OK, maybe I was wrong. Maybe there is a “deep state.” And this “state” is indeed quite deep and has been failing miserably. But maybe, just maybe, the final, deepest, part of the deep state will win against the orange tyrant-wannabe.
 So you can start doing your usual foam at the mouth rants, your usual name calling bullying, I’ll tell you who they all are. Maybe you can get the FBI to go after them instead. There are many, which makes the state deep indeed. There are millions. They are the American voters.
 Despite the many years filled with efforts to stop them they still exist: for now. Despite efforts like refusing them the right to vote via throwing them off the rolls because they may be part of some group that tends not to vote for people like you we survived. Despite special enforcement via ID laws, caging… almost 3 million members of this “deep state” rejected you in 2016. Who knows how many actually rejected you because the three states that made you think you were appointed king were heavily gerrymandered, Crosschecked, placebo balloted… uh, “provisional,” and games played with access to voting when it served your peeps to do so.
 The other portions of the true deep state have been failing. Impeachment won’t happen because we no longer live in that marginally more sane time when enough members of both parties can put aside partisanship and rally to the fact the president is a danger to society. These, like the voters, are the true deep state: they were given these powers by the Constitution and our forefathers. I KNOW you don’t like that, just like you hate our allies and love oligarchs, admire dictators who can do what you can’t, and think good people goosestep through our streets chanting “JEW will not replace us,” beat up; even murder protesters by running over those who dare disagree with the king.
 I know you’d also love to take hope away from us. That’s why you constantly lie like “they say we did nothing wrong.” We say just the opposite; which could be characterized by flipping that into the truth: you do nothing right. That’s probably why you had pictures edited to add people to make your inauguration crowd look bigger. True patriots of the true “deep state” like me don’t give a damn how big your whatever is. But we do care about your behavior. We do care about you acting as if we are only slaves at best, or to be murdered in Charlottesville, and the only real Americans worship you like some Germans worshiped their leader in the 30s and 40s.
 I am not holding my breath for 2018. Due to at least a score of years of Democratic Party leadership ignoring, shrugging off, your party’s voter purges, these efforts continue to be perfected and that translates into there may not be enough of us deep staters to tell you at the polls what you need to be told. The representative nature of our society may already have been beheaded by your party’s efforts.
 Hell, we can’t even be sure with black box voting the totals are the true totals of the skewed by caging vote is right.
 But if there’s anything left of the true and only “deep state:” the one designed by Madison, Jefferson and other forefathers, the deep state will win in 2018, and if we must wait: 2020.

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 Inspection is a column that has been written by Ken Carman for over 40 years. Inspection is dedicated to looking at odd angles, under all the rocks, and into the unseen cracks and crevasses, that constitute the issues and philosophical constructs of our day: places few think, or even dare, to venture.
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Ken Carman and Cartenual Productions
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