Thursday open thread—On pardons and the rule of law

As I type this, Donald Trump's lackey Roger Stone is being sentenced. Earlier this week, we saw Trump pardon a rogue's gallery of the venal and corrupt. Meanwhile, yesterday, we learned that Julian Assange was dangled a pardon by another Trump lackey, former representative Dana Rohrbacher, were he to testify that neither Trump nor Russia had anything to do with the DNC email hack of 2016.

What Trump is attempting to do to our institutions is unprecedented in the Republic's history. This is akin to the "state capture" of South Africa by a family close to its former president, Jacob Zuma. Trump and his consigliere, Attorney General William Barr, are working their hardest to bend the executive branch to service Trump's personal needs. When people rightly fear that we are in an incipient autocracy, they can easily point to this week's events.

Of course, I'm a glass-half-full type most days.

I'm not saying that everything is hunky-dory. We are in a pond of feces right now, and there's no denying that. (I won't even go into Bernie Sanders leading, so far, the race for the Democratic nomination.) But we are neither South Africa, nor Russia, nor Weimar Germany. The pundits of doom who point to Weimar Germany as an example forget one salient fact: Germany didn't have a 200 year history of democracy.

Yes, too many of our citizens are more interested in The Voice than in exercising their democratic voices. But it has always been thus. Even in our denuded state, there are more people willing to fight for democracy than there are those who wish to bury it. If we vote, we win; it's that simple.

So gird your loins. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance; this is a lesson we need to learn anew.