There is a great scene from season 9 episode 19 of Seinfeld (The Maid) where Kramer finds himself abandoned in unfamiliar “downtown” and calls Jerry for help:

Jerry: Well, what street are you on?

Kramer: Hey, I’m on 1st and 1st. How can the same street intersect with itself? I must be at the nexus of the universe.

Funny stuff when it is just a silly sitcom misunderstanding…not so much when two forms of the same powerful force happen to intersect paths. Namely: Modern Progressive Anti-Intellectualism and our current brand of Highly Refined Political Corruption. That happened this week as seen in, what on the surface may appear to be, two separate storylines: the latest indictment of Donald Trump and the clarifying revelations that Joe Biden and his family crime enterprise accepted a $10 million bribe while he was a sitting president of the United States.

As for the latter part of that equation, it appears to a simpleton like me that the $10 million was the agreed to kickback to the VP for releasing $1 billion of OUR money in aid to Ukraine. As it turns out, FJB found it convenient to attach some additional strings:

As a quick side note: If you think that there was only one “kickback” to our beltway pols factored into the deal then you just aren’t paying attention. I imagine that a scale that funnels a cool $10 mil to a VP must include at least $5 mil to the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader. I’ll let you fill in the rest of the payment schedule. At this point it is up to them to prove us wrong.

CSPAN documents Biden bragging about it to great media silence in January 2018. (By the way, what are odd that the FBI didn’t know about the entire operation long before January 20, 2017?) This only became a major news topic a year and a half later with then President Trump’s “perfect phone call” in which some insisted on seeing fault because any suggestion of an investigation of the sort discussed into criminal activity and corruption would “interfere with a U.S. presidential election.” In fact, after an un-authorized mis-use of funds (and a clear abuse of power…again to great media silence), Pelosi’s House of Representative codified it:

Using the powers of his high office, President Trump solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, in the 2020 United States Presidential election. He did so through a scheme or course of conduct that included soliciting the Government of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations that would benefit his reelection, harm the election prospects of a political opponent, and influence the 2020 United States Presidential election to his advantage. President Trump also sought to pressure the Government of Ukraine to take these steps by conditioning official United States Government acts of significant value to Ukraine on its public announcement of the investigations. President Trump engaged in this scheme or course of conduct for corrupt purposes in pursuit of personal political benefit. In so doing, President Trump used the powers of the Presidency in a manner that compromised the national security of the United States and undermined the integrity of the United States democratic process. He thus ignored and injured the interests of the Nation.

Unless you insist on the obtuse reading that it was the “foreign” part of the interference that really hurt Nancy’s benevolent ruling sensibilities, I think it is clear that lawfare actions by a president against his (potential) political rival in an upcoming election are frowned upon by the House of Representatives. (Even, it seems in the Biden case above, when the evidence of criminality and corruption are as plain as the nose on your face. But I digress.) I posit an alternative reading: I think Trump’s call threatened to muck up the well established, wide spread kickback pipeline that was enriching many in the beltway. (No doubt, it was a bipartisan pipeline. But I digress.) This would go a long way to explaining why Pelosi rushed to the podium in late September of 2019 to initiate her unauthorized impeachment inquiry.

So, considering the intellectual consistency that governs the modern media presentation of daily pseudo-events, I’m sure you are seeing many reports this weekend about the impeachable acts committed by FJB and his weaponized Executive Branch agencies to interfere with the 2024 presidential election. I will remind you here to take it all with a grain of salt. We are currently passing through this strange intersection in the intellectually un-serious universe of Progressive post-Republic America. But I will also warn that crossroads like this, while temporary, will become more frequent as we wade deeper into the abyss: 2024 looms large.