Investigate, Investigate, Investigate

 Mark Twain said, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."  A variation on that theme might be, "Everybody investigates Trump, but nobody does anything about him."  If Trump was guilty of half the things he has been accused of, he should have been locked up a long time ago.  It makes me wonder if there is some truth to his claim that each of these investigations has been nothing but a witch hunt.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending Trump. What I mean is, maybe he is a witch and deserves to be hunted.  

When I was driving school buses, we had something we called "the lowest common denominator effect".  I talked to a few teachers who observed it in their classrooms as well.  What it means is, the general deportment of the entire group tends to gravitate towards the worst behaved kid in the group.  There are some kids who seem to have a bad influence on the people around them, and I'm not sure that they all do it on purpose.  Sometimes it's obvious, when a kid does something goofy and immediately looks around to see if anybody's watching him.  Other times it's more subtle.

There was a high school kid who had been in serious trouble with the law, something about drugs.  One of the conditions of his parole was that he attend school regularly.  Funny, I thought that paroled druggies were usually forbidden to come within 500 feet of a school building.  I don't think this kid ever attended school regularly, but they never did come and take him away.  Indeed, he eventually graduated, to the surprise of most of us.  Maybe that was the only feasible way they had of getting rid of him.  The kid moved around a lot, and he rode intermittently on several busses that I was driving over the years.  Every time he rode one of my busses, we had a bad day, with kids acting up and getting all goofy.  I was never able to catch the kid himself doing anything, but the whole ambiance of the bus went down like a submarine as soon as he stepped abord.  Either he was really good at not getting caught, or he just exuded some kind of malevolent aura that made other people go nuts.