison, suggests that Russia has something to teach us — as I will detail in a future article. But as a famous television ad says: “Wait, there’s more!”
It turns out that the so-called ‘democracy’ that Russia allegedly ‘attacked’ using the internet is no guarantee of equity — or even of efficiency. The drama being played out over the nomination of a Supreme Court Justice is unlikely to occur anywhere else, and is partly caused by the role that ‘legality’ plays in the ‘democratic process’. The upset is so flagrant that journalists are forced to point out the difference between a congressional hearing and a court trial, in particular the tendency, in the former, to seek ‘proof’ of innocence, while congress is not habilitated to pass judgement, but can only accept or decline to confirm a presidential appointee, based on appreciations of suitability.
This process has drifted from the political to the cinematographic. In order to get a conservative judge onto the Supreme Court before the November election when Democrats are likely to win the House and possibly the Senate, the President could have dropped Brett Kavanaugh at the first sign of serious trouble and submitted another judge for approval. But the compelling tale of teenage attempted rape garners more attention than Congress’s role to ‘advise and consent’. The lives of three women are being subjected to public scrutiny, revealing democracy’s limits.
Deena Stryker is an international expert, author and journalist that has been at the forefront of international politics for over thirty years, exclusively for the online journal “New Eastern Outlook”.
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