Watched Texas Rep. Tony Gonzalez on This Week. It’s interesting how a guy who appears to be honest and straight forward can be so wrong about so much. George Stephanopoulos asks him two very relevant questions. “How can you endorse a person for President, when you disagree on how he acted on 1/6,” and “how do you endorse him when he refers to the people you call domestic terrorists, as heroes?”
You can see that Gonzales has no answers to these questions. You can see he knows George has him by the short hairs, but like most politicians, and pretty much all Republicans he won’t admit, even to himself, where the truth lies.
I didn’t choose Gonzales today because I think he’s important, but because he represents, not the people of Texas but a tightly packed, contentious group of GOP congressmen who know the truth but find it inconvenient to admit it, even to themselves. They have decided that Donald Trump, right or wrong, is their best chance to hold onto their well-paying jobs, and their constituents be damned. Gonzales knows that Trump was a disaster for the immigration problems faced by our nation, and he may even care about it, but not enough to put his job on the line by going against a lying Trump. If you watched the interview, you know I’m right. And you know that Tony has got to avoid poker games at all cost.
*****
In the last week we have been treated to the spectacle of two presidential candidates being interviewed on the same program when Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis went head-to-head in a kind of town hall setting in which each was allowed to make a presentation and was then questioned by members of the audience. No, it wasn’t as boring as it sounds, because it revealed far more about each candidate than the occasional question each would have received during a standard debate. What the candidates did, I think, was reveal far more about themselves than they wanted.
DeSantis seems to think he has been a lot more successful as governor of Florida then the facts show.
The truth is that he is governor of a state with the worst insurance record in the nation. The people of Florida just can’ get good health insurance even at usurious prices. Even worse, they can’t get home insurance at all. The weather in Florida isn’t DeSantis fault, but it is his job as governor to work with the insurance industry to entice insurance companies in large enough numbers to be competitive in his state. He has also failed miserably in managing a much-needed immigrant work force trying to enter a labor market desperate for help. Maybe worst of all he has turned a state that has been victimized by school and other mass shootings, into an armed camp, with almost zero control of guns, who has them, and who can carry them.
Haley, on the other hand allowed her questioners to back her into a dead-end corner on her inability to condemn Trump, who she claims to be running against, but also claims to be supporting as the right man at the right-time. Of course, she never has a grip on when the right- time might have been. It’s clear that Haley wants to be Trump’s Vice-President, so one wonders why she doesn’t just try to make the deal and step out of the way?
Then on the night before the 1/6 anniversary Joe Biden addressed the nation in a speech that told us he is ready to debate, and certainly with the likes of Trump. He showed that he can identify Trump as the lying sociopath he is, without stooping to the cheap threats and statements of coming dictatorship that Trump has used to express his obvious plans for the Nazification of the nation. *****
Mike Johnson, our faltering Speaker of the House, seems to have learned a new mantra when referring to the border crisis. “Stop the flow!” Unfortunately, it’s the only thing he’s leaned in the recent past. It refers to all things that have to do with the border. But as Margret Brennan points out in this weekend’s interview with him, stopping the flow takes money and the GOP House doesn’t want to give the President the money it will take to “Stop the flow,” because they don’t really want that to happen. Johnson, it seems has one mission and it’s not to secure the border. It’s to blame the President for the lack of security at the border. Unfortunately, that lack of control at the border keeps going back to the GOP’s failure at implementing any border legislation of their own.
Biden has a plan that includes border security as well as money for arms for Ukraine and money for the defense of Israel. The plan makes sense. Giving arms to Ukraine means helping the Ukrainians fight their own battle and not having American kids fight it. Supporting Israel means helping our only real ally in the Middle East to stay free and secure against a Muslim threat from almost every Arab nation.
The most integral of the parts of this policy involves having the money to adjudicate immigrant claims and either, return the people from whence they came, or give them some support upon entry to the county.
Johnson doesn’t want them in the country, so he twists his rhetoric to make it appear Biden isn’t doing anything when the reality is that he and his House votes are blocking Biden’s plans to handle the border correctly, while helping Ukraine and Israel.
*****
The GOP noise of the day is that the US economy is floundering under Biden and that only Trump can save it. I call bullshit and look to Fareed Zacharia for facts to offset the Tumpian nonsense. Look at these economic facts listed by Fareed on his recent GPS broadcast.
The US economy grew at an astonishing 5.2% in 2022. Estimated growth for 2023 is expected to be 2.1% which will be greater than any of the western nations. Manufacturing is up and wages are experiencing a boom, and this is not new. From 2003 to 2022 America’s per capita growth, adjusted for inflation has been outpacing the world. Our 2.6% against the United Kingdom’s 1.2%, the Eurozone’s 1.8% or Spain, France & Italy which have remained at a flat 0%.
America’s technology sector dominates the world the way nobody ever has. The ten top technology stocks have a higher value than the entire stock markets of Canada, the UK, France, and Germany combined.
The US is the world’s largest supplier of oil and gas, bigger than Saudi Arabia or Russia. And yet despite these facts, Trump and his lying minions would have you think that we have never been in worse shape. That’s nonsense. Despite leading the world for the last century, we have always had problems and have always overcome them.
A century ago, we were buried in prohibition and the great depression. That was followed in the 1940’s by WWII. The 50’s brought us the huge communist threat and the McCarthy backlash. The 60’s. 70’s & 80’s were the decades of political assassination, race riots, busing wars, our first major lost war in Vietnam, and the Arab oil embargo, which tripled the price of oil and brought on super inflation even as our President, Tricky Dick Nixon, quit the job to avoid impeachment. Is that the America Trump wants to make us into again? We survived all of it and we’ll survive what we face now because America is the greatest nation in the world, and it will put Trump in his place and conquer whatever challenges it faces as it moves into the future.
Bill, you know Mike isn’t Sec. of State.
Let’s hope we have a Happy 2024!