Republicans are now vowing Total War. And the consequences could be immense.

Trump partisans are behaving like the FBI has a mountain of smoking gun evidence to put Hillary Clinton into jail forever. Forget that there is just nothing at all in reality to support this, because whenever I point that out, they call me names and cite totally discredited websites as proof that they’re right and I’m an idiot.

It’s frustrating and demoralizing that we seem to be living in separate realities. I, of course, believe that I live in actual reality and they live in Breitbart reality … but I keep remembering how Karl Rove said to a reporter that the Bush White House was no longer concerned with facts, because they could create their own reality. Based on my interactions with Trump partisans this year, it seems like Rove was right.

So that’s why this FBI scandal is so upsetting to me. The power and inherent respect of the bureau is being abused by a small group of people who want to create their own reality, based on a book whose premise was conjured out of thin air explicitly to be a political hit job.

It’s incomprehensibly dangerous to have any government agency act upon totally false and imagined things because those things fit their ideology. It is terrifying when it’s an agency that has the power to arrest and detain and investigate people. 

And not that it matters, I guess, but what these FBI agents have done, and what Trump’s campaign is apparently complicit in, is a violation of the law. It is specifically a violation of the Hatch Act, which was written and passed to prevent exactly what these people are trying to do.

(via wilwheaton)