All the GOP candidates that are leading the field are now non-politicians who have good communication skills. Maybe that doesn’t include Ben Carson who isn’t a politician and isn’t very communicative, but it is certainly true of Trump, or Carly Fiorina who has nothing to sell but said communication skills, and of Ted Cruz, who although a member of congress comes at the world as an outsider. But the trouble with all these communication skills is that they are being used as a substitute for a plan of governance and certainly, in Trump’s case, they allow that candidate to appeal to voters sentiments and prejudices rather than their intelligence.
These communicators know that their strengths are to rouse their followers, to demagogue to the heavens that they are angry about the things that anger their followers. So far none of these communicators have communicated any ideas about what to do about these problems. They all see the problems and know how to whine about them, but none of them, especially Trump and Fiorina have come up with any sensible ideas on how to solve them.
Fiorina tells us that because she ran a business into the ground, she is the one we should elect. Why? Trump finally gives us a plan to deal with immigration problem that has put him on top of the polls and it’s so ridiculous that even the people who agree with his stance tell us that it would never work. Carson may have learned brain surgery but he never learned geography, which is probably a hell of a lot more important for a president than being able to crack open a skull. None of these people, popular or unpopular as they are, have a clue as to how to solve any of the problems they are shouting about.
Commentators all over the country are ascribing Trump’s and Carson’s popularity to the fact that Republicans in particular and people in general are disgusted with the leadership in both houses of our Republican congress, and are looking for someone who is not one of the good old do nothing boys.
Sure they are. But who the hell put these clowns in office? For years writers who are not members of the Republican Party have been crying to the heavens that the Republican politicians are not looking to help all the people but only the rich who throw them a few bucks every year to keep them happy and panting at their heels.
For years columns like this have said that the agenda of the Right is not to make this a healthy and prosperous country but to make the rich richer and the powerful more controlling. The political agenda of the GOP has not been to help the middle class or the poor, it has not been to clean the environment or rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. It hasn’t been interested in educating our kids or worried about their health care. The agenda of the Right has been to help the billionaires get another yacht. And the Republican poor and middle class still vote for them.
Now, all of a sudden, the poor fools who have been voting for useless clowns like Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, John Boehner, Steve Scalise, Mike Pence, Ara Hutchenson, Butch Otter, Kelly Ayotte, Daryl Issa, Tom Cotton, Joni Ernst, Lindsay Graham, James Inhofe, Mitch McConnell, Jeff Sessions and many others, are finally discovering that they are getting screwed and they’re mad as hell. Big surprise! And that large list above represents only a small sample of the scum who have tried their best to ruin a perfectly good country for the benefit of those who buy and sell them.
How did this bunch of stiffs get in office? The same pathetic dolts who are now whining about their sad lot in life and applauding a bigoted bully like Donald Trump voted them in. Why? Because those phony lying pols promised them not those things that would make their states or this country a greater place to live, but those things that appealed to their own personal bigotry, their religious prejudices and their own greed. So when some asshole like Mitch McConnell said, I’ll get that black guy out of the White House, they voted for him. They didn’t ask how. They didn’t ask what McConnell’s other policies were. They didn’t ask if he was going to shut down the government to get his way. They just saw the goal of their own prejudice.
According to a poll this week 66% of Trump voters think that Barak Obama s a Muslim, not a Christian, 61% of them think he is foreign born and 63% want to change the Constitution to end birthright citizenship. That is nothing but brute stupidity. People with those kinds of opinions are too dumb to breathe.
Every one of the names above has promised their constituents something that they wanted, but was bad for the country. Sometimes it was just a small thing like changing the abortion rules to make it more difficult, but many times it was very big, big enough to upset the way the country functions, like how to handle immigration.
When John Hoeven of North Dakota, tried to push the Keystone Pipeline through congress on the promises of more jobs, and more American energy, he never told his constituents that the jobs would number a miniscule 35, that the oil was Canadian and going to China so there would be almost no benefit to this country or that this was the most poisonous sludge that man had ever mucked out of the earth. He never mentioned that the burning of this oil would poison the atmosphere; push up the cataclysmic timetable for climate change and cause breathing and lung disease for hundreds of thousand of our children. And, oh yeah, he never mentioned that he was in the pocket of big oil or that he wouldn’t care when the pipeline, as they all will, would spring a leak, that will poison the largest aquifer in America.
Now the people who voted him in, because either they didn’t pay attention to what a sleaze he is, or they thought they were going to get something for nothing and didn’t, are pissed to the hilt and looking to an even sleazier bully like Donald Trump to save their sorry asses. This, of course, is how they got the garbage that infects the houses of congress now. These same voters that are deifying Trump are still too stupid to listen to all the candidates and find one, even if he or she isn’t a Republican, that answers their needs as citizens and the country’s need to serve them.
That’s why when it’s all over, we’ll still have a bunch of stiffs in congress that can’t get out of their own way and who will be able, no matter who is president, to continue to screw up the country for the rest of us.