This is well put. Indeed, never let a justice boner cloud a reality meter. Or, at least, relieve yourself of said justice woodie, look down in disgust at what has just taken place, look up and see things clearly again, and quickly reassess before the refractory period is eclipsed by the menacing stiffy that falsely believes our 'justice system' is capable of producing any such outcome of justice here.

In this country, the quality/quantity of criminal 'justice' received is largely contingent upon the quality/quantity of 'justice' that one can afford to buy. Let's not let our justice boners obscure the point that our so-called justice system is a machinery which makes justice -- the kind of justice which we're pitching tents over -- about as frequent (and as unverifiable) as goddamn bigfoot sighting.

I truly hope I'm proven wrong, but I'm confident that the manifold of values and principles supposedly foundational to our legal system -- due process, reasonable doubt, and so on -- will be applied with an excessive and almost parodic degree of excessive charitability in these types of high-profile cases. It's a system in which fraud and treason are effectively less punishable than, say, a minor nonviolent drug offense which, partly due to the nearly exponential growth of folks processed and reproduced like cattle in the leviathan we refer to in the Orwellian sense as the 'justice system'. The system can't accommodate such an overproduction of criminals and prison populations without practices like plea bargains, whereby individuals who cannot afford a decent lawyer are effectively given the choice to gamble on due process and risk an inordinately and unjustifiably long sentence, or to admit guilt for a short one (and, sometimes, an unjustifiably short case!). Gee, tough call huh? The system transparently and unabashedly incentivizes the latter. Could courts really process everyone's fair trial, to which they supposedly are entitled, given how excessively everything has been criminalized by unsavory pieces of subhuman fecal waste occupying positions of power because our political system tends to elevate and award the worst kinds of people and interests? Fuck no. Fair trials and constitutional rights are in a demand-production crisis. As always, they're reserved only for those who can afford them. Rights get bypassed for those who can't afford to defend them. That's how financial capital in the era of governance by corporations operates. Big part of the war on drugs, which is a catastrophe to most of us, and undoubtedly to our culture, but also forms a vast economic complex of selectively concentrated profitability for the tiny percentage of those in power, willing to continue, in a peculiar kind of way, the lineage of slave labor by literally trading the freedom and lives of human beings for ever-greater accumulations of more profit than a CEO or Wall Street dickhead could possibly spend on new homes, properties, coke, or pussy in a LIFETIME. The war on drugs is strategically designed to selectively criminalize threatening populations who may otherwise resist the systems which oppress them. If you criminalize early on, you avoid the possibility of marginalized, rightfully angry populations getting the kind of education and social/community/familial support that is a sufficient condition of understanding one's oppression, and of forming a collective identity around a shared plight. Instead, the war on drugs mostly effectively preserves and concentrates the liberties, or near immunities, of certain types of drug use by certain people, i.e., those who can afford to be touched by a fundamentally predatory legal system that has a death grip on keeping the outmoded/outdated fiction of the imminent dangers of something as banal as weed alive and well, as long as it keeps economic flows going in the correct direction (upward).

THE AMERICAN MASSES HAVE BEEN FED SHIT FOR SO LONG THAT THEY ARE CONVINCED WITH A LITERALLY RELIGIOUS CONVICTION THAT IT IS WHAT THEY CRAVE -- THEY ARE HYPNOTIZED INTO THINKING THEY ARE HUNGRY FOR SHIT. And whenever they get close to realizing 'hey, wait a minute! this kind of tastes like shit!' They are given an option for a different consistency of shit on the Bristol Stool Chart, and convinced all over that it's different, and this turd is a fresh meal that's been home cooked with love. Pan to Paul Ryan taking a runny shit in a bowl and slopping it down on the table with a literal-shit eating grin, and telling you how hard he worked on it just for you. The funny thing is, the GOP is so fucking bad that the healthcare repeal and replace failed largely because Paul Ryan's turd (or really, a bucket of shit produced by several republics shitting on top of one another having lived on a steady diet of Donald Trump's orange cock and asshole since January) somehow wasn't robust or nauseating enough.

I guess part of what I'm trying to say is this: let's not get handed the Russian connection, another turd on a platter, and convince ourselves our sense of justice can be satisfied by it.

I don't believe justice is possible according to the certain system and its culture of disinformation and neoliberal dogmatics. Justice and ethical responsibility is weaponized by those in power, and the only times it seems to work in the ideal terms of fairness, innocent until proven guilty, and 'justice as giving to each what they are due', is one the benefactors of it's weaponization can most benefit it. Otherwise, it's the worst kind of weapon -- one that the populous is unable to recognize as a weapon at all. A toxic shit sandwich mystified as a gourmet meal, and paternally distributed as if one should be so lucky to eat the waste of Gods among mere beasts.

A young black kid caught with a quarter ounce of cannabis in an idiocratic prohibition state receives only a comical parody of the rights, foundational principles of American law and governance, and processes that are in effect purchased by the elite defendant (if the prosecution ever gets past some endless investigation to even bring forth a case). For the kid, the 'justice' process involves only an empty ritualistic mimicry of due process. He's given a choice to either make gamble with his life, or admit guilt and forego his right to a supposedly free trial, which the system would be ill equipped to give everyone by virtue of the mere fact of abundance. Moreover, the gamble for his life generally involves a wager with utterly terrible odds -- not only does he face a strategic exaggeratedly longer sentence, but likely has sub-par representation by an underpaid, under-appreciated public defender, who has a case overload such that the defendant is probably lucky if the lawyer even remembers his name). The system is fundamentally configured such that any real justice in a high profile case of fraud and/or treason is almost impossible -- that is, almost as impossible as fair trials for offenses that are comparatively microscopic and inconsequential. It is completely, transparently obvious that this is a system which benefits power, which continually concentrates wealth and influence, reproduces the status quo, and which reproduces itself by disenfranchising the people most vulnerable to it.

Perhaps, to extend the metaphor of justice-boners, our collective erections for seeing justice should be relieved quickly and without romance. Treated as a biological, if not existential necessity; like draining an infected cyst. We ought to aim to relieve our justice-arousal primarily to bring about refractory periods where we can see rationally how the promissory notes of pleasure are produced by the very same system that is structured to continually disappoint that arousal. Let's quickly masturbate to rid ourselves of the undeniable pleasure involved in imagining this circus becoming tragedy, as if justice were something that could be distributed exclusively according to what is due unto each. But once this fantasy is over, and we look down with disgust and bewilderment about the pleasure that just possessed us, maybe we can more clearly see that the worst part of this bizarre new regime isn't the regime itself, but the systems which not only allow it to take power, but actually seem to encourage it.

If the Russian-Trump obsession eventually leads to fall of the trump alt-right regime, I would myself be unable to tame the arousal. However, what would remain in the wake of the victory? The systems which produced it. So let's try not to fetishize Russia, nor to make the Trump-Russia connections constitute our framework of justice. For starters, how about the economic system of global capitalism which allowed them to take place to begin with? Let's demand justice regarding the Russian connection but not shit ourselves about the scope of what it will achieve in the long run, but even in the short run (what new bizarre figure assumes legitimacy of rule once Trump and the alt-right fall? What about the system and subsystems which enabled the elevation of the worst, most corrupt of a fundamentally rotten system to rise to power as the figurehead of that system. All in the name of benefiting the status quo of wealth/power/influence distribution, and the mass ignorance of a general population who still believes their democratic liberty and rights are, in the present conditions, anything more than a ruse weaponized against them? We think we're getting pleasure from the prospect (and, hopefully, the actualization of seeing Trump et al. get fucked), but let's be careful. There's nothing romantic or ultimately sufficient to justify the raging justice-boner here; it's just another jerk off (and there's nothing wrong with that), but let's not elevate it to the level of Eros, shall we?