The Clumsy Interloper

Last night, I watched All the President’s Men for the first time in 20 years. Great script, performances, score, cinematography – no notes. Robert Redford’s haircut in that movie belongs in the Smithsonian between the Hope Diamond and the Apollo 11 capsule, but I digress. I was charmed by the relative quaintness of the scandal at play. The term “Ratfucking” was discussed in a scene between Carl Bernstein and Donald Segretti whereby operatives used planted stories and forged documents to undermine political rivals. The chicanery featured in Watergate was malicious, but it remained cloistered off in private rooms, confined to a whisper tone barely audible above the document shredder. On deepest of deep-cover, meetings were arranged in parking garages, a lone cigarette ember in the shadows, sources proffered intelligence that hinted at implicating and alluded to involving.

Today we have the ubiquitous pastime of “Shitposting” by internet trolls and foreign bots alike that muddy the waters into a brackish sludge. Steve Bannon’s strategy of “flooding the zone with shit” means we live in a cesspool of disinformation. The leader of the free world announces via digital decree to millions of followers that judges, politicians and reporters critical of his administration are agents of the deep-state. Conspiracy nut Candace Owens has 1 billion views on YouTube while the Washington Post just laid off 1/3 of their journalists. The scandal isn’t a bug anymore, it’s a feature. We’ve become the frogs in the simmering pot and over the past 10 years the water has advanced to a rolling boiling, but in an ironic twist of fate, many are reporting discontentment with our new hot tub amenity.

This leads me to the recently launched “Epic Fury” bombing campaign in Iran, which appears to be a continuation of the June 2025 bombing that targeted Iran’s military and nuclear facilities. This has been described, through garbled Trump administration talking points, as either a regime change and/or a preemptive defense against nuclear armament. Either way, the opening days of the attack delivered roughly double the tactical missile strikes as the “Shock and Awe” campaign during the 2003 Iraq war. Two weeks on, the Strait of Hormuz is promising to be the epicenter of the highest stakes theater of war since WWII. Sea mines placed. Oil tankers ablaze. Low flying drone strikes. Cruise missiles finding targets. Fighter jets deployed. Energy crisis looming. Here we are – in the hot tub – scrolling, scrolling, scrolling – awaiting the next pellet of information that our algorithm feeds us.

Republicans are massaging the narrative to temper growing discontentment with their base. Democrats are circling the wagons and wagging fingers going into midterms. The scope of technology has finally enveloped us and rendered us, as a nation, morally catatonic. If democracy dies in the dark, it suffocates in a vacuum of truth.

After years of partying, we have finally split the piñata and it’s full of spiders, raining down on us, and here we sit, bat in hand, dumbfounded, spider bit and numb to the chaos.

I’d bite your arm off for a Watergate leading the news tomorrow.