Monthly Archives: February 2018

Old McConnell and his boy Ryan

Old McConnell had a job. EEIEEIOO! And in this job he was a crook. EEIEEIOO! With a cash grab here and court grab there, here a grab, there a grab, everywhere a grab-grab, old McConnell had a job. EEIEEIOO!

Okay, now that we have the merriment out of the way, I would like to focus on Senator Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr., known to all as Mitch McConnell. Hailing from Kentucky, Mitch has been in office since 1984. He is a lawyer, having graduated from University of Kentucky College of Law in 1967. Senator McConnell suffered from polio as an infant, recovering largely by the ministrations of his mother. Evidently, that is what allowed him to develop a deep sense of empathy and compassion for the sick and needy. Exactly the same as House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-WI, who became a fierce advocate for the poor and government-dependent (by necessity) folks because of his public college education which was largely financed by Social Security survivor benefits following the death of his father. Such wonderful, noble Christians, Ryan and McConnell are. (Okay, so I wasn’t quite done with the merriment).

Senator Addison McConnell is a cruel and evil man. He vowed, two years after the election of our first African-American president who ran as a unifier wishing to reach across the aisle, that his most important priority was to deny then-President Obama a second term. Senator McConnell and his cohort in the House, former Speaker John Boehner, tried to keep Obama from passing an economic stimulus bill, which was necessary after former President George W. Bush caused the biggest recession in American history.

That’s the way it has been for the last 40 years or so. A Republican administration explodes the debt and ruins the economy, all the while claiming to be the party of fiscal restraint. A Democratic administration comes in to clean up the mess, only to be blamed for causing it in the first place, and facing strong opposition against taking the measures necessary to clean it up. The strategy is more than obvious. Grab power by any means necessary, remembering all the while that the ends justify the means. Once in power, cut taxes on everybody, making sure that the wealthy get the biggest cuts. Raise spending on defense by huge proportions, while spending nothing on domestic programs or social services. Then, when the deficit starts to become noticeable and/or starts to damage growth, blame the Democrats for their social spending on undeserving elderly, poor and sick, vowing to cut those programs even more than they have been cut already.

The Republican party’s leaders have, at least since the Reagan years, operated on the fringe of decency and morality, covering themselves with a fig leaf consisting of faux Christianity and racial animus. Since we have had Donald John Trump as president, their dodgy morality has gotten worse, entering the realm and banging at the doors of treason and obstruction of justice.

Senator Addison McConnell is not stupid. Morally asleep, but mentally awake. Addison denied President Barack Obama, a decent man and a patriot, his right to appoint a Supreme Court justice after the death of Justice Scalia. He worked fast, setting the plot in motion before Scalia’s body was even cold. Addison knows the ropes. He knows his way around the Senate, and he knows how to use the rules to his advantage. Representative Ryan is a parsimonious thug. Young, fit and trim, and wealthy, he lies awake at night thinking of ways that he can kill the poor, sick and elderly. He tries to accomplish this by denying them health care when sick, food when hungry, cash when destitute.

They will never admit it, but I think that, at the root of the Republican leaders’ efforts, is a desire to cause the deaths of those inconvenient people who they consider to be “takers” as opposed to “makers” in their Ayn Rand – inspired way of thinking and living. Why else would they try to take away the health care from the poor while they are cutting taxes on the wealthy and shoveling money at a bloated military machine? The money they spend gladly is much greater than the money they are trying to save by killing poor people. These Republicans, led by Addison McConnell and Paul Ryan, deceive ordinary Americans to vote for them by appealing to their racial prejudice. Period. I won’t dance around it. Republicans rule by racism. They try to make people think that it’s those miserable, lazy black and brown people who are stealing jobs and money from deserving whites. Not to mention the “illegals”. Only thing is, illegals commit fewer crimes than native-born people. And white people make up the vast majority of welfare recipients in general.

So this is the state of affairs: The foxes are running the henhouse. We have to wait until November to evict them, but we have to evict them before they kill any more innocent American citizens.

 

Guns and the GOP

Okay, here it is toward the end of February in 2018. We have just had yet another mass shooting perpetrated by yet another homicidal/suicidal problem-drenched young man. He has ended 17 lives and has chosen by living to spend the rest of his life confined like a dangerous animal. The Republicans control all three branches of federal government. But there is a fourth branch that they also control: the National Rifle Association. Or should I say, the NRA controls the Republicans due to its single-issue voters and large donations to the Republican party and its candidates.

I don’t pretend to know what motivates a man like Wayne Lapierre, the NRA executive vice president. He seems to be wholly owned by his employer, heart and soul, lock, stock, and barrel. After every madman-committed attack on civilians, his answer is the same: arm the civilians. I honestly don’t think Lapierre, or for that matter Trump or any of the other Republican leaders care very much what happens to people victimized by gun violence on their watch. Their kids are in private schools, and they live with their families behind locked gates, either in gated communities or private estates guarded 24/7 by private security forces.

It is well-known that even trained police officers, in the heat of an emergency, have a difficult time identifying the shooter and aiming their firearms well enough to take him out without hitting an innocent bystander. Given that fact, how in hell are school teachers, who might be given a week-long training program, supposed to succeed? They are underpaid as it is without taking on the duty of trained gun expert / school security officer. In addition to their initial training, they would most certainly have to take refresher classes, or their training would be lost and forgotten. But even assuming that security teachers would help, then the shooter would attack the students elsewhere. If we made our schools into armed fortresses, how long would it take an armed malcontent to take his activities to the next football game? Maybe they would start focusing on parties, or maybe dances. To arm up enough people necessary to protect all student mass events would be prohibitively expensive, and likely wouldn’t work anyway.

So this is the situation: The wealthiest first world country is the most dangerous first world country. Because of the guns. Why aren’t guns and gun ownership ever studied by the government to see what can be done to improve gun safety? Like we have done with cars, for example. I don’t see anybody trying to take our cars away. Nor do I see any rumors about car safety laws being the first step on a slippery slope to automobile confiscation. Hell, all our cars driven on public streets have to be insured and registered! Gun owners have been conditioned to believe that required registration of their firearms is not consistent with American values and is unconstitutional.

There are so many guns out in civilian hands in this country that if we stopped all gun sales tomorrow, it would take at least fifty years for there to be a significant drop in gun ownership. Regardless, just as a matter of common decency and common sense, I believe guns need to be regulated and registered. The harder it is for somebody to get ahold of a gun, the more likely it is that they will not use one to commit mass murder. They will not be able to act on the spur of the moment if they have to jump through some hoops in order to get a gun. And yes, I know that there are those who plan these atrocities for a long time. There isn’t a magic wand that can eliminate every possibility, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try.

And, last but not least, we need to take another look at the Second Amendment. Conservative judges on the Supreme Court decided in the Heller case in 2008 that the amendment allows individuals the right of firearm ownership. This is the Second Amendment: “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” No less of a soft, weak liberal than Nixon’s appointed Chief Justice Warren Burger called the gun-ownership view of the Amendment “a fraud on the American public”. 

The Second Amendment needs to be revisited, and its interpretation needs to be revised. It is a matter of common sense and common decency, both of which are in perilously short supply in today’s GOP. America has such potential. It has so much wealth, so many talented people in all forms of industry and commerce and healthcare. Right now, America is being transformed into a two-bit banana republic because of extremely poor governance by the Republican party. Europe is far ahead of us in so many ways. I can say that from my own experience with family members who moved here from Holland four years ago so their son could attend Clark University. My cousin moved there in the early ’80s to take a professor job at the University of Amsterdam. He, his Dutch wife and their son had intended to make their life here, but they cannot, because of the expense of health insurance among other things. They are going back to the good life in Holland, where you don’t get shot in class, and you have a right to health care, not a right to own a man-killing machine.

When I was a boy, I was told that I should be proud to be American, and grateful that I was born here. I was, for many years. It is becoming apparent to me that the American way of life is no longer something to be envious of. It is a hard, brutal, way of life because of our Republican party. The Republican party is a present danger to our democracy and our previous way of life. They have become the enemy within. It is easier to defend against an external enemy than an internal enemy. Both of my parents served honorably in the Second World War. Is this what they were fighting for?

 

Me, Myself, and I

I am thinking that I could write anti-Trump blogs from now until doomsday about how horrible I believe Donald Trump is. The simple fact of the matter is that what I think doesn’t matter. What I mean by that is that I won’t convince anybody who doesn’t already agree with me. There was a story in the T&G a couple of weeks ago about customers and workers in small-town diners in Worcester County, and their praise and continuing support of Trump and his administration. It’s a fact that, even here in Massachusetts, there are many conservative towns. It is the same way here as most places. The cities tend to be liberal. That is where the most educated people and the most racial minorities live. Further out, you run into some people with opinions that could have come from a typical Alabama redneck Trump supporter. It is a wonder to me that people who aren’t stupid, maybe aren’t geniuses (very stable or otherwise), but are reasonably intelligent, it’s a wonder to me that they can believe such hogwash. A lot of it is where they get their news. Breitbart is not a newspaper of record. The New York Times and The Washington Post are. They are also Pulitzer Prize winners with a long history of breakthrough journalism that has made the world a better place. Fox News was founded by a right wing radical as an organization which has the mission of broadcasting news from a conservative viewpoint, facts that are inconvenient are ignored or twisted. I have come to the conclusion that people who are Trump supporters don’t care about other people the way Trump opponents do.

I am a white male who fits solidly into the demographic of the average Trump supporter. The fact that I am not a supporter of his gives me a little pause, like wondering why. So many of my old friends from school are now pretty much unrecognizable to me when I think of how they were when I was in school with them. Although when I think about it, many of them showed signs of what might happen when they got older. Some of them were mean kids or highly competitive athletes who ran with the jocks. But what mostly seems to have happened is that their station in life changed, so they forgot about their old ideals and started caring less about doing the right thing, and more about taking care of number one.

I wonder sometimes if it isn’t them, that it’s me. Maybe I don’t understand the nature of growing up, and I am just yearning for a past that was just transitory, a waystation along the route to becoming adults. I hope that isn’t true, and furthermore, I hope that the millennial generation that is coming into adulthood doesn’t follow the same path as so many of my cohort did. I have written numerous comments and blogs criticizing Sanders supporters for being naïve and making the perfect the enemy of the good. I still believe that dynamic is true, but on the other hand, if these budding democratic socialists in the new crop of adults actually manage to hold onto their ideals instead of dropping them as soon as they crossed over to the other side of the fence like so many of my generation did, I would be ecstatic. That would make up for my disappointment in those who let Trump win by defaulting on their obligation to vote for the Democrat.

And one more thing: I constantly hear pundits on political talk shows saying that the Democratic party has to come up with a positive message, not just anti-Trump. To that I say, look at what the Republican party is doing to our democracy. There is an article in the Atlantic about precisely that. Read it, and afterwards tell me how important it is that the Democrats have a positive agenda that they can sell because being anti-Trump isn’t enough.