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> It’s judges dropping the ball here by letting high power lawyers steamroll their courtrooms with this nonsense.

See also: [0], sometimes it may not be judges "dropping the ball" but rather playing the ball for their own benefits.

However we spin it, corruption in the US is a larger problem than we like to pretend it is.

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-cr...

We (Americans) have normalized, often explicitly legalized, quite a lot of corrupt behavior in various positions of power.[1] We then look at how comparatively little illegal corruption there is, and the official line is that everything is fine, nothing to see here.

1. Officials failing to accurately provide financial disclosures result in a consequence of having to fill it out again. Members of Congress can legally practice insider trading, and often do. And even when there's no revolving door, post-facto bribes in the form of cushy sinecures are accepted. Money as protected speech. Etc.

I kind of think that everything is pretty much inevitably fucked once it becomes tacitly accepted that all politicians are liars.

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