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President Trump arrived in Alabama Friday night armed, as is his wont, with any number of barbs, jabs, and blandishments. Some were fresh bones to pick, others, old slights. Above all, the president was there to toss his support behind “Big” Luther Strange, the towering incumbent junior Senator from the Yellowhammer state. Sounding as though both first and surname could be peeled directly from the panel strip of a Marvel comic, Luther Strange has been Alabama’s senator for the past year. An unelected congressman, he’s held the position since Jeff Sessions’ promotion to Attorney General at the beginning of this year.

Alabama’s governor at the time of Sessions’ promotion, Robert J. Bentley, chose to fill the vacancy Luther Strange. He was considered to be a safe, stalwart conservative in the image of a McConnell or a Ryan. Prior to this appointment, Strange served as an attorney general for the state of Alabama. He did so with a kind of an antebellum ardor—a reactionary bent that’s uncommon outside of Alabama’s borders. Several times Strange sued the federal government and the Obama Administration for matters pertaining to transgender students, the Clean Power Plan, and ExxonMobil’s recompense for the Deepwater Horizons oil spill. Prior to that, he was a lawyer in private practice in the state’s capital at Birmingham. Earlier still, he was a lobbyist for the Transocean Offshore Drilling Company working in D.C.

Thus far, his has been an auspicious and industrious career. However, that doesn’t guarantee his future success in politics. The republican nomination of Senator (for which he now openly contends) has been from the outset well contended. His opponent, after an original field of nine was whittled to two, is the notorious “Ten Commandments Judge”, Roy Moore. His nickname, unlike Strange’s, leads to natural conclusions about the former’s sanctimony rather than the latter’s tall stature. Judge Moore’s notoriety is grounded in his fundamentalism, his recalcitrance, his religiosity, and his zeal, all of which when combined have hampered his judicial duties.

When he took his office as a state supreme court judge in 2001, Moore declared imperiously that “God’s law will be publicly acknowledged in our court”. Apparently, in Moore’s opinion, that “wall of separation” made famous by Thomas Jefferson in his letter to the Danbury Baptists was insufficiently high. The good judge saw no impediment in building back up the city of God atop the secular society within which it exists. Further, by “God’s law”, one has to assume that Moore meant not that of Vishnu, nor Woden, nor Saturn, but rather that of our capricious Yahweh. This much goes without saying when dealing with such a holy American man.

It’s one thing to flaunt one’s religiosity, quite another to apply it in public matters. His intention, unsubtly framed, was to subvert or at least provoke the Constitution’s establishment clause. This most essential clause, enumerated first in our sturdy Bill of Rights, proscribes the establishment and consequent promulgation of any national religion. Seldom is the argument made, but it’s worth pointing out that the Constitution says nothing in regard to the establishment of a “state” religion. So long as the federal government doesn’t try to disseminate its own creed, the strict constructivists and interpreters of the Constitution will say that Maryland can be officially catholic, Massachusetts officially protestant, and so on as you will. One can be sure this archaic argument wasn’t lost on Moore.

Esoterica aside, Moore found himself the subject of controversy for other reasons. He defied the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v Hodges, the case whose ruling awarded for the first time same-sex couples a right to marry and to have that marriage recognized by federal and state governments. Hitherto, the recognition of such invidious marriages was confined to the states in which they were permitted, while the federal government had no role.

Because of his obstinacy, Moore was reprimanded time and again. Eventually, these slaps on the writs led to his suspension as Chief Justice of the Alabama supreme court. Curiously, this hadn’t an effect on his popularity amongst Alabamans, which remained consistently high throughout his ordeals. It’s not hard to imagine why this is.

Moore is the kind of brazen bible-thumper so many in this deeply religious state adore. He’s seen as the last bastion of religious expression, the dying breath of a Jesuit fever. It’s for this reason, by and large, that Moore leads Strange in the senate-race polls; the margin has never dipped below double digits. And if the lessons of history are to guide our future inferences, the winner of the Republican primary will likely win the Senate seat. The last Democrat to be elected to the Senate from Alabama happened in 1992, and he no sooner defected to the Republican Party a mere two years into a six-year term.

All that being said, and with most polls pointing to a Moore victory and a Strange defeat, President Trump’s support for “Big Luther” during these past few months seems…strange. In fact, it appears only to have strengthened as the poll numbers look ever more unpropitious. It’s difficult to understand Trump’s support for Strange, as clearly he seems to be picking out of the starting block an ill-fated pony. Perhaps, though, Trump knows something we don’t. After all, he knows better than anyone that polls aren’t always and blindly to be trusted. Trump must think intuitively that Strange has a good shot at winning. Hence, Trump made it a point to speak to Alabama’s voters before they took to the polls.

Landing at Huntsville, a prosperous town in northern Alabama along the banks of the Tennessee River, Trump gave a rambling, ninety-minute speech to a fervid group of Strange’s and, more likely, Trump’s supporters. Trump, in the unrestricted time allotted him, took the opportunity to stoke flames of old and kindle controversies of new, all while doing little to move the needle for Strange. It was supposed to be Trump’s stump for Strange, but it devolved—as it customarily does—into an unfocused, desultory diatribe about the life of a besieged head of state.

Donning a pink candy-cane-striped tie, Trump stood in front of thousands to talk about topics new and trite. Under the heading of the latter, the president continued to bemoan the calamity that is NAFTA, to exalt the return in droves of American jobs stateside, and to assure us of the boon that will most assuredly be “clean” coal. As for the new, the president took an original swipe at North Korea while hurling an unprovoked offensive against the NFL.

In one of many divagations marking the evening, President Trump spent some time talking about North Korea. He called Kim Jong Un, the DPRK’s irascible autocrat, “Little Rocket Man”. Trump for the first time added the diminutive “Little” to his earlier insult of Kim Jong Un made first at the UN summit in New York. Since that time, a veritable war of the words has ratcheted up between the Donald and the despot.

Because no slight, no matter how sophomoric, can bounce off paper-thin skin, Kim Jong Un quickly responded to Trump’s first insult at the UN. Kim did so by calling Trump a “mentally deranged dotard” and a “political heretic”. The first dig quickly became an Internet meme and had those unacquainted with the more common term dotage or the language of Bacon, or Boyle, or Shakespeare scrambling for a definition and a lesson in the Elizabethan tongue. As for the second remark, I don’t imagine many Trump detractors, nor supporters for that matter, will consider it an insult. In fact, those opposed to Trump will likely agree with Kim Jong Un’s “heretical” attribution to this president; his supporters, on the other hand, wear it like an apolitical badge of honor as they chant like a mantra, “drain the swamp”.

While North Korea, by its own doing, is securely “in” the political arena, and thus expecting of and open to Trump’s punches, professional sport generally isn’t. The NFL was dragged into the political brawl, however, when the president decried those players who take it upon themselves to kneel during the singing of the national anthem. Said players are relatively small in number, representing only a small percentage of players on the field, but their sign of irreverence has consumed attention. Seething at the idea of players being so disrespectful as to kneel before the image of the flag, Trump imagined an idyllic scenario in which NFL owners (many of whom are white) would toss the “sons of bitches” (of whom most are black) off the field for “disrespecting the flag”.

Immediately interpreted as a racist remark, the media was quick to impute racial animus on him again. I don’t think the president said what he did with a racist edge, but this sort of a conclusion unfortunately lends itself more readily to him and his administration, both of whom have fallen embarrassingly short on issues pertaining to race in the past. More than anything, his statement about NFL players being tossed off the field for their protestations looked to me little more than red-meat for a deeply red state—and a football-crazed one at that.

He finished the night by turning back to topics of old. He covered his lamentation of Hillary Clinton and he touched on Melania’s heels that she’d worn during the hurricane. After that, he had enough fuel in the tank to talk about the ever-evasive border wall and that oh-so pesky issue of healthcare. The one needs building—the other to be broken down. He gloated about the economy and said that he felt like an Alabaman at heart—something of a consanguineous, kindred spirit returned to an adopted Southern home.

But turning the attention from Trump to others, an impracticable task, admittedly, it wasn’t clear if Strange was any better off for having hosted the president. The “Trump bump” didn’t come as anticipated, or at least not as drastically as some in the Strange camp would have hoped.

The Senate has embarked on its latest and, if we can hope to be so lucky, last attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Named uninspiringly the “Graham-Cassidy Healthcare Bill” (it would appear as though, at this point, the senate has been bled of its ability to conceive creative nicknames), it will be Congress’s fourth attempt to both nullify and substitute Obama’s eponymous 2010 healthcare law with something altogether new. Leading the charge and lending their names to this newest bill are Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA). With the help of Senators Dean Heller (R-NV), Ron Johnson (R-WI), and former Pennsylvania Senator and two-time presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, the group is determined to push through with a final thrust a piece of legislation that sticks.

These four horsemen of the senate, with the addition of an alumnus in Santorum, have worked to craft a bill that might prove itself palatable yet. It’s well-known that all foregoing attempts to deconstruct Obamacare have failed. This Graham-Cassidy bill will be the fourth attempted in nearly as many months. It was during the waning days of spring when the House of Representatives first proposed what came to be its ill-fated “American Health Care Act”. After initially being struck down on the floor, it found itself later re-introduced to a more receptive crowd. For its cause, it won enough votes (by the slimmest of margins) and was able to proceed from the House of Representatives to the Senate. There, under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s direction, it was altered in various ways. Large swaths of the House’s proposals were cast aside in favor of improvements thought better of the Senate.

As such, McConnell begot the “Better Care Reconciliation Act” in late June and it was brought to the floor thereafter in July. It failed in a 43-57 vote, a frustrating end to an issue that had become the nation’s summertime cause célèbre—debated from every water cooler to every barbeque grill. Reeling in their lost opportunity, a few Republican senators regrouped to attempt again a last-ditch effort for a legislative win. At month’s end, in late July, senators voted on the slightly modified “Health Care Freedom Act”. This penultimate measure, named “skinny repeal”, for its piece-meal approach, died of emaciation when Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Susan Collins (R-ME), and John McCain (R-AZ) withheld their votes. Pertinaciously, the three Republicans stood against their party line to ensure this bill’s demise. It was during this vote that McCain cast his dramatic, crepuscular thumbs-down that ultimately sent skinny repeal to its grave.

But like an importunate Lazarus, whose resuscitation is less impressive each time he breathes anew, the Senate’s Obamacare-repeal bills won’t die. Republicans are now touting the Graham-Cassidy Bill, which is set to stand for a vote at any moment in time this week. Concisely put, the Graham-Cassidy Bill seeks to dismember the ACA, condense all the federal funds it provided into one pot, reduce the size of said pot, and dole this lump sum of money out to the states. The states would then have the unprecedented discretion to allocate the money to those beneficiaries most deserving or in need.  Relying on the issuance of block grants, the states and not the federal government would begin responding more directly to their own citizens’ healthcare needs.

If implemented, the Graham-Cassidy bill would see the federal government loosen its exclusive license on Medicaid standards and services, which would then be transitioned to the states. Important to note is that Medicare (which is an altogether separate entity from Medicaid—the former dealing less with the indigent and more with the geriatric) would not be immediately affected. In overseeing the distribution of healthcare dollars through Medicaid, the onus would fall squarely upon the states. Unmolested by the bureaucratic strictures of Washington D.C., this would hand to the states the control of healthcare markets they’ve long sought. Now, it becomes theirs and not the federal government’s decisions to set terms for their beneficiaries (or those at the receiving end of Medicaid’s expenditures) and to fund the program affectively.

It would provide states with the ability to opt out of the ACA root and branch, or to keep any number of regulations that they’ve come to find useful. In this way, the Graham-Cassidy bill is amenable to each state’s particular desires. To achieve the best healthcare outcomes at the cheapest prices, such a state could forsake the ACA completely, retain it entirely, or conserve whichever portions best suited to their ends. The theme of the bill was put best and perhaps most sardonically when Vice President Pence said that “If you like your Obamacare insurance, you can keep your Obamacare insurance”. This tongue-in-cheek reference to President Obama’s promise about keeping one’s doctor sums up well that which would be the states’ prerogative under the Graham-Cassidy Bill.

This bill’s potential appeal to local and state governments lies not only in its repeal of Obamacare. More than that, it breathes life into the all-but forgotten idea of federalism, wherein the state has some sense of agency and determination of its fate. Simply, it gives the state the opportunity to choose and removes the compulsion to fall in line.

Given this choice, it’s likely that the politically unpopular but financially essential “individual mandate” of Obamacare would become a thing of the past. As it stands, the ACA mandates that all eligible Americans, or all those uncovered by Medicare or Medicaid, purchase health insurance either within or without the Obamacare marketplace. Resentment and contestation to this aspect of the law was fervid. This, after all, is a country of liberality and of the freedom of choice, not of edict and obedience. Nevertheless, having seen its day in the Supreme Court, the ACA’s legality was upheld under the Commerce Clause—now a blanket resort for any issue. Individual rights enthusiasts and younger, healthy Americans bristled against the mandate and its having been ruled constitutional. After all, the mandate was constructed not for a younger American’s benefit. It was to be his unwitting subsidization of his elderly kin that would keep the program afloat.

The McConnell bill nominally scrapped the individual mandate, but placed in its stead a fine for any person trying to obtain insurance after a six-month coverage lapse. By any other name, this fine amounts to a mandate. Improving on that is the Graham-Cassidy Bill.  The latter dismisses both Obama’s mandate and McConnell’s “fine”, so long as the interested state deems them superfluous. If not, the state could just as quickly impose them. It would become a provincial decision.

To forgo the mandate would be to change the entire process by which insurance companies and, by extension, healthcare providers are compensated for their service. In negotiating with insurance companies, states could allow the insurance companies to charge up to five times more for the coverage of an elderly individual than a younger person. People tend to bristle at the mere idea of this, thinking it predatory, exploitative, or blatantly gerontophobic. They think it an avaricious grab of our elders’ wallets by wealthy healthcare executives, but it’s nothing more than a centuries-old matter dollars and cents. The issue, if one is to think of it as such, ineluctably boils down to risk. Of course, insurance companies must be allowed to charge their older clients higher premiums to account for their policy-holder’s increased risk. A nonagenarian, it’s clear, carries with him far more risk of ill health (and thus a costly hospital tab) than does a twenty-something year-old in the vigor and verve of his youth. In one’s dotage, one pays more than in one’s nonage, and this is the only economically sensible approach. An insurance policy, whether it be for health, flooding, or a vehicle, works in the same way. All are produced from an evaluation of risk. Much like an opulent home built along the beach or a lead-footed motorist driving a Ferrari should expect to pay more because of their heightened risk of damage and injury, the pricing of healthcare should reflect one’s risk. In an open market, those of us more liable to maladies will pay more for protection. Those less prone, will pay less.

The ACA attempted to adjust this calculus so that older individuals could be charged only three times as much as younger people. Possibly, in the future, this may well remain a viable option. As the Graham-Cassidy Bill points out, the state is the ultimate arbiter about the factor of three or five. The state will decide by just how much more grandma will be charged than granddaughter.

These are some of the biggest implications of the Graham-Cassidy Bill. There are others, including a freeze on Medicaid’s reimbursement for Planned Parenthood for at least one year, diminished access to cost-sharing reductions, and new definitions for what counts as an essential health benefit. The bill would also compel states to reconsider implementing high risk pools. Prior to the ACA’s adoption, thirty-five states offered these pools. Their purpose was to group together and subsidize the costly care of chronically sick people beset with various co-morbidities. These pools were unnecessary under the ACA because those who met the “high-risk-pool” criteria were automatically guaranteed health insurance, irrespective of their pre-existing conditions. If pre-existing conditions are no longer covered universally, the high-risk pool will step in to subsidize the inflated premium an insurance company is likely to charge.

The Graham-Cassidy Bill also provides more laxity for health savings accounts. Republicans have long touted this approach as a way to shift the status quo and potentially save a buck in the process. It would transition us from a system heavily reliant on governmental largesse to one that emphasizes individual frugality. In a word, the health savings account is a personal tax-exempt fund that can be allocated specifically for one’s medical care. Essentially, it is an untaxed investment in oneself. The ACA constricted how much an individual could contribute to the account in a given year. The numbers have yet to be released, but the Graham-Cassidy bill will doubtless allow individuals to contribute more to their health savings accounts than did the ACA, a boon for the free market and for the lost concept of personal responsibility.

Succinctly put, under the Graham-Cassidy Bill, states henceforth will be able to decide what they want to do with healthcare within the confines of their borders. Surely reason to cheer for the newfound spirit of self-determination, this comes at a cost; the states will have less money from the federal government to fund Medicaid. In exchange for the old prodigality of the federal government, the states will win their liberty. Unless, like so many before it, this proposed bill doesn’t pass. Then, it’s back to square one.

On Tuesday morning, President Trump stood before an assemblage of members of the United Nations for his first address to that international body politic. Speaking from the UN’s headquarters in Manhattan, Trump addressed the countless dignitaries and heads of state with the patois and the coolness of a local boy—a New Yorker at once comfortable in his own skin, yet temperamental if pushed to be so. He was on his own turf, operating on his own terms, and the confidence of one reared beneath those skyscrapers and lofts was manifest. Most of those foreign ministers, plenipotentiaries, and emissaries seated in his presence waited anxiously, while all of them listened curiously, to hear what this novus homo, this new man on the international political scene might say.

Yet while Trump is indeed a new and unknown entity on this particular stage, the gist of his song remained largely the same. With the world’s eyes and ears upon him, he simply echoed the familiar chorus of what hitherto he’s been known to say. His invectives were recognizable, but in no way were they debased for having been heard once or twice (or thrice) before. He cast his aspersions at the usual suspects. On the receiving end were the likes of Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea. He castigated them for their instability, their wretchedness, and their importunate threats of war and destruction signaled at the West. His tone changed, though, when addressing the problem children Russia and Saudi Arabia. More sympathetic to them, though ignoring the fact that they’re equally baneful in many ways, Trump treated them with kid gloves. He danced around impugning them overtly, when really he probably should.

The speech was received variously across the globe, but dichotomously here at home. This is nothing to be unexpected. His speech (and probably, and sadly, all of his speeches henceforth) split along traditional party lines its critics; it empurpled the left and enraptured the right. To the latter, it was perfectly well-suited to the classic conservative line. Nothing about it, save for its soft treatment of the former USSR, was unorthodox from a Republican’s point of view. To the former, it was something altogether different. Upon hearing and digesting it, Democrats were aghast. In Trump’s words the alarm bells of a fledgling nationalism and isolationism rang. More daunting than that, though, they heard the unsubtle war-drum beat of Trump’s blind aggression and his jingoism. He continued and perhaps even escalated his rhetoric on North Korea, seeming as though his aim at the end of the day is to goad the irascible regime into lashing out and loosening a missile from its sleeve.

As is his wont, Trump began his remarks by flaunting the stock market’s unprecedented rise. It’s a bullish market that we’ve all enjoyed in recent months. To that pat on the back, we’ve become insensitive, but the economic momentum this county has experienced under his leadership is no small thing. So what if he reminds us of it from time to time?

From our economy, he moved on to the military. He celebrated the invigorated prowess of our armed forces and their re-discovered, awe-inspiring might. Implicit in this celebration was a warning to all of those international leaders in attendance who very well might not read lips, but who certainly won’t fail in their translations to read between lines. America’s military is back, the subtle message cried, and she’s not one to be messed with. Usually a doughty message, no doubt, on this occasion it was undercut unfortunately by the fact that within the span of a few months, America’s Navy had witnessed the loss of two of her vessels (the USS Fitzgerald and the USS John S. McCain) in the waters of the far East. The galling fact is that neither the Fitzgerald nor the McCain were engaged in combat drills at the time of their sinking. Without having sustained an assault, they sunk. Investigations into the matter are ongoing, but they their capsizing seems to have been a case rather of negligence than of belligerence.

After assuring the UN members of America’s auspicious state of affairs, the president went on to make two things clear: for one, national sovereignty will be the new American policy as forward we march in this age of Trump. For another, the rogue regimes dotting the globe had better begin looking out and getting their rooms in order. Their destabilizing and insidious activities will be tolerated no more.

This concept of “sovereignty” that Trump expressed struck many like a discordant tune. It’s become an unconventional ideal in this increasingly globalized age. The UN, after all, or at least ostensibly is an organization built on inclusivity, mutual regard, and good will. It champions comity and warm relations above all else. The idea of sovereignty, rightly understood, bristles against that admirable ethos. Sovereignty intimates a sort of “go at it alone” mentality, quite at odds with the founding principles of its creed.

Convening in 1945, the “Four Policeman” (who included FDR of our own great land, Winston Churchill of the British Empire, Maxim Litvinov of the USSR and T.V. Soong of the then as is now ironically named People’s Republic of China) gathered to chart a course in the immediate post-war years. Seeking peace, or at least a breathing spell for war, each man pledged his respective country’s allegiance to a newly conceived alliance that would aim toward the world’s benefit. Within days of their commitment to this end, twenty-five more nations signed on to the initiative as well. As the years passed, still more countries joined the club. Membership in what became the UN accreted until today it boasts one hundred and ninety-three member states. It’s become the world’s largest intergovernmental association—something quite near Immanuel Kant’s precocious concept of an international federation of peace.

Listening to President Trump, however, one might be led to ask just why it is the UN is needed at all? He’s looking ever more inward, as many other nations do the same. Is the UN antiquated, obsolete, an impotent post-bellum remnant of our past?

It’s important here to bear to mind exactly what it is the UN does. Under its aegis, negotiations between countries that might not have otherwise come to the table have been possible and in some cases, lasting and successful. What’s more, by the UN’s doing, numerous cooperative peace projects have had profound effects in war-torn countries from Africa to the Middle East. At the height of its existence and in its glory days, the UN had an immeasurable hand in making poliomyelitis obsolete, in promoting gender equality in benighted states, in combatting HIV and AIDS, and in increasing literacy rates in both children and adults. Are further medical, societal, and financial gains of this type to be squandered under this heading of national sovereignty and with the subtitle that reads “America First”? It’s this that’s provoked many liberals’ disquiet.

New on the international stage, though consistently true to his old form, President Trump laid out before the eager world his worldview. In brief, it reads as follows. America is looking inward, and the world (particularly its less savory actors) would do well to look out. Venezuela’s been put on alert, as President Maduro destroys a nation once prosperous and pregnant with natural resources, history, vivacity, and life. Its Caribbean neighbor, Cuba, will no longer be countenanced in the US and erstwhile trade embargoes will be again imposed. Iran is skating in the arid deserts of Tehran on thin ice, and a resumption of its nuclear deal is unlikely to persist beyond the fall. North Korea is positively begging for war and it already has one foot off the edge of that cliff. Trump made clear to Kim that if he so chooses that path, it will be a long fall to the bottom. The speech was unconventional, but it was positively and expectedly Trump. Bellicose and brazen, frank and sincere, it was his earnest New York weltanschauung in plain view.

How long is one to remain loyal to a lost cause? Having recently released her memoir with the self-searching title What Happened?, Hillary Clinton again importunes the American public for an answer to this question. For the more determined adherents to her cause, loyalty has become something of a synonym for perpetuity. Like a matrimonial affair, it’s become a situation of till death do they part. Among those who feel this way, there’s a sense of the atemporal and unconditional—of never letting go. These are the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed liberals whose laptops and windshields still adorn themselves with “I’m with her” stickers and “H’s” pointing to the right. But one must wonder whether or not even these people considered exactly for how long their “I’m with her’s” needed apply, or whether or not they’re having buyer’s remorse r second thoughts.

Since the release of Clinton’s book earlier this week, the former Secretary of State has emerged from her wooded Chappaqua estate in Westchester County, New York. In what’s become her familiar, automatized form, she’s been making the media rounds. After she was interviewed by USA Today’s Susan Page, Clinton appeared on CBS Sunday Morning, The View, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Rachel Maddow Show, and Anderson Cooper 360, as well as on burgeoning left-leaning “new” media platforms like Vox and Pod Save America. The last of which is a podcast hosted by a former—and at one time, adversarial—coterie of Obama staffers. Then, as if that amount of exposure weren’t enough, Clinton will be embarking on what promises to be a lucrative book tour through the liberal hotspots—coastal cities across America and in Canada. Beginning in September, the tour is planned to run through mid-December, giving to all those breathless loyalists a chance to see her. However, as expected, seeing her is not without its price. From just over $100 in Philadelphia to $2,000 in Toronto for a VIP experience, the opportunity to hear Ms. Clinton speak will set you back.

Prices don’t always connote value, though, and for what the tour’s organizers are charging, those deciding on whether or not they’ll attend might be better off keeping closed their purses and wallets. You can always expect a few things from an address by Ms. Clinton. She is, after all, reliably redundant. You’ll hear the same lamentations, the same recriminations, and the same frustrations over and again. You can expect her to be wonky and punctilious, but there’s nothing inspiring in this. It causes much of what she says, however articulately put and empirically based, to fall habitually flat. There’s nothing of the rousing quality of speech that a man like Obama captured in his oratory so well. Nor is there any of the urgency and passion that a woman like Elizabeth Warren evokes. Simply, and for her sake, regrettably, Clinton’s words are shopworn, tired, over-used, and under-nourished.

With that in mind, Clinton’s patrons might be better off forgoing this expense and skipping the tour altogether. Instead of investing further in this “lost cause” (I can conceive of her in no other way) they should be saving their money and planning for the future. They should not, above all, be re-investing time, money, and energy in the past. The congressional mid-terms are fast approaching, and as such, the Democratic Party’s candidates (particularly those vying for office in “purple” districts and states) will need every dollar they can get. If the Democrats hope to see candidates with political pulses succeed next year, and not continue pushing for the failing specter of 2016, they must refocus their attention away from Ms. Clinton. Instead of propping up and dragging on stage her memory, whose political coffin has been long since sealed, they should spend their dollar in the realm of the living.

But still, there are those among us who are inexplicably besotted with what Clinton has to say. Mainly, to this group belongs those people who will be filling her auditoriums. In brief, and this might just save you a week’s paycheck and an hour’s time, Clinton is blaming everyone else for her presidential loss. She seems to have found catharsis in tossing around this blame, rather than soberly analyzing her shortcomings from within. She’s found various scapegoats, upon whose backs the glass ceiling cumbersomely weighs.

To find them, she’s cast a wide net to catch and crucify those whom she believes most responsible for her loss. Most responsible, and for that very reason, most reviled in Clinton’s opinion is former FBI director James Comey. Clinton and Comey’s relationship, though never convivial, was at the very least one defined by mutual respect. It was Comey who, for all intents and purposes, exonerated Clinton in the summer of 2016 after his department’s investigation into her personal e-mail and her damaged computer servers. Overstepping his professional bounds and meddling in the DOJ’s, it was Comey who said that “no reasonable prosecutor” would raise a criminal case against her. This determination was not his to make.

Later, in the midst of an FBI investigation into former New York congressman and incorrigible pedophile Anthony Weiner’s computer for evidence of his crimes, thousands of his wife Huma Abedin’s undisclosed conversations with Clinton surfaced. A long-time Clinton aide, Abedin’s conversations with her boss should’ve been secured and maintained on a proper government server. Clearly, as I’m sure a surprised FBI discovered, they were not. From what began as an investigation into Weiner’s Lolita complex ended in a greater morass.

It was because of this last revelation on Weiner’s computer, Comey announced eleven days prior to the presidential election that he would re-open his investigation. It was at this point Comey played the inopportune role of the interloper. Arguably, he imposed himself where he didn’t belong in bringing his department’s newest finding to the public’s attention. In the minds of many vacillating voters, Comey sowed just enough doubt to turn he who might’ve been a potential Clinton voter into a foot-dragging advocate for Trump. It’s unclear how many people ultimately shifted their support in the wake of Comey’s remark, but Clinton is convinced that she was “shivved” by the former FBI director. While I might not be so bold as to express it in quite those terms, it’s certain that Comey opened and poured salt into a wound at a decisive time just before ballots were cast. That said, it was far from the dagger in the heart that Clinton believed it to have been.

Clinton’s castigation of James Comey is her strongest and her most validated, yet she also lays blame on a hodgepodge of supporting characters. She speaks with scorn when recounting Bernie Sanders’s role in the primary, who she impugns for having siphoned from her cause would-be supporters on the fringes of the left. Sanders’s piquant, albeit largely quixotic pitch to millennials struck a chord to which Clinton wasn’t properly tuned. An idealist to her realist, Sanders talked about universal health care, “Robbin Hood” taxes, and free college education as feasible goals should he be elected. Finding no such vaulting rhetoric and ambition in Clinton, millennials flocked to Sanders (much the way a small bird did upon the septuagenarian’s shoulder). She called his campaign “profoundly frustrating” because, as Clinton rightly said, Sanders cared little that “his math didn’t add up” and that his plans “had no prayer of passing Congress and becoming law”. Nary a qualm on my part, I couldn’t agree more. This is a sober and mature assessment of Sanders, and one well worth keeping in mind as the Vermont Independent continues his meteoric rise, but it’s also uninspiring. Sure, the winds of impractical promises may have filled and carried Sanders’s sails, even if his ship’s course was set for nonexistent lands, but at least it had momentum. Her campaign was simply adrift in the trite tides of the “same-old” expectations.

Having aspersed both Comey and Sanders in her book, Clinton also took the time to assail Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate whose marginal appeal was never more than that. Most remembered is she for having demanded a recount in multiple Rust Belt states. At the end of the day, Stein received just one percent of the final vote tally, but there are some who think this humble little statistic belies her unaddressed import. It’s now clear that many voters from Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio made the decision to defect from Clinton to Stein. In her book, Clinton calls into question Stein’s sympathies to Russia, by claiming that the Harvard-trained physician attended a dinner hosted by the Kremlin’s propagandistic television network, RT, in 2015. This dinner was the same one infamously and damningly attended by former NSA director Michael Flynn, whom President Trump later fired for his indecorous, though perhaps more aptly put, treasonous relations to Moscow.

Fittingly, this leads to the topic of Russia. It’s on this point that Clinton is perhaps most justified in feeling indignant and as if she’d been made to play with loaded dice. Russia played no small role in what came to be her second and most galling shortcoming in a presidential election. The fact that Russia did not merely attempt to, but so far as we know succeeded in sustaining a social media disinformation campaign the likes of which we’ve not yet seen in the modern age is beyond question. The campaign, crude and insidious though it was, doubtless was effective and Clinton has ample right to be mad about it. Its ultimate aim was to see to her defeat and to this end, Russia’s meddling can’t be overlooked.

There are only so many allowable reasons for a loss. Between James Comey, Russia, Sanders, and Stein (which I’ve taken the opportunity to list in decreasing order of their relevance to her cause), her reasons would appear to have been exhausted. Yet one more facile excuse remains in the barrel. If none of those other scapegoats do the trick, there’s always the crutch of misogyny upon which she can lean. Clinton has continued to blame systemic misogyny as an underlying reason for her loss. She’s wrong to do this. She’s confusing her femininity with her political failures, her X-chromosome with the “X”-factor she so woefully lacked.

I feel a tinge of shame for saying this, and a towering sympathy for those unable to read these words due to a lack of electricity, or a lack internet connectivity, or a lack of both, but I’ve been relatively unscathed in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma. By sheer good fortune, my water—although not yet potable—has returned to my tap. The shower dribbles a slightly musty substance recognizably aqueous. In it I’ve bathed, careful not to let a drop slip through my lips but grateful to have anything at all. A day later, upon flicking on the light switch, the kitchen turned incandescently bright. This wasn’t at all what I expected. At least for four days, flicking that switch had become more of a muscular reflex than an expectation for the lights actually to work. Harnessing the sun, I dropped to my knees beneath those energetic bulbs with a shout of Sol Invictus! and with a word of reverential worship for Edison and his invention.

I’ve been lucky. Each moment in the artificial light reminds me as much. Mine, however, isn’t the happy fate that’s been visited upon vast swaths of my fellow Floridians. At the time of this writing, more than three million “customers” (by which the electric industry refers to them), remain without power in the state. A “customer”, as the electric companies define it, is not a person per se, but a consumptive unit. The consumer behind the designation of “customer” might be a business, a restaurant, a hospital, or a single-family home. You can imagine how a single “customer” could represent just one household, but—by extension—it may very well represent a family of five or a small business of twenty-five. This means that, in reality, an incalculably larger number of people are living and working without power. The Washington Post, for its part, has placed its estimate of those residents without power to be at around twelve million. This figure, if accurate, would account for more than half of Florida’s population.

Efforts to restore power to those in need could take days or they could take weeks. Hopeful of the former, many are beginning to expect the greater likelihood of the latter. The trouble is this: many power lines have become inaccessible in many places. Crucial roads have been rendered unnavigable with detritus and debris (roofs, signs, shrubs, panels, and the like) strewn about them. And if these challenges weren’t enough to the crews of men and women working on the power company’s behalf, flooding remains to be an ever-present issue.

The effects of this storm have been widespread and they’ve been many. Most surprising in its aftermath has been learning exactly which areas of the state were affected and which were spared. Early on, Tampa Bay was expected to be completely destroyed. Climatologists had warned citizens of this and city planners had reconciled them to this preordained truth. The number of evacuees from the city were among the highest in the state. Generally considered America’s most precariously built city, Tampa Bay was expected to be hit with a storm surge that might’ve rendered the town a modern-day Atlantis. Miraculously, it was spared.

If not Tampa Bay, the meteorologists were certain that the Florida Keys would bear the brunt of Irma’s insuperable force. Sadly, they wouldn’t twice be proved wrong.

The Keys are one of Florida’s more unique attractions. Verdant, isolated, and as south as south can be, they make for an alluring archipelago, from whose mount one can almost glimpse Cuba. Yet for all their natural beauty, they are unpropitiously placed. Of the thousands of little islets that compose the Keys, about forty are habitable and every last one is vulnerable. Before Irma made her landfall, the damage at the Keys was expected to be severe and by all measures, it was. It’s impossible for inspectors to report on the damage reliably at this early hour, given that many parts of the island chain remain impassable. That said, they are estimating that twenty-five percent of the homes have been irreparably damaged and equally as many business establishments have been ruined. Worse still, multiple deaths have been reported, marking the only casualties of the storm thus far.

Miami, like Tampa Bay, was expected to absorb the worst of Irma’s wrath. And again, fortuitously like Tampa Bay, Miami was relatively unscathed. South Beach was spared the eye of the storm, but experienced is furious winds. At or just below Miami’s skyline were multiple cranes. For reasons unbeknownst to just about any person watching from home, the cranes were left where they stood in anticipation for the storm. Inevitably, with winds exceeding 150 miles, down they fell, tearing through the buildings next to which they stood. Besides this damage to the city’s infrastructure above the ground, it also suffered damage on it. Irma brought to Miami significant flooding in most parts of the city.

These cities and areas—Tampa Bay, the Keys, and Miami—were doubtless better prepared to face Irma than those in the northern part of the state. Less prepared for her was Jacksonville. Just off of Interstate 95 in Florida’s northeast corner is Jacksonville. It’s the city that first greets you as you transcend that Florida-Georgia line. Situated on the coast, it sits about thirty minutes from the Georgia border above. Coursing through this port city of nearly one million people is the St. Johns River. It’s a massive body of water that meanders some three hundred and fifteen miles south down the state to the Ocala National Forest. At its widest, the river is nearly three miles across.

Already turgid from the summer season’s heavy rains, with Irma’s assistance, the St. Johns River was made to overflow. Not wanting a subsequent hurricane to surpass her efforts, Irma caused the St. Johns to do so in a historic way. Not since 1846 has the city experienced so diluvial an event. As the storm passed through, the river quickly exceeded its banks and flowed into the surrounding areas. Without sufficient rivulets or avenues into which this excess water could flow, it streamed into residential and commercial areas, saturated the grounds, made impregnable the streets, and damaged countless homes.

The four places tell four different tales. Yet it says nothing of my own city’s story. It’s at this point, then, that I turn and reflect upon the place from which I write. Of course, no city nor town can expect to see its way through a category four hurricane completely unscarred, but the damages Naples has absorbed appear—at least at this earliest stage and to my eye—entirely manageable. Granted, I say this after having spoken with countless residents who still are without power, having waited in desperately long lines for groceries, and having given up hope more than once while waiting for fuel in lines that would evoke memories of OPEC-induced shortages. Still, however bleak it might be, the overwhelming sentiment and the recurring caveat I keep hearing is that this storm and the damages could’ve been much worse.