the problem is, there IS a john wayne lol. john wayne was a poseur, never served in the military (which in itself is not a crime. some say he was a draft dodger and others say he wanted to serve but for some reason couldn't (or wouldn't). i don't care; the point is that everyone thinks he did and people treated him as if he had, and meanwhile he was an open racist. we need someone other than a john wayne. we HAVE a john wayne, complete with bone spurs and racism.

g

There are plenty of reasons to think the reaction against the lies, corruption, and cheating will do some lasting good. Gerrymandering is weakening [usatoday.com]
The house will begin hearings no matter what Trump does about Mueller. And with the number of people who have "flipped" or are currently flipping, we can bet the report is much worse than any of us suspected (just as every time we read something new about the inner workings of this White House from someone who was there...it is so much worse). The list of indictments will get longer, Trump Jr. likely will be indicted, and now that Trump has publicly impugned the independence of the Supreme Court, I'm not sure he can depend on it (or the Senate) to support him when the shit hits the fan and it turns out to be much much more than any of us anticipated...and is poison shit, at that. At a certain point, the "whataboutism" will seem shameful and stupid to even Senate republicans, to even Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts and Alito and Gorsuch. Which will all coincide with a downturn in the economy that seems to be beginning already (all the gains for 2018 have been wiped out; now we're working on giving back the gains for 2017). When the economy is the only thing people seem to like about Trump, what shield will he have against impeachment before a backdrop of crimes and misdemeanors...while the economy starts to tank?

Today, America is far more complex, and cannot be explained by the racist and sexist "good guy/bad guy/white male hero" myth of old Western movies.

As a group, Democratic voters were the collective hero of the Midterm Elections.

"If the November midterms stood for anything, it was that in most jurisdictions that allow for meaningful voting and proportional representation, the whiz-bang showmanship of the past two years has become stale and dull.

"A clutch of exciting young candidates ran for office without even explicitly engaging with Trump or Trumpism. Powered by energy from below, they largely ignored the wallpaper of noise and sound that is the president. The narcissism and self-love of the ’90s TV hustler has finally just become tiresome.

"But this Thanksgiving weekend, the sense beginning to emerge is of the systems of democratic governance repairing themselves— of good people standing up, of women surging forward, of teenagers answering the call, of law and truth reinstating themselves. The feeling is that some kind of fever has maybe broken."

[slate.com]

David, I'm having trouble with this post. Not that its a bad post. Its just that I have trouble with the John Wayne solution. I grew up in the west with JW movies and enjoyed them. I've ranched and rodeod, but as an educated liberal, I realized that JW represented a paradigm that is not healthy.

JW is a product of his time. Unfortunately, the paradigm of the time was both ethnocentric (especially white male ethnocentrism) and terribly misogynistic. The idea that the western man represented the idea of the ideal rugged individual is inconsistent with historical truth. Most individuals moving west were not the cream of society's best. They were the disenfranchised, trouble makers, individuals that were ill prepared to make their way in society, and people looking to make a quick buck.

There was no code of the west. That was invented by Hollywood and authors like Louis Lamour. Not to denegrate the grit many needed to have to survive the difficulties inherent, but that doesnt mean they were moral or ethical. Just tenacious.

We don't need a Hollywood myth to save us. We need a collective of conscientious individuals to step up and say no to the unethical behavior found in Wahington and the nation today.

Spot on. And, lo - along comes Mueller and his deputies. That could turn into a song!