Editor’s Note: Have a question about what cause the feds had to raid John Bolton’s house on Friday morning? It doesn’t really matter — they’ll think of something. Because that’s how it’s done in revenge-fantasy autocracies. For any other questions that won’t see you renditioned to an El Salvadoran prison, feel free to Ask Matt at askmattlabash@gmail.com, while you still have some freedom left to lose.
Dear Matt,
Why are we trapped, like bugs, in the amber of this moment? We're smart. We should have seen this coming. Does a moment in time, like this, answer the "Problem of Evil" question...finally?*
Regards,
Adelard Leo C.
*Sorry for the whining. The people of Ukraine and the Uyghurs have it much worse. They are U people. Get it?
Don’t sell the Ugandans, the Uzbeks, or the Unitarians short. It’s no picnic being them, either. I feel your pain. And being a professional misery barnacle— I try not to cause it, but I do feed off of it — I tend not only to see the glass half-empty, but will muse aloud, in 2,000-word increments, about whether the glass will shatter in our hands, with glass shards shredding our esophagi. They don’t call me Reverend Sunbeam for nothing.
And to be honest, I was having one of those weeks. The news was…….well, you know how the news is these days. I’d spent the week before matching wits with a witless heckler. And I spent a nice chunk of this one having a tussle with a decades-long great friend of mine — also not a Trump fan, I should add — about whether President Stable Genius is a fascist. Which, even if you’re in the “no” camp, it might clue you in how far we’ve fallen that that’s an open question.
I won’t divulge the specifics of our gentlemanly, highly sophisticated argument (by which I mean neither of us called each other “asshole” even once). But here’s where I landed on the issue on Notes, right after the John Bolton raid of yesterday morning:
Raiding your former employee/persistent critic’s house just because you can? It’s a bad sign for the country. So I was all set to head into my weekend doom spiral. When two things made me snap out of it: