Started reading a new book.

“The Great Derangement: A terrifying true story of war, politics, and religion at the twilight of the American Empire,” by Matt Taibbi

From the Introduction:

Taibbi writes that his research led him to see that….

“The [American] lawmaking process had evolved over time in such a way that almost all of the important decisions could be made behind closed doors by a few key players in both houses, without debate or discussion and certainly without any real input from the voting public. …Congress spent most of its daylight hours naming post offices and passing resolutions to honor sports teams, while the important stuff it did--like gut the Clean Air Act as an “emergency” response to Hurricane Katrina--it did in late-night meetings of mostly anonymous committees, out of the (at least potentially) prying eye of the press and the public.

“…both parties, Democratic and Republican, were equally guilty in what really was a conspiracy to run the government without outside interference. The only way the public could protest all the handouts and earmarks and fast-tracked tax breaks and other monstrosities was to vote for the other party--and the other party, it turned out, was inevitably whoring for the same monied masters.

“… I began to notice what I quickly realized was a phenomenon directly related to the mess in Washington. There was a consequence, a flip side to the oligarchical rigged game of Washington politics: apparently recognizing that they’d been abandoned by their putative champions in Washington, the public was now, rightly it seemed, tuning out of the political mainstream.

“…But they weren’t tuning out in order to protest their powerlessness more effectively; they were tuning in to competing versions of purely escapist lunacy. On both the left and the right, huge chunks of the population were effecting nearly identical retreats into conspiratorial weirdness and Internet-fueled mysticism.

“…. I began to see the outlines of the grotesque black comedy that had taken root in this country since [9/11]. …One day I tried to imagine the whole thing from the point of view of Osama bin Laden. Here he had gone through all the trouble of attacking New York City, and how did the victim nation respond?
Well, its government responded by counterattacking the wrong country and passing a whole host of insane laws that had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism; its president responded by encouraging its citizens to buy Chevys and go on vacations. Then, when it came time to ask why the attack had happened, the president announced that it had happened because the terrorists, well, those folks hated our freedom. Examining this rationale, the mainstream press did not denounce Bush’s reasoning as the preposterous horseshit it was, but instead tripped over themselves en masse in a desperate attempt to find new ways to compare their leader to Winston Churchill. Months later, bin Laden himself had been forgotten, and the country moved on to denouncing the real enemy, culminating in the banning of French fries from the congressional cafeteria.

“The people, of course, soon recognized that they had been egregiously lied to by the executive and by their supposed allies in the Fourth Estate and began to seek out the REAL explanation for what had happened.

“On the right, huge masses of Christians began to understand that New York had been attacked as divine retribution for America’s acquiescence in the effort to allow homosexuals to marry.

“On the left, they had a different explanation. According to the more educated, sophisticated set of Americans, the Americans who knew how to appreciate The Wire or a good Coen brothers film and who in their informed secular worldview felt smugly superior to those half-baked hysterical crackpots on the religious right, Islamic terrorism was actually a clever cover story. The actual culprit in 9/11 was none other than our own president, George W. Bush, who had effected a brilliant diversion in bombing Manhattan using Saudi patsies with links to Sunni Islamic radicals, in order to start a war against the nonreligious Iraqi state of Saddam Hussein. Naturally.

“From bin Laden’s point of view, the whole situation had to be immensely frustrating. He pulls off the crime of the century, of the millennium perhaps, and the victim America turns out to be so wrapped up in its own intramural bullshit that it can’t even give him credit for it. America turned out to be, in a way, psychologically immune to attack; its government was too corrupt to fight back, and its people were too crazy to comprehend their position in the world. We were a nation gone completely mad, blind to everything outside our borders, with our effective institutions co-opted by crooks and thieves and our citizens piddling away the last days of their influence reading sacred tracts and spinning absurd theories about the grassy knoll, WTC 7, and the international Masonic conspiracy.”