I was registering on Trump’s antics in the White House yesterday and I started thinking back a couple of years to when we had, despite his weaknesses, a rational gentleman in the White House. Then I went back five or six administrations and looked at how they had advanced or detracted from the American dream. It was pretty scary.
As far back as Ronald Reagan there has only been one president that has left this country in good financial shape. Bill Clinton left the country with a financial surplus, no other president has ever done this. Every other president has left us with a deficit and sometimes a staggering one.
That realization left me looking at the significant achievements of each of the presidents from Reagan to the present. For Ronnie it was undoubtedly the Iran-Contra affair. Sure serious Reaganites will point to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union as Reagan’s biggest accomplishments but conservative pundits belief’s to the contrary, Reagan had about as much to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union as did my then ten-year-old son. Communism collapsed because it is an unworkable economic system. Television pushed it over the brink. The people of the communist world were starving to death. But for the first time n the history of man they were able, because of TV, to see that the rest of the world was not in the same fix as them. Don’t believe me? Take a look at a parallel universe, North Korea. The people of North Korea are starving, their children are going without medical care and as individuals they have no future, all so Kim can protect his position by spending every penny on a nuclear arsenal. But those people don’t know why this is. They have no information, no contact with the outside world. Put a couple of TVs in their possession and they will tear Kim to pieces, just like the people of the Soviet Union dropped their communist masters as soon as they realized that there was another world out there. It was as simple as that. The Soviet system, lacking in motivation, bereft of any kind of entrepreneurship, was killing itself while the rest of the world was flourishing. Reagan had nothing to do with that, he just benefited from the timing.
Iran-Contra, on the other hand, was a direct result of a presidential decision carried out by loyal military aides like Ollie North. This was basically a criminal operation that led to the booming of the drug traffic in this country. It was one of the most damaging operations ever instituted by an administration in this country indirectly leading to millions of cases of drug addiction all over the United States.
Reagan was followed by George H.W. Bush who spent an uneventful four years, with some insignificant tax legislation as his only accomplishment.
Bill Clinton; possibly the most functional politician of the group followed Bush. He is the only one who has left the country better off fiscally than he found it. He would have been hailed to the skies if he’d found a way to keep his dick in his pants but he was an inveterate womanizer and that led to his lower than they should have been ratings as president.
Clinton was followed by George W. Bush, still despite strong attempts by Trump, the worst president in United States history. Trump is floundering around trying to do everything wrong while Bush was able to achieve that goal almost without trying. He wasn’t a sociopathic liar like Trump but he did just about everything else wrong. He started out by lying about WMD’s in order to get us into a needless war with Iraq. Then he let his unholy trio of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Libby attack Valerie Plame, a heroic CIA agent and wife of former Ambassador to Niger, Joe Wilson, because Wilson wrote a magazine piece exposing the truth about the fact that there were no WMDs in Iraq. This led to the government forcing Plame into retirement and the abandoning of agents and resources in eight countries that had been connected to her. Many were killed as a result of this malfeasance.
Libby was later convicted of revealing Palme’s classified status and sentenced to two and a half years in the can but Bush pardoned him. Libby should have been drawn and quartered. But Bush wasn’t finished. He began cutting regulations on business and banking and this quickly led to the second biggest economic crash in the history of the nation. He finally left office in complete disgrace.
Bush was followed by Barak Obama; who quickly jumped into the void, passing, after years of talk, a viable but controversial healthcare law. He followed that with legislation that bailed out the floundering auto industry and hundreds of thousands of jobs. He followed that with more legislation that helped save Mid-Western manufacturing. Then he lost congress and for the last six years of his administration nothing much happened. He never really learned to play the politics game in Washington so in the end he was a disappointment. He was, however, like George HW Bush a laudable roll model as a President.
Now we have Trump, a blundering, psychotic, serial liar who is a disgrace to any job he would ever hold, let alone that of President f the United States. He’s a racist, a misogynist, a bigot and easily the greatest embarrassment this country has ever had in the White House. If he is allowed to continue in office, he will easily outstrip Bush as the worst in history. All he is lacking now is a major catastrophe like Bush’s war or his financial crash.
So of our last six presidents, four Republican and two Democrat we have one ineffectual gentleman, George H.W. Bush, an ineffectual gentleman, Ronald Reagan, a semi-senile ex-actor with the wrong moral values, Bill Clinton, a functional politician with no self control, George W. Bush, an absolutely dumb clown with a great personality and no idea what he was dong, and Barak Obama, an absolute gentleman with good ideas but little notion of how to execute them in the political arena. Now we have Donald Trump, an egomaniacal sociopath, one step from an institution. If I’m an Independent and I am, I have to look for a Democrat as our next president but only if a lazy, indolent Democratic Party manages to come up with some functional plan by which to run this country. So far I haven’t seen even a hint of one.
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This blog carried a story a while back in which I called Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos an idiot. A lot of people thought that I was unkind in my description but this week in an interview with Leslie Stahl, Ms. DeVos was kind enough to prove my point. I had thought that saying we needed guns in schools to protect the children from grizzlies was about as dumb a comment as I had ever heard from something standing upright, but in answer, or rather in her inability to cogently answer any of Stahl’s questions DeVos proved my original point and went me one better. This woman, whose job is the result of political palimony is staggeringly ill equipped to do anything but sweep floors. She had no facts about her own state’s school situation, and seemingly had done nothing to get any. In a real world, not the current one of reality TV she would have been out on her ass yesterday.
But she’s not the only one. White House chief of Staff John Kelly had to bring the clown show we call a cabinet together last week and instruct them about acting like government employees instead of greedy plunderers. Under discussion were expenditures by various cabinet member like Ben Carson who shelled out $31,000 of your tax money for a dining rom set, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke who spent $139,000 for —wait for it—office doors. (Must be Trump Gold) Veteran’s Affairs Secretary David Shulkin took his wife to Europe on a vacation he listed as government business while we have already lost Scott Pruitt over his penchant for flying in private jets and charging it to us. Trump ran on the policy of draining the swamp. It looks like he’s done that and put all the snakes in the Cabinet
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The revolving door at the White House is now spinning out of control. The big problem? Trump’s “yes men” aren’t saying, “yes” loud enough or often enough to keep the Liar-in-chief happy. This is a President who stocked his original cabinet with the most incompetent bunch of ass kissers ever to stain the steps of the capital. Remember the infamous meeting when each of them sat around a table and told him how great he was?
Trump appointed each and every one because they were slime that would follow his lead into any toilet. A large number of them are already gone, replaced with more idiots with their lips attached to Trump’s rear. Now he finds that the replacements won’t toe his dictatorial line closely enough to cover his lies and he’s looking for people who are more attuned to kissing ass than even the bunch of shameless incompetents he now has in office.
It seems that Generals Kelly and McMasters are leading the line to the door. I guess Trump’s love of generals went south when he found out they got to be generals by having minds of their own. Trump doesn’t want anyone around him that thinks for himself. He only has time for those who nod their heads and wag their tails when he vomits out another of his lies.
It’s important to remember that cabinets, because presidents, appoint them, are often filled with “yes men,” but in most former cases they were “yes men” with experience and functionality. This has, unfortunately, not been the case in Trump’s appointments. When you have appointed a cabinet filled with the likes of Rick Perry, Betsy DeVos, Scott Pruitt, Steve Mnuchin and most of the others, you are cutting off your own balls. This scandalous accumulation of blundering idiots, make the Gong Show look like an intellectual construction. It leaves the country with a universally uninformed President being assisted by a gaggle of functionally deprived cabinet members. We are in deep shit!