Let's just start with the baseline reality here, because I feel like we are all being slowly marinated in such a thick brine of daily insanity that the national brain has begun to treat things that should set off every alarm bell from Bangor to Bakersfield as if they're just another Tuesday in the clown-car constitutional collapse.

. . .

Because we have reached the stage of American politics where the president can say something so profoundly brain-scrambled bonkers that ten years ago it would have triggered an immediate national meltdown and instead the reaction is just a shrug and a panel discussion.

Meanwhile the rest of us are sitting here watching this unfold like passengers on a bus where the driver just announced the steering wheel might actually be a waffle iron.

. . .