Last last week, Politicus USA reported, Maine Lawmakers Move to Impeach Republican Governor Paul LePage. It sounds serious, “Governor LePage is accused of blackmailing the Good Will-Hinckley School board by threatening to withhold half a million dollars in funding if they extended a job offer to Democratic House Speaker Mike Eves.” It’s really petty nonsense, so exactly what you would expect from Paul LePage. But what’s most important is that LePage is not popular in his state. He’s been twice elected president because (1) there have been three way races; and (2) they are off year elections when not many Democrats go out to the polls. In 2010, LePage got less than 38% of the votes cast; he did much better in 2014, but still only got 48% of the votes.

What’s more, whenever the people of Maine are asked, they don’t like the job that he’s doing. So sure: impeach him. Throw him out of office! And then what? He’ll just run again and the voters of Maine will re-elect him. Who knows? He might get a full majority in a new election. Clearly, Maine has a screwed up system. But it is hardly unique. I’ve written before about the tendency for blue and swing states to regret their recent governors — and even red states. It doesn’t seem to matter. On the day of the election, it’s a matter that “they’re all the same,” and then a couple months later, it is “I never imagined they’d do that!”

I’d love to see LePage impeached. God knows he deserves it. But ultimately, the people have to take responsibility. What LePage is doing — which he doesn’t deny — is entirely in keeping with what he’s done before. No one can reasonably claim that they are shocked by him. I suspect that the world gets rid of LePage the way that it got rid of Rob Ford. First LePage has to be caught on video tape using an illegal substance. Then his behavior has to get so bad that he checks himself into rehab. But note: Rob Ford may not be mayor, but he’s still on the city council. So maybe there is no way of getting rid of Paul LePage.

This, my friends, is how empires fall. We really do live in a post-truth world. Nothing matters — most of all policy. And on that count, I don’t really blame voters. For a good forty years now, they have watched as they have elected conservatives and “liberals” and nothing especially changes. Yes, things get modestly better under the Democratic Party than under the Republican Party. But it is easy enough to consider that a coincidence. And I really think we are at the point where most of what we once called the middle class look at the increased pain with a sense of schadenfreude — as though the pain of others makes up for their own pain.

So go ahead, Maine: impeach Paul LePage. But even if he is expunged from the good graces of the body politic, the blight he represents will go on. We will still live in a society that doesn’t think things can get better. We live with a system that makes voting difficult, and privileges the rich and the old — just incidentally the base of the conservative movement. We live with media that sees politics as a game devoid of meaning. It would take a kind of revolution of thought for the people to push back against that. I still hope. But I would find it shocking if it ever occurred.

Jim Naureckas at FAIR made a great catch, George Will Won’t Throw Out a Perfectly Good Column Just Because Its Premise Is Completely Wrong. Apparently, George Will publishes his columns first in Investor’s Business Daily and only later do they appear in The Washington Post. In between these publication, someone at The Washington Post actually fact checks the article. Because Will made a huge mistake: he thought that the decision in King v Burwell was based on the so-called Chevron deference.

This is based upon the case Chevron USA, Inc v Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. In that case, the Court decided that when a statute is ambiguous, deference should be given to the reading of the executive agency. Before the King v Burwell decision arrived, a lot of people speculated that the Court might find against the plaintiffs using Chevron deference. But after the case came out, it was widely reported that Roberts specifically did not use Chevron deference. This was a big deal because it made the case all that more stronger a decision for the government because it meant that a future Republican president couldn’t just decide not to offer the subsidies to people buying insurance on the federal exchanges.

Somehow, George Will missed this. Like I said: it was widely reported — so widely that I knew about it and when I started reading Naureckas’ article, I thought, “But this case wasn’t based on Chevron!” I soon learned that was the whole point. But the fact that George Will missed it is probably an indication how cut off he is from normal news. The conservative media were too focused on how the decision was the very end of freedom in America. Just look at Will’s overblown headline, “On Obamacare, John Roberts helps overthrow the Constitution.” But it’s so much worse than just being wrong.

In his first draft, George Will wrote, “Rolling up the sleeves of his black robe and buckling down to the business of redrafting the ACA, Roberts cites a doctrine known as ‘Chevron deference.'” By the time the editors at The Washington Post got done with it, it read, “Rolling up the sleeves of his black robe and buckling down to the business of redrafting the ACA, Roberts invents a corollary to ‘Chevron deference.'” And it goes on from there. Rather than just replacing the three paragraphs about the Chevron deference — just 160 words — he made minor edits to keep it there, even though it isn’t central to what is, after all, just a rant.

I understand this. After you write an article, it is really hard to delete it, even if it turns out to be based upon a misapprehension. But I suspect that it just doesn’t matter to George Will. Here is the critical paragraph — the one where he makes his central point:

What you will notice there is that it is not falsifiable. “Progressivism” is some monster that he’s conjured; it isn’t a thing and and it doesn’t have a “central objective.” The claim that the separation of powers was meant to stop progressive action is just one of those conservative canards that people like George Will “know” to be true without evidence. So what would be the point of giving up the Chevron deference section? It’s just words. The point is that George Will is really really unhappy with John Roberts and he wants us all to know that freedom is dead.

You know how Republicans are always going on about lazy welfare recipients and hammocks and making out how destroying the social safety net would be the best thing for the poor? That’s just what they talk about so that their vile policies sound reasonable. Most of the poor work. And this is getting more true every day. Everyone knows about all the public assistance that gets given to Walmart employees because they are paid so badly. These are the working poor and they are who you should think of when you think of “welfare” — not Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen.”

I recently had a conversation about welfare with a conservative and he told me that the problem with it was that people just live on it their whole lives. “How what that?” I asked. Had he not heard of how we ended welfare as we knew it in the 1990s? Did he not know that there are extreme lifetime limits on welfare? It doesn’t matter how much we as a society do to harm the poor, people continue to think that it is 1970 and we are in the middle of the Great Society. This is how Republicans continue to win elections. They just keep making the same arguments, even though things have utterly changed.

It isn’t just me saying this. Last week I read, Most of America’s Poor Have Jobs, Study Finds. A study by “sociologists at BYU, Cornell and LSU” looked rigorously at the data and found that, “The majority of the United States’ poor aren’t sitting on street corners. They’re employed at low-paying jobs, struggling to support themselves and a family.” It isn’t surprising. What else are these people going to do?

The truly sad thing about all this is that the whole idea of “welfare reform” was if you could just get people working, then they would be able to climb out of poverty. But of course, they don’t. That’s because we’ve allowed our country to become the New Feudalism. We have an economic system that is set up to over-reward the winners. And a big part of this is taking tax revenues — that get more regressive all the time — and use it to allow companies like Walmart to pay far less than the market rate for employees. There are plenty of other ways this is done. But it is important to remember that when the government gives food stamps to a Walmart employee, what’s actually going on is the government is giving money to Walmart by allowing it to pay people less than a living wage. This is welfare for the billionaire Walton family.

At the same time that we have an incredibly unjust economic system, we have a social system that is devoted to the idea that we have a perfectly just economic system. Thus, we lionize the rich — even though very few of them even earned their wealth and those who did have no special abilities outside their own professions. And far worse, we scapegoat the poor. It’s bad enough being poor, but we blame the poor for their poverty and then blame them for much that is wrong with the society.

So stop and think the next time you hear someone like Paul Ryan say, “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into complacency and dependence.” Remember: most of the people depending upon the safety net are not lying in a hammock; they are working the swing shift at Walmart.