So help me whatever.

There was a time when the underside of the bus was routinely occupied by Fox, Drudge, Breitbart, and their fellow carrion-feeders. Nowadays they’re joined by every print journalist and broadcaster who dares to report anything that runs counter to our opinion of the moment. A slightly positive story about a candidate is immediately and angrily labeled part of a conspiracy against our favorite, and a discussion of facts and figures from the historical record is vilified, assumed out of hand to be nothing but cherry-picked lies. There is now no member of the media - print, broadcast or cyber - whose clothing is unstained by the motor oil that coats the bus’s undercarriage.

Meanwhile, we have become an eruptive collection of lie-detector experts, each with our own special distillation of truth serum. We turn on each other, now, with an automatic venom that used to be reserved for the corruptive influences that really do seek to defile our present and our future. We are self-declared fastidious historians driven by absolute altruism, dedicated to nothing less than the pure exposition of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help us whatever; we can't risk that purity by listening to anyone, not even those who've always walked beside us. Because of that we are becoming increasingly isolated, necessarily separated from our former camaraderie because, in the end, only one of us can be right. And we all know who that isn’t, don’t we? It sure as heck ain't me.

Okay, I’ll go back under the bus now.