I have only offered up a speculation that creates a result nobody with a three digit IQ could abide, or so I hope.

Your speculation makes every bit as much sense as mine.

A lot of what motivates mine is my age, looking back on the amount of life energy I have focused on my faith in democracy. I cannot tell you how painful it is to realize I could have been wrong.

I have to admit that all that time I spent advocating--as we say--"power to the people" might just as well have been spent searching for a benevolent autocrat.

There is a such a shortage, though. Trump is an autocrat, or wants to be, but there is nothing benevolent in his rule. It's not very sophisticated, either--just Robin Hood in reverse.

I've spent my entire adult life plugged in to politics on the local and state levels. I have no deathbed confessions to offer. The truth is that most of the public servants I've known were honest and had their eye on the public interest. We often disagreed about where the public interest should take policy, but the people who were Trumpian---in it for the main chance---were few.

If the people I knew were representative, either I am too foolish to smoke out thieves or this democracy I have always supported really does create a national melting pot where the scum rises to the top and everything on the bottom gets burned,