Springfield, June 16, 1858

Watched a little Lou Dobbs last night because it's always good to see how the other half lives. If you don't watch him all the time (and you don't have a place in his court), what he's up to, night after night, can seem bloody horrifying. Some agencies of the federal government, backed up by the evil George Soros, the mainstream media, and the tech giants, have engineered an assault on the beaches of the Trump presidency with such force and numbers that anything from World War II seems like kids in a sandbox.

It's a coup, really, an outright rebellion against the law and the Constitution, and by agents of discord and division, liberal dems. The Russia thing was a hoax, the impeachment sheer nonsense. Now, this treacherous cabal of treasonous, commies and their hosts of Antifa buddies have jimmied the computers enlisted to tally vote counts, just to make sure that "this President" would be denied the second-term he so righteously deserves.

In Covid news, Dobbs' version lauded Trump's devotion to the American people via Project Warp Speed, which is now readying an astonishing national program of 350 million Americans with any one of two or three wonder drugs the President's determined energy has conjured.

We don't spend much time with sweet Lou or Hannity, with Tucker or Laura, just crack the door of the church once in a while to see or hear what's happening in the sanctuary. In the church down the block, where we normally attend, the congregation was singing from an altogether different hymnal.

To be sure, there was just as much praise for the scientists who've created possible antidotes for Covid, but no one sang the President's praise. CNN and MSNBC put a lot of numbers up on the screen--a record number of positives yesterdays, of hospitalizations, and deaths--a string of incredible numbers that Dobbs didn't bother bringing up. You could say we're rounding the curve if you have absolutely no idea how huge the curve is.

Yesterday's other big story was Rudy G's hair-coloring running down both sides of his face during a press conference at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, a news conference which, oddly enough, featured zero party officials. Dobbs didn't mention Rudy or his bizarre performance. Anderson Cooper called the whole thing "a clown show," then apologized to clowns. Cooper didn't have to say much really; yesterday was one of those news days when a picture was worth a thousand words.

What President Trump is up to with this his own two-week self-imposed lock down is either a determined quest for justice against the formidable powers of hell (Dobbs) or a dingbat hissy fit (most anyone from opposing networks). Seems Americans are either are greatly taken with the man's stubborn strength of character or have decided a week ago already that the man should have been stuck in a corner with a dunce hat. Trump is either the Angel Gabriel or a Brigadier General in Satan's minions.

Just for the record, Abraham Lincoln didn't pull the famous phrase out of his hat. He found it in the Bible, but he could have jotted it down from other sources as well, including Saint Augustine. When he stepped up to the podium at Springfield, Illinois, on June 16, 1858, he did so to accept the Illinois Republican Party's nomination for a U. S. Senate seat. He wasn't blind to what he and everyone else were seeing: slavery was threatening the Union in ways the century-old government had never experienced. Kansas was aflame. The raised fists of Southern states were unmistakably threatening.

"I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free," he said. "I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided," he claimed, because "it will become all one thing or all the other."

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.

That was the context of a speech whose central line is sewn into just about everyone's sense of the American story, and that single line, or so it seems to me, has, sadly enough, sharp and immediate relevance.

"A house divided against itself cannot stand."

I have no idea how we get beyond this. No idea.