Will We Continue?

 OK, I am now having serious difficulties knowing how to respond to the day-to-day goings on in America. Plus, many places around the world seem to be afflicted with similar crazy behavior. Putin alone practically denies all semblance of a civilized human being. Clearly, he is committing mass murder on a daily basis, with the full and complete approval of the Russian people. And please don’t argue that, “Oh all the Russian people don’t understand what he is doing”.  Maybe. But I think that, like here, they prefer to believe the lies coming from the Russian state media. It’s the same here. People who watch Fox News pretend they are getting real news, whereas we, the non-Foxies, understand that Fox is brainwashing them daily. Exactly the same way that Russian media is brainwashing Russians.  The difference, of course, is that in Russia, Putin has eliminated any alternatives to Russian state media. Here, Americans actually watch Fox News because they prefer the lies emanating therefrom.

So, in one sphere, we have mass murder being committed on a daily basis, and we are unable to prevent it, because we have a lunatic running Russia who might decide to obliterate the world via nuclear weapons should we challenge him openly.  And in our own personal sphere, America, we seem to be inundated daily with mass stupidity from a now defunct republican party that seems incapable of operating on anything like a normal human basis.  Remember after that election that delivered to us “The Squad”. Remember the Squad? Here from Wiki: “The Squad is a group of six Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives. It was initially composed of four women elected in the 2018 United States House of Representatives elections: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. They have since been joined by Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri following the 2020 United States House of Representatives elections. The Squad is well known for being among the most progressive and left-wing members of the United States Congress.”

All were elected under the age of 50, have been supported by the Justice Democrats political action committee, and are on the left wing of the Democratic Party. All except Omar and Tlaib were initially elected to Congress after unseating incumbents in primary challenges. All represent safe seats with Cook Partisan Voting Index scores of at least D+25.

The Squad has been said to represent the demographic diversity of a younger political generation and the advocacy of progressive policies such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, which have sometimes clashed with their party's leadership. Ocasio-Cortez coined the "Squad" name in an Instagram post a week after the 2018 election. The term and the group went viral thereafter.

And the Right Wing almost immediately began hating on The Squad, mostly I think because they were women, and partly because they are liberals, which means that they think everyone should have health care, and that workers should be paid a livable working age.  I know, horrors, right?  So republicans hated The Squad.

But what do they offer instead? Well, we have what we might call the ContraSquad.  And who are they? Well, let’s see, we have Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorne, Josh Hawley, Matt Gaetz. I could go on but you know who they are.  And what do they believe? Well, think Jewish Space Lasers causing the wildfires in California. See, if Stephen Colbert, or Trevor Noah had said that, we would just laugh, because it is an obvious comedic idea. When Greene espouses such a thought, we find ourselves wondering, “OK, is she an anti-Semitic Nazi, terminally stupid, or just an evil bitch?” And Boebert? Again from Wiki:

“Boebert supports Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, voted to overturn its results during the Electoral College vote count, and supported the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Boebert opposes measures intended to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and posted misinformation related to face masks and COVID-19 vaccines. She opposes transition to green energy, abortion, sex education, gender-affirming treatments for transgender minors, and non-heterosexual marriage. She supports an isolationist foreign policy and minimizing immigration to the United States.”

And so the list goes on. This Conservative “Squad” seems to be a weird group of folks who defy common sense and logic much of the time.

And then we have folks such as Mitch McConnell, who seems bent on acting so politically charged that he has vowed to deny any further Democratic SCOTUS appointees (none on the horizon at the moment) any kind of a Congressional hearing.

So, it is not simply that we have an opposing political party challenging Democrats. It’s that we seem to have an almost unrecognizable political party, masquerading as republicans. I keep asking myself, “whatever happened to the republican party”? I actually voted for a republican when I was very young—Dwight Eisenhower. And, although I did not vote for him, I actually worked under the Ronald Reagan Administration in the Department of Health and Human Services.  I well remember Richard Nixon, and The Watergate affair. Heavens, I even watched the McCarthy Hearings—remember those?

And so, I actually understand that republicans are, or at least used to be, a sort of semi-responsible opposition force, even if I disagreed with much of their thinking. If after the data came in, we understood that Reagan’s belief in the Laffer Curve (reduce taxes and revenue will rise to a point) made him seem intellectually diminished.  But I never thought Reagan would destroy America, or our system of Government. Now I am no longer sure.  There is some weird effect operating, perhaps enabled or even amplified by Fox News, that has created a disconnect between the utterances from the republican party operatives and any sense of logic or humanity. And I no longer can recognize any underlying logic, aside from this: Power to the Winner. Nothing else matters. 

Perhaps this disconnect from reality can be attributed to Donald Trump, who is the Compleat Narcissist, and, for him, Power really is everything. To him, nothing else matters. That he is enabled by Fox News is clear. But less clear, is why the American public is still on board. The republican party leadership attempted to overthrow our government—that is what January 6^th was all about.  And yet, republican voters still cling to the Trump mantra.  And I find that frightening to the point that I now see the possibility of a complete failure of our entire system of government, perhaps to a point that we could wind up looking like Russia—Trump’s presumed model. We may know fairly soon actually. Our first window into the future is the upcoming 2022 election, where control of the Senate is at stake. And then, of course, we have the next 2024 election, where we determine who will lead our entire government. Should that be Donald Trump and his coterie, then it is on our heads collectively. That awful event can only occur should the American people decide they want to move to an autocratic style government.

So, think hard folks. It is all in our minds and our hands. Vote, and Vote carefully. It is up to us.

 

 

Today

Today I find myself wondering whether humankind has simply ceased advancing, and maybe instead, we find ourselves moving backwards into some earlier state of precivilized behavior pattern.  I am thinking of Vladimir Putin specifically, who acts as though he wishes to return to a world state in which he rules as permanent monarch and the world outside his realm simply bows to him each time he opens his mouth.

Yes, yes, I know that we (the non-Russian world) have taken steps both to arm Ukraine, and to financially punish Russia for its Nazi-like wartime behavior against Ukraine.  But I also see folks like Mitch McConnell, and the other republican clowns (think Marjorie Taylor Greene) continue acting as though Joe Biden was the real enemy, not Vlad the Impaler. Now, how is that possible?  Well, apparently republicans no longer even notice Vlad’s latest outrage, so busy are they at trying to tear down Joe Biden.  Mitch even allowed as how, after seeing Ketanji Jackson-Brown approved for SCOTUS, that he planned to work especially hard to ensure that no other SCOTUS nominees from the Dems would ever see the light of day.

See, we as a people, no longer have anything in common, towards which we might work as a united Nation.  Maybe social media, that hotbed of hateful commentary, has really captured America.  We seem no longer to understand what is important and what is minor. Makes me wonder what might have happened had FDR’s various depression-era and Wartime initiatives been treated by Mitch McConnell.  Might he simply have objected to the CCC, the WPA, and even to our entry into WW II? Would he have treated Pearl Harbor as some Democratic plot to gain control?  Can’t you hear OANN and Fox reporting on Pearl Harbor, or the Nazi invasion of Europe and all those Death Camps, treating all that as Democratic hysteria?

Now to be fair, we as a Nation remain unsure how best to rein in Vlad. He seems completely over the edge of that madness line. And, worse yet, as his invasion efforts continue to fall apart due to the ineptitude of the Russian military and the fierce resistance of a united Ukraine, we cannot say with any confidence what path he may take up to and including nuclear war against Ukraine.  As we diddle and dither, using our limited financial toolkit, Vlad seems to be growing increasingly crazier.  So far, nothing, however horrific, seems to working to get the Ukrainians to accept defeat.  Instead, they keep punching Vlad in the nose.  Now, within Russia, Vlad has so secured the airwaves and the print media that ordinary Russian citizens seem to have no idea how awful has been the performance of their Russian military and their War Crimes approach to this invasion. Everything is lovely in the garden and all bad effects (i.e., dead people) are totally the fault of the Nazi Ukrainians. And if they can’t get their money out of their banks, that is also Zelinskyy’s fault.

And the fact that republicans seem to all have their collective heads up their asses seems to be going unnoticed by the world at large. We are too busy yelling about Will Smith and what our public schools are doing to brainwash our kids into becoming Gay.  Or, for heaven’s sake, why suddenly everyone seems to want to have an abortion.  So, all republican states are now focused exclusively on LGBTQ issues or on abortion, and none of them seem to care about actual mass killings in Ukraine.  Oh, and don’t get me started on that 1619 Project, where we teach children all about race and racism. Horrors, do we really want our children to know that we are a racist culture???

So, let’s instead, change the channel, let our republican leaders safeguard our ballots so no Democrats can win , and we will all send "Thoughts and Prayers" to Ukraine.  Now, can we get back to the Will Smith Horror story???

Rationality

 It’s really interesting about this Life thing. I thought, in my innocence, that as I became older I would understand life’s occurrences better.  But, as it turns out, it would seem that the older I get the less I understand. Well, that applies to humankind. Other animal critters have always been a bit beyond me.

When I was really young, you know, the 1940s and 1950s, I seemed to at least have some understanding of how America was responding to the events of the day throughout the world. You know, there was that nasty depression thing that began in the thirties and continued to at least the beginning of WW II, when FDR founded that CCC creature, and then we began moving into full production mode to gear up for that War. Everyone seemed to be pretty much on the same page. I am sure we had our share of closet Nazi’s who supported Adolph’s adventures into mass murder. But the key is that they remained within their respective closets. Mostly Americans who vocalized about things, pretty much supported our president. If republicans objected they seemed to remain largely quiet and supported the war effort.

Then we entered the 1950s and a period of relative quiet, even as that Cold War thingie grew into a bigtime phenomenon.  We seemed to hate the Russkie-Soviets and they hated us. But we reacted by building bigger bombs each year, and they did the same.  There was that period during the late 1950s in Cuba, when the Soviets seemed to believe they could move on us, and just as everyone thought maybe we would all be toast in the morning, everyone backed off.

We had the Korean dustup, in which a lot of Koreans and Americans were killed, but that stayed in Korea, and we backed off.  So, two Koreas, huh??

Oh and then we entered our first war that we were eventually destined to lose—in a place called Vietnam. It was all about that Cold War, during which everyone on each side wanted to demonstrate their cojones. We finally gave up after losing 38,000 American troops, and several hundred thousand Vietnamese troops. Oh, I know, we still argue about whether we “LOST” the war in Vietnam, but we simply walked away and then the North took over the entire country. That seems like we lost.

Now, to be fair, during the entire Vietnam War period, from say 1954 until Nixon left in 1975, we had an ongoing “debate” about the War. Many protests, even some riots, and genuine disagreements among the populace.  Nixon even won the presidency based on his stance about ending that war.  But in truth he never really “ended” it. He vastly expanded it, even to bombing Cambodia, before just giving up and walking away.

Now throughout this entire period, I thought I at least understood the arguments. While I didn’t necessarily agree with being at war in Vietnam, I did understand that our nation's peoples needed to continue speaking with one another. I at least vaguely understood the principles operating and the arguments uttered by each side of the ongoing debate.

And then our country seemed to begin becoming confused. Maybe it was Ronald Reagan, or maybe Reagan simply reflected the state of confusion. But I began becoming confused.  I even worked in our government briefly under Reagan.  I had joined the Department of Health, Education and Welfare when Carter was still president. Then Reagan boomed into office and I found myself working under this weird republican administration.  Reagan said and did weird things. He subscribed to that Laffer Curve theory, in which, in theory, when you cut tax rates, your tax revenues would rise and everyone would be happier.  Well, The Laffer curve is in truth a Laugh a minute. Turns out, as you reduce tax rates, your revenues go down and you produce even bigger deficits. But Reagan was really more a movie star than a thinking human. What did he know?

But folks on the right in America still voted for him and he won a second term. We experienced what became known as “Reaganomics”. From Wiki, Reaganomics, refers to the neoliberal economic policies promoted by U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s. These policies are commonly associated with and characterized as supply-side economics, trickle-down economics, or voodoo economics by opponents, while Reagan and his advocates preferred to call it free-market economics.

The four pillars of Reagan's economic policy were to reduce the growth of government spending, reduce the federal income tax and capital gains tax, reduce government regulation, and tighten the money supply in order to reduce inflation.

The results of Reaganomics are still debated. Supporters point to the end of stagflation, stronger GDP growth, and an entrepreneurial revolution in the decades that followed. Critics point to the widening income gap, what they described as an atmosphere of greed, reduced economic mobility, and the national debt tripling in eight years which ultimately reversed the post-World War II trend of a shrinking national debt as percentage of GDP.

And this period, during which I finally had to leave my government post and go into business for myself before going braindead, was characterized by serious political disagreements that spread throughout our country.  Then we had a series of presidents under whom the political disagreements blossomed into a form of national dystopia. Reagan, then Bush I, then Clinton, then Bush II, then Obama, and finally Trump, wherein the “National Good” as a concept seemed to disappear altogether. Obama was interesting. He was bright, ethical, and focused on trying to restore our status as a Nation of all its people. But he was also a person of color. And that was so provocative that common sense no longer seemed to operate. He was born in Hawaii, but was accused of being African at birth, Kenyan I believe was the charge. And our racists began coming out of their closets en masse.  And then Donald Trump succeeded to the Presidency, beginning our period of mass hysteria cum lunacy.  And that is where I began losing all sense of what we Americans were thinking. Maybe it was as simple as closet racism becoming the norm in America (I had thought the Civil War settled that issue). But it seemed bigger even than racism.  Trump appealed to a growing body of opinion throughout our Nation that Government should no longer dominate the National dialogue on any subject.  Trump was/is so stupid that he seemed to offer folks who hated thoughtful consideration of issues a way out. Don’t think, just react. Trump was/is a racist, misogynist, narcissist, borderline crook, and completely at odds with thoughtful approaches to any/all national and international policy issues. He basically began pulling us out of all alliances, under the guise of “Making America Great” again.  And this seemed to appeal to more Americans than I care to count.

And because his voice was heard by so many Americans who seemed of the same mindset (racist, misogynist, narcissist, et al) other politicians began subscribing to his visions and his rhetoric.

Now, in 2020, the American people as a voting bloc sent him packing. But Trump and his minions refused to go gently into the night, resulting in, at the least, the January 6^th murderous mob scene in which idiot-malenfants decided to take over our government so as to restore their dude to office.  Now that effort failed, because our government was still operating largely under laws and rules forbidding such a devious effort.  But the mindset has now continued and perhaps even expanded.  How else to explain the likes of Madison Cawthorne, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert getting elected into office? On the other hand, we also elected “The Squad” –again from Wiki: The Squad is a group of six Democratic members of the It’s really interesting about this Life thing. I thought, in my innocence, that as I became older I would understand life’s occurrences better.  But, as it turns out, it would seem that the older I get the less I understand. Well, as that applies to humankind. Other animal critters have always been a bit beyond me. 

On the other hand, we elected “The Squad” –again from Wiki: The Squad is a group of six Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives. It was initially composed of four women elected in the 2018 United States House of Representatives elections: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. They have since been joined by Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri following the 2020 United States House of Representatives elections. The Squad is well known for being among the most progressive and left-wing members of the United States Congress.

All were elected under the age of 50, have been supported by the Justice Democrats political action committee, and are on the left wing of the Democratic Party. All except Omar were initially elected to Congress after unseating incumbents in primary challenges. All represent safe seats with Cook Partisan Voting Index scores of at least D+25.

The Squad has been said to represent the demographic diversity of a younger political generation and the advocacy of progressive policies such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, which have sometimes clashed with their party's leadership. Ocasio-Cortez coined the "Squad" name in an Instagram post a week after the 2018 election. The photo, taken at a VoteRunLead event where the four founding members spoke, subsequently went viral.

So, now we have people both in and outside Congress who barely speak the same language. And, as a result, I now barely even understand the principles under which “debates” occur throughout our sorry Land.  The three republicans, Cawthorne et al, seemed to be hailing victory signals during the violent insurrection, and they seemingly support Putin over Zelensky.  Cawthorne referred to Zelensky as a “Thug” (although it is doubtful Cawthorne even knows what a “Thug” actually is). Given what Putin is doing in Ukraine, War Crimes, by most observers, I fail to understand how these idiots could support Russia. Would they have supported Adolph Hitler for heaven’s sake?

And so it goes. Republicans as a whole throughout Congress seem now incapable of rational thought, and are simply opposed to anything our President proposes.  And those republicans seem to retain the support of their voting blocs.  Why, How??? How is that even possible? Do Americans actually support and plan to vote for idiots such as Cawthorne,  Greene and Boebert? Really folks?? You agree with these idiots??

I suppose we will know for certain during this 2022 by-election. If republicans win and take over Congress, then I suggest that America may be lost for eternity. Hopefully, we are better than that. We will see.

So, folks, whatever you are thinking about by-elections, get out and VOTE. Our very future as a rational nation depends on your VOTE.

Please VOTE!