The Good News: We’ll Get Thru This

Or maybe we won’t, but here is constitutional law professor Noah Feldman’s rather brilliant TED Talk.

It is the genius of our system, he says, and of the Founders who created it, that we can navigate through the most tempestuous of waters.

But still.  Our president is “a complete idiot” (Karl Rove), a “dangerous con man” (Marco Rubio), “a national disgrace” (Colin Powell), “a pathological liar” (Ted Cruz), who “seems to feel big only when he’s trying to make other people feel small” (Carly Fiorina), and who is “undercutting everything we stand for” (Lindsay Graham).

And those quotes — all true and all from Republicans — were offered before he began proving himself to be even worse than anyone imagined.

And before his deep-seated preference for journalist-murdering Vladimir Putin was becoming ever more evident and concerning.

Before he took office, he joked he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose voters.  Now he seems to believe he could do that and just pardon himself.

After treating the Boy Scouts to an endlessly cringe-worthy speech — a record crowd of kids he seemed not to realize hadn’t come for him, but for their annual Jamboree — he beat up on his attorney general, made idiotic statements about health care legislation, and then — having never served in the military himself (despite being in the best health of anyone ever to have run for president), he Tuesday tweeted out a policy that could require expulsion of as many as 15,000 transgender men and women who have chosen to serve.

(On which point, I commend Warrior Princess. “To everyone who saw him, he was a hero. A warrior. A man. But underneath his burly beard . . .”)

Even Orrin Hatch, an 83-year-old Republican from Utah, knew this was wrong.

This can’t go on for four years.  But however long it does go on, if Noah Feldman is right, the system will right itself.

As my mother used to say, “Let us pray.”