Has this country’s inequality, racism, and kowtowing to privilege ever been writ larger? I’m trying to have some perspective here. But is there any other way to see the Manafort sentence?

Handed down by a 78-year-old product of Princeton/Harvard/Oxford who was gifted to the nation by Ronald Reagan, it is execrable in the extreme. Judge Thomas Selby Ellis III has just let us all know that, at least in his court, justice is meaningless.

And I hate to say this, but maybe it’s not an entirely bad thing that this entire Trump experience is unmasking things about the USA that had been marginally less obvious before. The raw strivings, the pursuit of power, the consolidation of privilege — these things were somewhat softened by a respect for the so-called ‘norms.’

Yes, Nixon was a nightmare, but Congress eventually stepped in, overcoming partisanship and putting a stop to his excesses. The Bush/Cheney years were a horror, too. But at least they tried to hide their misdeeds, as they painstakingly parsed the definition of torture, for example, to make it ‘acceptable’ to do what they wanted to. There was that much lip-service to the myth of America.

Now all bets are off. As the orange miasma has stated, he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and he’d get away with it. White privilege wins out, thanks to a Princeton/Harvard/Oxford judge who doesn’t find felonies very disturbing when committed by a man who has lived an ‘otherwise exemplary life.’

And the irony is that what’s propping all this up is a base made up of white folks who actually don’t have power or privilege or money.

Fed a diet of Fox/Koch/Mercer propaganda and Trump lies, they are being shamelessly duped and manipulated. For what? For power. For money. For maintaining privilege.

It’s been real for a long time — the underside of the myth of America. It’s never looked more raw and ugly. But maybe I’ve just lost all perspective…