WEDNESDAY: Sitting president poses with gun!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 2026

Supreme Court wrestles with race: We're so old that we can remember last weekend, when people were upset about the attempt to create a mass shooting incident at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.  

That seems to have been then, and this seems to have turned into now. This morning, the sitting president posted his latest extremely strange Truth Social post. Headline included, here's the start of Mediaite's report:

Trump Vows ‘No More Mr. Nice Guy’ in 4 AM Iran Threat Featuring Image of Himself With Gun

President Donald Trump issued a new threat to Iran early Wednesday, posting an AI-generated image of himself holding an assault rifle alongside the blunt message: “No more Mr. Nice Guy!”

The image, shared on Truth Social just after 4 a.m. ET, showed the gun-wielding president in a dark suit and sunglasses, standing before a backdrop of explosions tearing through a hillside.

“Iran can’t get their act together,” Trump wrote. “They don’t know how to sign a nonnuclear deal. They better get smart soon!”  

The report continues from there. For the record, he's posing with a very big gun, as you can see if you click to the Mediaite report.

In our view, it seems that something may be wrong with the sitting president. The sitting Blue American press corps refuses to discuss it.  

He posted the image at 4 a.m. The image shows him posing with a very large gun. 

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is once again trying, for the ten millionth time, to find a way to explain the permissible role of race in the creation of congressional districts. 

As usual, today's ruling involves the state of Louisiana's six congressional districts—two of which would be "majority-minority" in the proposed map under review. 

In a 6-3 vote, that proposed map has now been struck down. Headline included, here's the way the AP report begins:   

Supreme Court weakens a landmark Civil Rights-era law and aids GOP efforts to control the House   

The Supreme Court on Wednesday weakened a landmark Civil Rights-era law that has increased minority representation in Congress and elsewhere, striking down a majority Black congressional district in Louisiana and opening the door for more redistricting across the country that could aid Republican efforts to control the House.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court’s conservative majority found that Louisiana district represented by Democrat Cleo Fields relied too heavily on race. Chief Justice John Roberts had described the 6th Congressional District as a “snake” that stretches more than 200 miles to link parts of Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette and Baton Rouge.

“That map is an unconstitutional gerrymander,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the six conservatives.

The effect of the ruling may be felt more strongly in 2028 because most filing deadlines for this year’s congressional races have passed. Louisiana, though, may have to change its redistricting plan to comply with the decision.   

The report continues from there, with comments, pro and con, about the 6-3 ruling. As a first stab at a summary, the AP report seems to be saying something like this:

Louisiana created an oddly configured district to make it more likely that a black candidate would win a seat in the House. According to the Court's majority ruling, the proposed district results from a type of gerrymander which is banned by the Constitution.  

We expect to return to this topic when full reports have been filed by the nation's major newspapers. Here's why:

We've never seen a major policy topic where so much impenetrably fuzzy language is employed by partisans on all sides. (In this case, it sounds like the Alito opinion may be fairly straightforward, though that could turn out to be a mirage.) 

At this difficult, dangerous time, we Americans are finding it increasingly hard to function as "a people." Who will speak clearly on this matter? Will anyone in these impoverished times show up with that type of skill?

The sitting president has now chosen to pose with a great big giant gun. Who among us—what new birth of Abraham Lincoln—will present, at this difficult time, with the gift of clear, comprehensible speech? 

("Back out of all this now too much for us?" We believe that Robert Frost sought a way back out of all that!)

PEOPLE: The very next morning, we the people...

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 29, 2026

...began making phone calls to C-Span: Under current circumstances, are "we the people" up to the challenge of creating "a more perfect union?"   

Do we want President Lincoln's "mystical chords" to bind us together as friends? Or are we now engaged in a great civil war with our tribal enemies, Red America battling with Blue?   

You're asking excellent questions! For the record, the current circumstances to which we refer include the disappearance of the gatekeepers—of the Walter Cronkites and the David Brinkleys—in the wake of the "democratization of media" over the past forty years. 

That "democratization" was the fruit of a technological explosion which has replaced the Cronkites and the Brinkleys with such "opinion leaders" as Greg Gutfeld and Tyrus—and with the shaky judgment of our current crop of comedians and podcasters, a few of whom are referenced here:

The Man Show

The Man Show [was] an American sketch comedy television show on Comedy Central that aired from 1999 to 2004. It was created by its two original co-hosts, Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel, and their executive producer Daniel Kellison. The pilot was originally paid for and pitched to ABC, which declined to pick up the show.

The Man Show simultaneously celebrated and lampooned the stereotypical loutish male perspective in a sexually charged, humorous light. The show consisted of a variety of recorded comedy sketches and live in-studio events, usually requiring audience participation. The Man Show was a career breakthrough for Kimmel.

The Man Show is particularly well known for its buxom female models, the Juggy Dance Squad, who would dance in themed, revealing costumes at the opening of every show, in the aisles of the audience just before The Man Show went to commercial break, and during the end segment "Girls on Trampolines".

[...]

In 2003, Kimmel and Carolla left The Man Show, with the hosting jobs passed down to comedians Joe Rogan and Doug Stanhope. The new pair hosted the show for two more seasons before it ceased production in 2004. 

 All in all, there it is. It was Kimmel and Rogan and the Juggy Dance Squad oh my! 

Speaking from a Blue perspective, extremely poor judgment was on vivid display with this show. Today, Rogen is one of our failing nation's most prominent Cronkite Replacement Figures. 

Kimmel is the latest in a long line of Tinseltown strivers who keep supplying the RNC, and today the Fox News Channel, with endless distractions and talking points.   

For the record, Cronkite and Brinkley were serious, deeply experienced people. They were part of the generation of Americans to whom President Kennedy referred in his famous inaugural address:   

PRESIDENT KENNEDY (1/20/61): Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed...

Cronkite and Brinkley had indeed been "tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace."  They didn't arrive on the scene in the kinds of clown cars so common on this current American scene.

Back then, they were numbered among the nation's gatekeepers. Today, a sprawling network of former "wrestlers" and undisguised cable news nut-balls have taken their place as guardians of our flailing nation's increasingly clown-like imitation of public discourse, an imitation of life.

Today, the gatekeeper/guardians are largely gone, replaced by the class of people commonly known as influencers. Two of our current influencers got their start on The Man Show, where they displayed their lack of perfect judgment as they ogled the girls on trampolines—as they thrilled to the exploits of The Juggy Dancers. 

(As they pretended, exactly as Greg Gutfeld currently does, that their unfortunate conduct was really a form of lampoon, of "satire.")

What's an abandoned people to do in the wake of this cultural breakdown? What's an abandoned people to do in the face of 24-hour, nut=ball messaging from overtly partisan corporate "news ogs?" But also from an array of overtly disordered podcaster / influencer types?  

What are we the people to do as our mystical union descends into the current tribal war? Alas! We the people forced to fall back on our own imperfect powers, as people around the globe have always been forced to do.  

This country is full of good, decent people—but we're also a nation of people people. We humans have never been a race of mental giants. That helps explain why viewers of Fox & Friends Weekend were weirdly told this, very early, at 6:09 a.m., this past Sunday morning, about what had happened, the night before, at the Correspondents Dinner:

CAMPOS-DUFFY (4/26/26): As everyone now knows, we saw a shooter outside of the venue, outside of the ballroom doors. He was trying to get through the magnetometers, and he was shot and killed as he was trying to rush into the ballroom, where the president, vice president, members of the cabinet were—about a thousand, over a thousand people, were at that dinner. Very dramatic events indeed.   

Say what? The shooter was shot and killed as he tried to rush into the ballroom?  Why in the world had Campos-Duffy said that? 

Strange! It had become quite clear, on Saturday night, that the attempted assailant had not been shot and killed as he rushed toward the ballroom of the Washington Hilton that night. Indeed, here's what co-host Charlie Hurt had already said, eight minutes earlier, right at the start of that same Fox & Friends Weekend program:  

HURT: The suspect was apprehended before he could get to the ballroom and hurt anyone else, and the takedown was caught on camera. He's now been identified as 31-year-old Cole Allen of Torrance, California, who's believed to have been a guest at the hotel. He's believed to have acted alone and reportedly told law enforcement that he wanted to shoot Trump administration officials.

That's what the other friend had accurately said. Reading from prompter, Campos-Duffy proceeded to say that he was "set to be arraigned tomorrow.

It was clear, by 6:02, that Allen had been taken into custody. That said, Campos-Duffy still seemed to have it in her head that he had been shot and killed.  

Everybody makes mistakes—and what happened at the Hilton had been very upsetting to many people. It may have been so for Campos-Duffy, who had been present at the event with her husband, a cabinet member, and with her two co-hosts.

At any rate, Campos-Duffy mistakenly "let the word go forth [on Fox & Friends Weekend] to friend and foe alike." The shooter had been shot and killed, she now strangely said.

Everybody makes mistakes—and in this instance, cable news etiquette prevailed. Neither of her two co-hosts corrected her groaning misstatement. At 6:22, Campos-Duffy finally corrected herself, as you can see right here. 

Everybody makes mistakes and shows imperfect judgment! Today, our cable news stars and our other gatekeepers are frequently highly fallible, to the extent that they're trying to be truthful at all.

We the people are left on our own. The results can be quite spotty:

At 7 o'clock that very morning, C-Span's Washington Journal began to take phone calls from us the people. Those phone calls were cause for substantial concern. The basic fact of the matter is this:  

When we the people are left on our own—when reliable gatekeepers have been replaced—the ideas we the people generate can be cause for substantial concern.

We often get it very wrong. Under current arrangements—given the nature of the new technologies—our weird ideas quickly spread.

Tomorrow: What the callers said

TUESDAY: Should Jimmy Kimmel have told that joke?

TUESDAY, APRIL 28, 2026

"Jokes are jokes," Clooney says: Should Jimmy Kimmel have told that joke? We refer to the joke he told last Thursday night—the joke which went like this:

On Thursday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host did a mock roast of President Donald Trump and officials in the administration. At one point, Kimmel got around to cracking about the first lady.

“Our First Lady Melania is here,” he said at the time. “Look at her, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow.” 

So joked Jimmy Kimmel, whose judgment was notably imperfect back in the Man Show days. Whose judgment is sometimes less than perfect now.

In fairness, it wasn't exactly a joke! It was a presentation performed as part of a "mock roast"—one possible problem being that, as part of an actual roast, the person being roasted has agreed to be cast in that role.  

That's one possible part of the problem. The most obvious part of the problem is this:  

As a general matter, it's a bad idea to tell a joke in which you're asking people to laugh and applaud at the thought of some public figure's death. As a general matter, entangling the target's wife in the "some day soon he'll surely be dead" almost surely adds to the shakiness of the whole idea.  

So you'll know:  

Tasteless jokes envisioning Joe Biden's death have been an ugly, demonically stupid part of the Fox News Channel's nightly menu for several years at this point. The public nutcase known as Greg Gutfeld persistently offers jokes which place the former president inside hearses or deep down in the ground. 

His disordered mind can't quit this fun; disordered creeps sit around him on his show pretending it makes perfect sense. In total fairness, let us say this:

Some of these lackeys may be so dumb that they don't see that there's a type of ugliness connected with this manifest nut-ball's behavior.  

(Also in fairness, the cable star in question needs help, or so it seems to us.) 

Given the garbage this "cable news" channel spews—let's not forget the multiple "jokes" about whether Hunter Biden had started "banging" or [BLEEP]ing first lady Jill Biden yet—it's especially pathetic to see Fox News Channel types reciting the channel's manufactured agitprop about Kimmel's joke, in which the current first lady was pictured dreaming of her husband's death. 

Sad! Under current arrangements, there's nothing those Fox News types won't do in service to corporate agitprop. There's nothing they won't do to advance the messaging of the tribe. 

But that doesn't mean that our own Man Show grad was employing good taste, or was showing good political sense, when he went with his "mock roast" joke.

No one has perfect judgment; everyone makes mistakes. It might be better, on occasion, to simply say that a certain joke should perhaps have been left unsaid.

Sadly, though—disappointingly—George Clooney didn't do that:

‘Jokes Are Jokes’: George Clooney Defends Jimmy Kimmel After Trumps Demand He Be Fired

Hollywood star and Democratic activist George Clooney stepped up to defend late-night host Jimmy Kimmel after President Donald Trump called for the comedian to be fired by ABC over a White House Correspondents’ Dinner joke mocking First Lady Melania Trump.

[...]

Speaking to Variety at the Chaplin Award Gala in New York on Monday, Clooney dismissed the backlash and drew a direct comparison to remarks by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who told Fox News ahead of the Correspondents’ Dinner that “there will be some shots fired tonight in the room,” a line widely understood as a reference to the traditional roasting at the event.

“Jimmy’s a comedian, and I would argue that Karoline Leavitt didn’t mean shots should be fired, right?” Clooney said. “She was making a joke. Fair enough. You look at that side and go, ‘Well, jokes are jokes.’ But the rhetoric is a little dangerous. And we’ve seen it a lot lately."   

The comparison to what Leavitt said (on that occasion) is very. very dumb. We find it very hard to believe that Clooney isn't much smarter than that.  

At any rate:

"Jokes are jokes," the gentleman said. In a very basic way, it's hard to argue with that.

That said, jokes are also insinuations and suggestions. They put ideas in the air.

Jokes can frequently cover for insults. And unless you think there's no such thing, a joke can be in bad taste—or, at the very least, it may strike voters that way.   

The garbage can overflows on the Fox News Channel each night. Increasingly, the sewage from the noxious 10 p.m. show has been seeping down to The Five. 

The nightly toxic waste on Fox dwarfs what Kimmel said. That said, Kimmel has often had imperfect judgment—and bad judgment by Hollywood types has been hurting liberal and Democratic Party interests for at least three decades now.   

As a general matter, it might not be the greatest idea to invite people to laugh as the picture of a public figure's death. Inserting the public figure's wife won't likely improve the mix.

Dreams of Joe Biden's death are spewed by Gutfeld night after night. He runs a corporate sewage dump. It's best left over there.

WE THE PEOPLE: When we the people began to react...

TUESDAY, APRIL 28, 2026

...a certain problem emerged: We're so old that we can remember when Iran was still in the news.  

That takes us back to last Saturday morning. The war with Iran hadn't yet ended. The Strait of Hormuz was still blocked, upending the global economy.  

Vaguely, we can remember all that! But those news topics disappeared in the wake of Cole Allen's alleged attempt to storm the White House Correspondents Dinner last Saturday night.  

There we the people went again! Our news agenda was hijacked by the latest attempt at a mass shooting. Also, this mass shooting would have been political in nature—and so, we the people began to react.  

We the people began to react at 7 o'clock on Sunday morning with some rather peculiar calls to C-Span's Washington Journal. We'll offer examples of those calls in tomorrow morning's report—but first, we the people began to hear from our major journalists, and it got dumb very fast. 

It got dumb extremely fast—and this is who we are. 

For starters, consider this report from Mediaite. It concerns a comment which was made shortly after midnight on that very Saturday night 

‘Tone Down The Flipping Rhetoric!’ John Roberts Rips Hakeem Jeffries For Comments After WHCD

Fox News anchor John Roberts admonished House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) for comments he made after the shooting incident at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Roberts was at the event at the Washington Hilton when a gunman ran through the magnetometer and fired shots before being tackled by security. One Secret Service agent was saved when his bulletproof vest caught the shooter’s round.

President Donald Trump, Melania Trump, and Trump officials were safely ushered out of the venue.   

Roberts told host Trace Gallagher that future correspondents’ dinners “need to have Trump-level security.” 

That's the way the report begins—and so far, so basically good! 

Many people have voiced concern with the level of security at the dinner. But Roberts didn't leave it at that. Speaking to Gallagher on the Fox News Channel, the Fox News anchor said this:  

[continuing directly]
“And then again, you know, we heard from Hakeem Jeffries just before you and I came on together. And he said, ‘Oh, we are so happy nobody was hurt.’ Well, you know, then to down the flipping rhetoric!

“You might not like the guy,” Roberts said of Trump. “You might not be able to stand him. But you call him Hitler, you call him a fascist, you call him all of these things. You call him a threat to democracy. Some lunatic out there is going to take that language to heart, that rhetoric to heart.”

“And feel emboldened!” Gallagher agreed.  

In our view, Gallagher tends to be a bit of an agitprop machine. Before we consider what Roberts said, let's consider his background, and his deep experience.  

John Roberts is Canadian by birth. Like Gallagher, he's a good and decent person—and he's highly experienced:   

John Roberts (journalist) 

John David Roberts (born November 15, 1956) is a Canadian-American television journalist. He has been working for the Fox News Channel, as the co-anchor of America Reports. Roberts joined Fox News in January 2011 as a national correspondent based in Atlanta. He was the Fox News Chief White House Correspondent from 2017 to 2021, covering the first Donald Trump presidency.   

...Roberts first moved to the States in 1989 to join the Miami CBS affiliate. In 1990, he returned to Canada to host the CTV Canada AM national morning show. Roberts then returned to the States, joining CBS News in 1992 and later moved to CNN in 2006. At CBS, Roberts was an anchor on various national news programs, an anchor at their New York affiliate WCBS-TV, and White House correspondent. At CNN, Roberts was an anchor and Senior National Correspondent. 

[...]  

He had been widely considered a potential replacement for CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather after Rather stepped down from the anchor desk in March 2005, but Bob Schieffer was chosen on an interim basis to be the next CBS Evening News anchor, and in subsequent months, it became clear that Roberts was not under consideration for the job. During his time at CBS, Roberts received three nationals Emmy awards as well as a Gracie award for his coverage of a groundbreaking surgery to repair neural tube defects.  

At CBS, Roberts had been a contender! That said, he has performed at the highest levels in American broadcast news—for CBS, CNN and the Fox News Channel—for more than thirty years. 

He's deeply experienced, and he's a good and decent person. Despite all that, Roberts now blurted this:  

“You might not like the guy. You might not be able to stand him. But you call him Hitler, you call him a fascist, you call him all of these things. You call him a threat to democracy. Some lunatic out there is going to take that language to heart, that rhetoric to heart."  

Speaking with Gallagher just after midnight, Roberts fashioned the assailant as "a lunatic." Presumably, that may mean he thinks the assailant is "mentally ill" in some way. 

We'd be inclined to think that some such mental health problem does obtain.  

Roberts seemed to be angry—upset. Stating the obvious, what happened last Saturday night was upsetting for many people—yes, that does include us. 

That said, Roberts almost seemed to be angry at Hakeem Jeffries for saying he was glad that no one got hurt. And then, the experienced newsman emitted a familiar type of rant, in the course of which he even offered this:  

If you think a president is a threat to democracy, you shouldn't actually say it!   

Roberts emitted a standard Fox News Channel presentation, in which he seemed to suggest—offering no examples—that Jeffries has been calling President Trump "Hitler" and "a fascist."  By now, everyone within the reach of the Fox News Channel has offered some version of that general rant, often accompanied by tightly edited video clips in which no such statement is made.   

We rarely (if ever) see the sitting president referred to as a "Hitler." That said, we hear constant allegations to that effect by stars on the Fox News Channel.

Imagine! According to Roberts, you can think that a president poses some such threat, but you must never say it! A lunatic may hear you say it and decide to show up with a gun!

To some extent, what Roberts said is of course perfectly accurate. In a nation of roughly 340 million people, including more than 200 million people ages 18-65, any criticism of a public figure may inspire some (one) unbalanced person to react in a violent way. 

There's no avoiding that possibility—and a resort to gun violence has become a national norm over the past 27 years, dating to the mass shooting at Colorado's Columbine High.

It's true! If you criticize a sitting president, a disordered person may react in a disordered way. But in that part of Roberts' statement—the part about the threat to democracy—Roberts was basically saying that we the people can't be allowed to criticize a president at all.

That struck us as an extremely strange remark, from a deeply experienced person. Roberts made the comment shortly after midnight. Seven hours later, the calls to C-Span began.

Roberts is a good, decent person. That said, he made a remark that evening which strikes us as very dumb.

As he made that odd remark, then as the calls to C-Span came in, a dirty little secret was put on display:

Even as we seek "a more perfect Union," we the people just aren't extremely sharp—and we never have been!  

Quite often, that's true of us the people in Blue America. It's also true of them the people who tend to align as Red.

Tomorrow: Washington Journal takes phone calls from us the people, Blue as well as Red

MONDAY: All of a sudden, it's Florida's turn!

MONDAY, APRIL 27, 2026

Ship of state rolls on its side: All of a sudden, it's Florida turn to make a joke of its House districts. Over at the Washington Post, Marley and Knowles report:

DeSantis floats Florida map that could give GOP up to four more House seats   

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis unveiled a plan Monday that could give Republicans as many as four more congressional seats as the GOP scrambles to preserve its thin House majority.

The Republican governor rolled out his new map in one of the last acts of a national redistricting fight that President Donald Trump kicked off last year. Republicans have drawn nine districts in their favor across four states, and the map in Florida could bring that total to 13.

In response to Trump’s efforts, Democrats have gained more favorable lines in 10 districts—nine through a pair of ballot measures and one through a court decision. Democrats notched their latest win last week, when Virginia voters approved a new map that could give Democrats all but one of the state’s congressional seats.  

Fox News first reported on DeSantis’s proposal. A spokesperson for the [Florida] governor released a rough version of the map, which showed Republicans having a majority in 24 of 28 districts in a state that just a decade ago was a toss-up between the two political parties. Now, Republicans hold 20 of those districts.   

In response to the Texas redistricting, crazy-quilt House district maps have leaped from state to state. If Virginia's (temporary) new map survives court challenge, Dems could win as many as ten out of eleven House seats in the somewhat narrowly divided state.

(In 2024, Candidate Harris beat Candidate Trump in Virginia, 51.8% to 46.1%.) 

In Florida, Republicans would stand to win 24 out of 28 seats. That would be 86% of Florida's House seats, in a state which Donald Trump won in 2024 with 56% of the vote.  

In Virginia as in Florida, the numbers don't exactly seem to make sense. That said, the crazy-looking House districts sometimes remove all doubt—the Texas turnaround has triggered the latest race to the bottom as the basic concept of the search for "a more perfect union" disappears beneath the waves. 

For our money, Virginia Dems might have shown better political judgment if they'd engineered a (more manageable) 8-3 district split, rather than seeking a (possible) 10-1 Democratic advantage. But the notion that we the people are a real people, in constant search of a more perfect union, disappeared a long time ago for those who have eyes to see. 

This redistricting is just one aspect of the larger societal descent which has been underway for decades now. This latest meltdown started with President Trump's commands to Texas. In all honesty, some of our nation's assortment of meltdowns trace right back to us Blues!

(It's hard for us to see that.)

To see the proposed Florida map: You can see the proposed Florisa map as part of the original Fox News Digital report. 

For what it's worth, Virginia's proposed (though temporary) new districts look substantially weirder! These are the wages of the grasping, clawing modern Babel into which we've all been thrown.

UNION: Do "we the people" still exist?

MONDAY, APRIL 27, 2026

How about that "more perfect Union?" Within the American context, "Union" is a mystical concept as well as an historical term.   

The historical term is present at the time of the nation's founding. As the leading authority on this topic reports, it's connected to a second mystical concept—the concept of "us the people:" 

Union (American Civil War)  

The Union is a term used to refer to the central government and loyal states of the United States during the American Civil War. Its military forces and civilian population resisted the purported secession of the slave states that formed the Confederate States of America following the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States.

[...]

The term "Union" occurs in the first governing document of the United States, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. The subsequent Constitution of 1787 was issued and ratified in the name not of the states, but of "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union ..." 

Union, for the United States of America, is then repeated in such clauses as the Admission to the Union clause in Article IV, Section 3. Even before the Civil War began the phrase "preserve the Union" was commonplace, and a "union of states" had been used to refer to the entire United States of America.

So says the leading authority on this multi-faceted bit of American language. 

At the very founding of this nation—such as this nation has been—we see the yoking of two mystical concepts:

"We the People" were adopting the new nation's Constitution for the purpose of forming "a more perfect Union." 

That said, the language of "Union" had already been present in the full name of the Articles of Confederation, the forerunner to the Constitution.

Back in 1787, a mystical entity, "we the people," were seeking to form "a more perfect union." Several generations later, President Lincoln came to be hailed in the manner described below:

Presidency of Abraham Lincoln

[...]

Following his death, Lincoln was portrayed as the liberator of the slaves, the savior of the Union, and a martyr for the cause of freedom. Political historians have long held Lincoln in high regard for his accomplishments and personal characteristics. Alongside George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he has been consistently ranked both by scholars and the public as one of the top three greatest American presidents, often as the greatest president in American history.

The martyred sixteenth president was hailed as "the savior of the Union." A bit later in that report, the leading authority quotes the words with which the incoming President Lincoln ended his first inaugural address:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Mystical chords of memory, he predicted, would swell the chorus of the Union. In the incoming president's view, passions must not be allowed to break the bonds of affection which remind us that "we are not enemies, but friends."

Over the course of the next four years, the Union was saved as a legal jurisdiction. That said, have we Americans ever been a mystical "us the people," grouped together by "bonds of affection," forming a mystical Union extending beyond the legalisms which kept us one nation, not two?

Putting it a bit more directly:

Are we a mystical "people" today, bound together in a mystical "Union?"

Are we some such "American people" today? It seems to us that it isn't clear that any such mystical entity still exists. It seems to us that some such mystical entity is unlikely to survive the sociological changes which have brought us to the point we saw enacted again, on cable TV, this past Saturday night.

Briefly, let's be clear:

As a technical / legal nation, the United States isn't going anywhere in the next few weeks or in the next few years. But in the face of the gruesome behavior of major elements of our society, the notion that we form a mystical American people, bound together in a mystical Union, has become quite hard to sustain.

What has brought to this point? We'll examine that question all week. But as a Union has turned into a Babel, deeply unhelpful behavior has long been emerging from all sides—from Red America but also from Blue.

Those mystical chords of memory are hard to spot at this time. All this week, we'll examine the following question in the wake of what happened on Saturday night:

Can anything resembling a mystical union survive the sea in which we, the former American people, are now condemned to swim?  

We're asking you to take a step back and consider a larger picture. Are we a "people" forming a "Union" today, or have we turned into a Babel?

Tomorrow: C-Span's Washington Journal hears from us, the people