As anyone following politics should know, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, and Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, brought charges in the Eastern District of North Carolina against James Comey, the former head of the FBI, claiming that Comey threatened the life of President Trump by posting a video consisting of seashells spelling out “86 47.”

Blanche claims to have other evidence, but given the fact that “86” is actually a restaurant term used to strike an item from the menu because the kitchen’s run out of that item, Blanche is stretching more than a little bit.

This is the second attempt by Trump to prosecute James Comey, and Blanche apparently is doing so because the Donald ordered him to do so, and after what happened to Pam Bondi once she failed to successfully bring charges against Trump’s so-called enemies, Blanche isn’t wasting any time.

Even some Republicans, including Senator Thom Tillis, are skeptical.

As for Comey’s being charged with threatening the President for merely expressing an opinion that Trump ought to be removed from office,whatever happened to First Amendment rights?

Unhappily, what else can you expect from a President who demands that comedians who make fun of him and his wife be fired? Or who discharges without a legally valid cause a highly commended career federal attorney merely because Trump hates her father?

What’s even more disturbing is that Trump can threaten anyone and everyone he doesn’t like, including to destroy an entire culture if those leading it won’t immediately capitulate, but takes umbrage in the slightest satire or mockery. He’s also delayed or withheld disaster aid to states that didn’t vote for him in the last election.

If any Democrat President had done half of what Trump has, they’d have long since run afoul of Congress, but superannuated adolescent Republican Representatives and Senators who once gloried in Trump’s braggadocio are now clueless chumps or sniveling cowards, unwilling to hold their bullying leader to the requirements of the Constitution.

I have mixed feelings about protests. While I definitely support non-violent protests and the right to speak out under the provisions of the first amendment, I have to confess I’m skeptical about the effectiveness of non-violent protests. At the same time, it’s fairly clear that non-violent protests that result in violent suppression efforts by authorities have sometimes been effective in moving society, not always for the better, and sometimes seem to have had little or no impact.

In my life, I’ve been involved in exactly one protest at a single time. In 1965, when there were more than a few antiwar protests on college campuses, and I was a senior in college, four or five of us decided that the motivations of quite a few of our contemporaries who were protesting were, shall we say, less than pristine. In our youthful ‘wisdom,’ we organized a counter-protest just to prove that one could get attention with only a few people and a catchy slogan.

So, we — all five of us, as I recall — invented the “Student Committee for Restricted Escalated Warfare in Vietnam” or SCREW in Vietnam, as an attempt to point out that even a few students with a ridiculously oxymoronic name could get publicity. We had just five people, two posters, and a few hangers-on while we protested the protestors, just once.

That one single counter-protest received mentions in the local college paper and TIME magazine, and I didn’t realize it until much later.

I’ve often thought of that over the years, especially when seeing how large and even well-funded non-violent protests often seem to have little or no effect, even when there’s significant public outrage.

The other morning at breakfast, I happened to read, actually read, the “guarantee” on the side of the waxed cardboard container containing cream, which promised that my satisfaction would be guaranteed or I’d either get my money back or a new container of cream, whichever I desired. All I had to do was to send the empty container back to the company.

Except the cream cost $4.95, and the empty container weighed about four ounces. So to mail a five ounce package back to the company, according to the U.S. Postal Service calculator, would cost $2.72. Since I don’t have a postage meter, and the only stamps I have are first class forever stamps, I’d either have to go to the nearest post office, roughly two miles away, or use four stamps (totalling $3.12 in value). So… if the cream had been spoiled, I’d end up paying $4.95 for the cream originally, then spending either $3.12 or $2.72 (with additional driving costs and time), to recover the $4.95. I’m not desperate enough to spend all that time to recover a little more than two dollars, and I suspect someone who’s really poor, assuming they’d even consider purchasing a large container of cream, wouldn’t have the time or possibly the resources, either.

So, for practical purposes, the “guarantee” is almost meaningless, at least to me.

But how many products have a similar guarantee — your satisfaction guaranteed or your money or a replacement back?

The Federal Trade Commission has a whole set of regulations dealing with guarantees, and they’re fairly detailed, and I suspect they’re moderately effective for larger items from reputable sellers, but even if the seller abides by the regulations, in the case of small items, the buyer may not want to go thorough the hassles of trying to obtain the guarantee.

In the case of the cream, there’s almost no downside to the producer making the guarantee, because the guarantee boosts the company with a minimal downside.

As a member of the so-called Silent Generation – not that friends or family would ever call me silent – I’ve occasionally been called “set in my ways” (i.e., old and stubborn), but there’s a reason for that. After you’ve been around a while, you tend to get irascible when you watch the younger generations make the same mistakes their parents and grandparents did. Especially when those mistakes cost billions of dollars and get thousands or tens of thousands of people get killed.

We had a Civil War, once upon a time, and over 600,000 young men were killed, because it was not only a civil war, but a culture war. One culture thought people were not born equal and that those born white were superior; the other culture believed that people were created equal. The “equal creation” culture won the shooting war, but they’re still fighting the guerilla tactics of the white nationalists over a hundred-fifty years later. And this is in a theoretically democratic culture.

Then there were the two world wars, in the first of which a bloc of countries that believed in authoritarian rule took on a group of nations that, in general, did not. The second world war followed the same general pattern, as did the Korean War.

All that, while real to me, is ancient history to virtually all Americans.

More recent history, if still ancient to the younger generations, includes the Vietnam War, in which we sided, in fact, with an abusive colonial-derived authoritarian regime against a popular and also abusive but local communist uprising.

Then came the Middle East mélange, a series of conflicts where the United States attempted so-called nation building as an alternative to abusive sectarian/authoritarian regimes in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now, once more, Iran.

And somehow, everyone is surprised, again, that the truly abused peoples in these lands really don’t want to “fight to the death” against their home-grown abusers. They’ll accept them, if reluctantly, in a way that they won’t accept foreign (to them) western democratic systems. And, in a way, they’re right to reject our style of governing for their cultures.

After all, we’re still fighting guerilla actions here at home resulting from a conflict that theoretically ended over a hundred and fifty years ago.

Donald Trump’s popularity is at an all-time low, which is hardly surprising, given the fashion in which he’s managed to diagnose accurately the concerns of the majority of Americans and then adopt solutions that have managed not only not to solve those problems, but to worsen them, likely with more terrible “solutions” to follow, possibly including a long-standing Iran mess.

Despite this, popular support of both political parties is even less than the support for Trump. Yet neither political party seems able to recognize this or to craft and/or implement any solutions. The Republicans continue to drink the Trump Kool-Aid, while the Democrats campaign on the anti-Trump bandwagon, failing to recognize just how unsteady and uncertain that position is.

Given Trump’s vengeful and vindictive nature, it’s easy to see why Republicans have fallen into line like sheep, even if that line may well lead to the electoral slaughterhouse.

But why have only a handful or two of incumbent Democrat politicians also been near mute? Right now, there are 214 Democrat Representatives in the House, and 45 Democrat Senators (not counting two independent senators who usually vote with the Democrats). But I follow politics moderately closely, and I can only come up with possibly 20 Democrats who seem to be taking visible public stands against the idiocy of so many of Trump’s failing policies.

Part of that may be that the national media doesn’t cover those politicians who have taken such stands in their states and districts. Another part is fear of incurring Trump’s public wrath, which can be costly, especially for those who must defend themselves against Trump’s vicious and frivolous lawsuits. But what I find most interesting is, from what I can tell, that many of those Democrats who have stood up aren’t exactly the wealthiest of individuals.

For example, Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who has been quite outspoken, is anything but wealthy. Nor are Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan and Jason Crow, all of whom joined Slotkin and Mark Kelly in pointing out that military officers are required not to carry out illegal orders, all of whom Trump singled out for reprisal.

Unhappily, that leaves quite a few Democrat Senators and Representatives who’ve not been particularly outspoken or active against the various Trump idiocies. But while the Republican members of the House and Senate may be wise, in terms of personal political survival, by keeping their heads down, I don’t see that strategy benefiting Democrats that much, especially after the coming mid-term elections.

But then, few politicians think beyond their next election.