Before the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump announced that if he lost it would mean that the election had been rigged. So we all laughed and agreed that Trump was truly insane.
On January 6, 2021 a mob of Right Wing terrorists and traitors invaded the Capitol after being egged on by the sociopathic Donald Trump and we all shook our heads in despair and wondered if these people were crazy. The election had been attacked by Trump and his foils over and over but had been certified as honest and valid after every attack.
“Who believes these assholes, these Trumpaholics?” we asked. Well, the answer is a shitload of really dumb people, led by a traitorous cabal of GOP leaders who seek to destroy our democracy for their own personal gain.
They are doing it by introducing a tsunami of legislation aimed at restricting access to the ballot box to as many Americans as they can because they and their leaders have ascertained that there are just not enough Retrumplicans left in the fanatic base to get anyone elected. The result:
800 bills introduced in 49 states
18 bills enacted in 14 states
115 bills moving through legislatures in 24 states, all aimed at winnowing down potential voters to a small group that believes and will follow Donald Trump and the fetid candidates proposed by a party that is actually leaderless and is being torn apart by factions of criminals trying to hold onto their offices regardless of how that will damage the United States.
There is only one solution to this problem. The Democrats just have to outvote their opponents and build up an insurmountable number of House and Senate members that can simply crush any opposition on all fronts.
Given the current structure there is only one way to do that. Biden and the current members of congress must show the American public, especially those that are mystifyingly uncommitted, that they know how to run an effective government. They must do this by passing needed legislation that is favored by the vast number of Americans and then by showing that they can make the results of that legislation work for the people.
If they can accomplish that, they will have a fighting chance to gain the kind of majority they must have to pass needed legislation in congress and even take a shot at the Electoral College and the issue of 2 Senators per state regardless of population.
*****
After 20 hapless years, Joe Biden is finally pulling American troops out of Afghanistan. Still, many think it’s a bad idea. The Economist stated that; “America’s war in Afghanistan is ending in crushing defeat.”
Well, they are certainly entitled to their opinion and we sure in hell didn’t win anything over there. But the reality is that the war started with nowhere to go except crushing defeat and it has just muddled along to its present conclusion. This is a war that never should have happened, dreamed up and orchestrated by Donald Rumsfeld and a ratpack of Bush administration warmongers including John Bolton and Dick Cheney. There was never any real reason for us to be in Afghanistan and even if there had been we should have learned the futility of going there from the Russians who tried it before us and left in the same crushing defeat.
The excuse was that 911was plotted on Afghan soil. That may be but none of the plotters were Afghans. Most, including the leader, were Saudis. Maybe because the Bush family was deeply involved in the oil business, which was then was pretty much run by the Saudis, we somehow overlooked their involvement in the whole deal. It seems that no one held stock in anything in Afghanistan so that became the target of opportunity.
Despite the fact that we never should have been there, a whole coterie of stay the course types exist that are dead set against us leaving. They whine that the Taliban will take over the country and drag the whole place back to the 7th Century, the same place it was when we got there. They tell us that the government needs just a little more time to pull it all together. The Afghan government has had twenty years to pull it together and between gross incompetence and flat out criminal activity they are still back where they were the first day American troops arrived in Kabul.
Right now the Taliban are acting like a functional political structure. They are not killing government troops. Instead they are giving each one eighty bucks, to help them get home after they have surrendered themselves and their weapons to Taliban control. That doesn’t mean that they are going to be nice guys when they take over. They will be a disaster for all Afghan women and anything that even approaches religious freedom. But that is the problem of the Muslim religion and many other religions all over the world. We cannot adjust American foreign policy because of conditions that have nothing to do with the United States. Our own Supreme Court is about to prove that they aren’t ready to let women have control of their own bodies so should we really be calling the kettle black?
In case no one noticed, Osama Bin Laden wasn’t hiding in Afghanistan when we killed him. He was in Pakistan. Anyone ever wonder why we didn’t invade Pakistan? Maybe because they have nuclear weapons and they are nutty enough to use them? Or maybe having screwed up twice the warmongers decided to keep their mouths shut and let Obama handle it his way.
We are getting out of a country in which we have proved over twenty years, that we cannot change the culture and can do almost nothing to improve it.
But there is one thing we do must do before we leave. We have to take care of those who have actually helped us while we were there. That is a responsibility that we have become infamous for shirking. Go all the way back to Vietnam and bring it all the way up to Syria and the Kurds.
*****
The history of Republican governors in the state of Texas is like a compilation of the jokes from the old movie Dumb and Dumber. More recently under the rein of George W. Bush it seemed that the occupants of the governor’s office in that pathetic state were in a battle to prove they could be even stupider than their predecessor.
Texas governor Greg Abbott is busy trying to prove he’s actually dumber than his predecessor Rick Perry, a not insignificant task. Don’t forget Perry stepped into his cabinet post as Energy Secretary without a clue that he would be responsible for our nuclear capabilities.
Well, now that the entire Democratic segment of the Texas Senate have fled the state in order to keep that body from having a caucus and thereby prevent them from voting on the proposed pre-civil war voting rules, Abbott is threatening to have them all arrested when they return to the state. What for? Leaving the scene of an accident?