I was reading a couple of seriously right wing sites this week. Of course I read them. You have to read everything if you want to have some realistic idea of what’s going on in the world we inhabit. Bizarrely enough, I find all these sites still bitching about the state of the state; maybe even more then they ever did. There is just as much bitching and whining as there is on progressive sites; maybe more. And I wonder why? Didn’t they get what they wanted when Trump was elected?
I mean, they got their wish? They got the Fat Liar in the White House? These people voted for a criminal, a con man and a moral degenerate just so someone who was not already a politician would get in the White House and do things differently. Well, he is absolutely doing things differently – than any President that came before him. Maybe more like a dictator than the President of a Democracy, but absolutely differently. So what’s the problem?
Maybe the problem is that different isn’t always better. If you look back over the last eighteen years you’ll see a drastic degeneration in this nation and almost all of it is due to GOP leadership. And it still hasn’t changed with Trump.
Sure there was eight years in that period when Barak Obama led the country but outside the first two of that eight, he had a GOP congress. In those first two years, Obama got a lot done. He saved the nation from the worst depression since 1929 and he passed the ACA, an imperfect version of health care that had to be imperfect in order to get it past all the naysayers. In saving the nation from George Bush’s depression he saved the auto industry and put the nation back on an employment track that grew each year and has continued that growth into the Trump years.
Sure, Trump loves to brag about all his surging employment figures but the reality is that they are just a continuation of what Obama set in motion. After Obama’s first two years the GOP sold the electorate on the idea that Obamacare was bad for the country. They were able to convince a lot of the same dumb assholes that later voted for Trump, to vote their people into the House and Senate, thereby putting an end to anything productive that Obama wanted to do. So the last six years of the Obama Presidency were pretty much a waste of time. But at least he didn’t destroy the good work that had been done by former Presidents, a course of action that seems to be the only thing that the Fat Liar in the White House has any talent for.
So how about the other ten years? Well, Bush had the first eight. Bush was an interesting character. A charming guy everyone wanted to have a beer with, which was about the limit of his capabilities. He was dumb as a post and lazy as a slug and he turned the thinking and decision making for his Presidency over to Dick Cheney, one of the most evil men ever to walk the halls of the White House. Of course they did have a little bad luck when Osama bin Laden flew two planes into the World Trade Center and killed thousands.
But Cheney didn’t see it as bad luck. He saw it as an opportunity. Did we go after Saudi Arabia where most of the terrorists had come from? Of course not! The Bush family was in the oil business there. They protected the Saudi oil people, ignored the fact that most of those who had attacked the World Trade Center were Saudis and led by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Pearlman, Woolsey and a coterie of idiot warmongers they invaded a country that hadn’t had anything to do with 911 but that did have more oil, Iraq.
So we all know how well that went. It would have been a disaster even if it hadn’t led to the birth of ISIS, which it did. All of which meant that up to the inauguration of Barak Obama, George W. Bush was the worst president in the history of the nation. His laziness and stupidity had done more to damage the United States than anything since the Civil War. When Bush left the White House, Americans sat back took a deep breath and figured that we were okay for another century or so.
But the GOP still wasn’t out of dumb moves. They seethed about having a black president, fumed about regulations set up to keep our functioning yet super greedy business community from making billions instead of trillions each year and out of an enormous field of candidates, some of whom had to be, at least semi-competent; they chose a racist, misogynistic, criminal, con man to be their standard bearer against the seemingly unbeatable Hillary Clinton.
Clinton was so sure of herself that she barely bothered to campaign and therefore, even though she won the most votes, but not the most important votes in our non-functioning electoral system, we ended up with a criminal in the White House.
Even at this juncture there were some of us who thought all was not lost. After all there were still the House and the Senate with the ability to control the more degenerate impulses of a Trump administration.
Unfortunately we were wrong. Once again we had overlooked the propensity of the GOP to act in the best interests of themselves instead of the best interests of the nation. Desperate to hold onto their jobs and oblivious to any thought of what was best for the nation, the GOP left an ignorant, egotistical, maniac alone to act on his worst instincts.
The two men who could have controlled Trump, simply because they had the leadership of the House and Senate, abdicated their responsibility and did nothing. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk. Ryan finally fled and McConnell buckled under and became Trump’s bootlicker.
In the meantime Trump, without any governmental experience and too lazy or too stupid to learn the basics, has left us with 10% of the government we need to run the most powerful nation in the world. Thousands of government jobs have remained unfilled, simply because neither Trump not his sycophants have any idea what the requirements of those jobs are or who has the ability to fill them. The positions that have been filled, have been assigned to people whose only qualifications are knowing how to suck up to Trump.
The GOP cabinet is made up of a coterie of dunces who have proven to be either criminally bent or intellectually bankrupt. Fossil fuel lobbyists have been put in charge of the environment and an intellectual deficient has taken over our national education. We have a woman in charge of Homeland Security, who doesn’t know where our borders are or what’s going on along them. And then there are the bad ones.
But destroying America hasn’t been enough for the ignorant liar who currently resides in the White House. Because in his small mind, ego is substituted for intelligence, he has decided that he knows how to run the whole world and between days spent at his golf clubs and nights watching Fox news and sending out misspelled Tweets he has been incredibly busy trying to screw up a world that has existed for the last seventy or so years without a major war.
Trump, in only two years, has turned over pacific trade to China by pulling us out of the TPP, has abandoned trade with Canada and Mexico by imposing tariffs that can’t possibly work, has weakened the NATO alliance that has been the major obstacle to Russia in their troublemaking in Eastern Europe and has endangered the Iran treaty by pulling us out. He has insulted our allies and praised any number of dictators and has bragged about an utterly failed series of nuclear meetings with North Korea.
In only two years Trump has already surpassed Bush as the worst President in history and he still has two more years to go. It’s a complete wipeout and it lays clearly at the feet of the GOP, the Party that allowed him to be nominated and then pushed him into the White House; the Party that with numerous chances to control his worst instincts has allowed him free reign to plunder the constitution, deal with our enemies, fill his administration with thieves and criminals and set himself for a retirement with billions to live on.
In the meantime millions go without adequate health care, more are working at jobs that do not pay a sustainable wage and education is so expensive that millions more start adult life with a burden of debt they will never overcome. All this while the debt and deficit, the control of which is supposed to be the forte of the GOP, is completely out of control and threatens to crash the economy.
But most of all, it’s because of the fact that the GOP has promoted and defended a government completely without moral values, completely devoid of any concept of fairness or empathy, one that holds any normal human value in contempt; that we accuse it of endangering everything for which America stands. If the Republican Party is allowed to continue down this path they will destroy the nation in less than another decade.
They are currently fighting against universal healthcare, renewable energy, sensible gun control and viable infrastructure reform, the four platforms that could save the nation and bring it successfully into the next century, simply because they think it will cost their leaders money. It won’t, and if they don’t come to that realization they will be destroyed in 2020 and they will have had it coming.
*****
The curmudgeon will not be published for the next two weeks. Thanks for being loyal readers and I’ll be seeing you in mid-April