Every morning I peruse the headlines to see which wing of the fortress of Democracy has crumbled further. Lately one particular section, and a central section at that, has featured massive dry rot, bricks falling off the edifice, and doors dropping off their hinges. Due to eight years of deferred maintenance, the Halls of Justice are close to collapse. All of the walls are bearing walls, so the entire structure is now at risk. Police have cordoned off the area to the public until further notice.

I am pretty sure I saw an article somewhere this morning titled "What Just Happened?" that I think was asking why the polls are suddenly tightening once more, but when I went to look for it again it had disappeared. But that question is what really prompted this essay. Is it possible that the pundits don't know what is happening and why people are not flocking to Hillary when confronted with the lunacy of Trump?

IMO the collapse of the DOJ on multiple fronts is what is driving the Trump candidacy.

Front #1 - Hillary and The Emails

Hillary broke the law. People believe that. A lot of people think it is pretty cut and dried and they can cite which laws they believe she has broken, from small to large. They think the most egregious law she broke had to do with storing classified information in multiple locations and making that information accessible not just to theoretical hackers, but to dozens of people who did and do not have the proper security clearances. Then there are side issues of deletion and destruction of government property, obstructing court orders, obstructing Congress, perjury, etc. Instead of investigating and prosecuting the laws that were broken, the FBI investigation seems to have denigrated into a group of caring and empathetic FBI agents holding hands with Hillary and her staff and asking "You didn't mean to have classified stuff in all those places did you? Would immunity make you feel better? Here you go."

The credibility of Comey, Obama, the FBI, Lynch, the FBI, the DOJ and the State Department have been absolutely shredded in the last few days with numerous revelations - immunity, fake names, cover-up jokes, etc. etc. It is interesting to note that practically all of the coverage is coming from right wing and conservative sources with very light coverage from the larger and more mainstream choices. This cements the impression of the MSM having a liberal bias, something that I really had no issue with previously, because my interest had always tended to align with liberal bias. Because my interest in this particular regard is something I would have viewed previously as bi-partisan ( Justice over politics) it's been very eye-opening to me to realize that I have been living in a liberal bubble. Live and learn.

One of the greatest moments in Democracy in recent history was Nixon leaving the White House in a helicopter. It was breathtaking to realize that at that instant, we really were a country with a Rule of Law, not men, where even the President of the United States could be investigated and prosecuted for abusing his office for political gain. It was a moment when the media and the levers of the government, both House and Justice, came together and worked as they should have worked as a check to abuse of executive power. Like Rick and Ilsa who always had Paris, we'll always have Watergate.

Front#2The complete failure of the Obama Justice Department to investigate and prosecute any of the people in charge who fomented and profited from the financial meltdown

This is another case where laws were broken. Yes, they were. This was not simply an issue of bad optics or bad ethics as our President told us as he stood between the banksters and the pitchforks, these were issues of cut and dried illegalities, again both small and large, that were documented by many sources in real time. As Elizabeth Warren just pointed out - 14 criminal referrals were sent to Justice out of the House investigations into the matter. The AG, Eric Holder, in what looks like an effort to tamp down any real investigation and prosecution of the miscreants, gathered together all the State AGs to combine with the Justice Department in a (gasp!) Task Force which . . . . did nothing. To anyone. Oh, a few civil fines here and there by the SEC, which made no dent in the profits, but which could be written off as the "costs of business". And did these fines ever filter down to the homeowners? No my friends, it did not. Most went into the general funds of the states.

Real living, breathing Americans were swindled and lost their houses. I read all the Congressional testimony - no, it wasn't simply people "buying more than they could afford". It was people who were baited and switched from fixed rate mortgages they had applied for into ARMs at closing when the moving van was in the yard. It was people who had their homes taken from them for paltry amounts in what Warren called at the time "servicer induced defaults" when they could not get corrections for misapplied payments, or were charged for bogus duplicate insurance among other things. There were people who had to fight foreclosures conducted with fraudulent and re-created documents. There were people foreclosed on by the wrong entity that didn't even hold the mortgage. There were security frauds concerning the underlying mortgages in the bonds. I could go on, but why bother, you get the gist.

In contrast, when a Bush was in office during the Savings and Loan meltdown, I believe Bill Black said that over 600 bankers went to jail. The actual real people who had actually done the bad things were tried and went to jail. Imagine that. But my friends, it did happen here and it happened under the Republicans.

These millions of homeowners who were screwed came from both parties. I bet a lot of them are bitter about the justice they received from the Obama White House. That is Obama's "legacy" for them. Who thinks they are going to vote for four more years of Obama Justice as meted out by HRC? Who herself profited from the same uneven hand of Lady Justice, who wasn't blind in her case and was peeking below the blindfold to see who she was putting her thumb on the scale for.

Front #3 Black Lives Matter
I honestly don't know where to begin, but I'll start with the obvious - one would have thought that our first African American President and our first two African American Attorneys General would have been sensitive to the problem of numbers of black lives being lost because of the use of deadly force being used inappropriately on a specific demographic, which co-incidentally happens to be their own. (I apologize for using the word "inappropriate" because it is so inappropriate in itself as a descriptive for what has been going on).

Okay, I have to apologize again, this time for my first sentence, because in rereading it, I can see how it smacks of white privilege and elitism and ignorance. I plead guilty to all of that. Every time this subject comes up, I want to prostrate myself and apologize to every person of color I come across, "I'm sorry, I truly didn't know." I didn't know because I live in the white bubble where I don't have to worry about my husband or father or brother being pulled over for a traffic violation and ending up dead. I hate myself for not knowing and not being aware and tuned into what was going on. In fact, this entire essay is about No Justice and I can imagine every single POC reading it say, "Really? You're just finding this out?".

No, it really did take people of color going into the streets to open my awareness of the issue of Black Lives Matter. Who thinks it's an "issue" when completely innocent people or people guilty of only minor infractions like shop lifting or jay walking or traffic violations are gunned down by trigger-happy militarized police who are conditioned to see the majority of black men as "thugs"? But to get back to my point, as a clueless white person, I had to be educated. But our President and AGs did not. Why were they so behind the curve on this whole damn thing?

I said I had been educated. I think I have, in a positive way. But I think others are being educated in what I would say is in a very negative response - to think like Donald Trump that the reaction to people rioting over a just cause -to get the police to stop killing them - is to enact more and greater injustice to suppress them, like "stop and frisk".

Because of the failure of the Dems to recognize and make efforts to correct this situation far earlier, they are going to suffer a double whammy - loss of confidence from a number of groups asking "where have you been?" This group could include POC, liberals in general, and Law and Order conservatives.

Much to my chagrin, it has been under a Democratic President and a Democratically controlled executive branch that we have seen Justice, a Right, eroded and converted into a commodity distributed unequally to those with money or power or both. In my opinion, the people are aware of this fact and they will punish the Democrats at the polls for proving to us that Justice is not blind and knows very well who she is dealing with.