Call it whatever — moving the goalposts, working the refs, tilting the playing field…defining deviancy downward, or even the ultimate soft bigotry of low expectations — but the librul media is falling in, even as it’s obvious that Donaldo is bringing Banana Republic style governance to El Norte.

while we have mostly managed to resist treating Trump as a normal president, I’m increasingly worried that we have simultaneously fallen into a more subtle trap: Even the private citizens, the business executives, and the politicians who are fully conscious that the president of the United States is a peculiar aberration have not changed their behavior in the day-to-day; despite knowing everything that there is to know about Donald Trump, they go about their personal and professional lives as though we lived in perfectly ordinary times.

Many Republican congressmen and senators, for example, have not only distanced themselves from Trump’s most outrageous comments in public; in private, they have also acknowledged that he is a dangerous fool who will most likely do immense damage to their party, their country, and the world. And yet, they have spectacularly failed to walk that wise talk, neglecting to put real limits on Trump’s ability to fire special counsel Robert Mueller or launch nuclear weapons.

Of course, the response from the New York Times is … to publish a series of letters from Trump’s base, I assume as some sort of apology for … for what? Acting like fucking journalists? Yeah, there are Trump voters out there who still like the guy. Quite a few, though less by about three million than HRC voters, who haven’t seen similar generosity from the Gray Lady…and will forever be defined by the various outlets of the right wing noise machine/puke funnel as criminal accomplices of the “Democrat” Party if not actual enemies of the state.

These are not normal times — I can attest to that as we endure another brutally cold night, which is keeping me wide awake watching faucets continue to hopefully drip and/or monitoring space heaters — and Trump’s not a normal president. There’s no need to pretend otherwise.