Continued Stray Thoughts on the Current Political Climate

With the cascade of stupid, immoral, illegal, subversive, un-American, and possibly treasonous things emitted by der Sturmtrumper and his administration reaching levels that make it nearly impossible for any sane person to keep up with, I’ve started just keeping a running list of observations on the matter.  Every time the list reaches critical mass, I suppose I’ll post it and start a new one.  Can’t hurt; might help.  Here’s the most recent list:

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1. Watching der Sturmtrumper rage-Tweet at people from the safe confines of the White House shitter really, really makes me wish we could bring back dueling.  Seriously – we could solve this problem with a quickness.  Broadswords at 3 paces and I’ll take pretty much anybody over him.

2. Presidents can’t order wiretaps.  Either der Sturmtrumper has descended even further into paranoia-fueled madness or a federal judge found probable cause of a crime.  Either way this clown is unfit for office and needs to be removed for the safety of the republic.  Not that this seems to bother his supporters, though.

3. You know, I’d be more likely to believe it wasn’t a Muslim ban if he’d stop calling it a Muslim ban.

4. With every passing revelation, the likelihood of a Trumpian Reichstag Fire event grows higher.  Watch your back, my fellow Americans – the made-up emergency designed to get you to give up your rights willingly instead of fighting back may not be long in coming.

5. Do these people not understand how health care actually works?  Or do they just not care?  Discuss.

6.  To the best of my knowledge, only one other time in American history has a major federal investigative agency ever flat out declared that a sitting president was an outright liar.  That president resigned in disgrace.  Grab your popcorn, folks.

7. At this point I’m just hoping my children can get through school before the public education system that generations of Americans across the political spectrum have devoted their time, money, energy, resources, hopes and dreams to creating is destroyed by an administration and a party determined to rule over a supine and ignorant peasantry.  It will be a tight race, from the looks of it.  They’ve already introduced a bill to gut public education and give the money to fly-by-night for-profit charter schools – schools that have been fairly conclusively proven to be worse than the public schools they’re starving of funds.  But then when did reality ever matter to these ideologues anyway?

8. So far it seems that nobody other than Paul Ryan actually likes the new and improved Republicare legislation.  The Teabaggers hate it because it’s “Obamacare Lite.”  The libertarians hate it because it’s got too much Obama Care in it.  The AARP hates it because they have correctly deduced that it is essentially a tax on senior citizens.  Sane conservatives (lawsey, there still seem to be a few of those around…) regard it as incoherent and poorly designed.  Hospitals hate it because it just foists the costs of health care onto them.  70% of the American people are no doubt not going to like it since that’s the approval rating of the current ACA.  The Congressional Budget Office, well, we don’t know if they like it or not because they haven’t even been given a chance to evaluate it.  But then why should the American people know the actual cost of anything when they can just take Paul Ryan’s word for it? 

9. Part of this could just be the fact that after six years of whining about the ACA and promising that they had a replacement plan ready and waiting for repeal it’s fairly obvious that they’re just making this up as they go along and have no actual clue what they’re doing.  As predicted, they’re trying to follow the Wisconsin GOP playbook and just ram it through the legislature before anyone gets a chance to object, but the US Congress is a bit trickier to do that with.  They may yet succeed in ramming this through – the modern GOP is nothing if not willing to sacrifice actual humans in the name of greed and partisan ideology – but it will be known and it will come back to haunt them.  I do hope every single member of Congress who votes for this contracts a painful and uncovered chronic illness.  It’s not becoming of me to admit that, but there it is.

10. If I could buy a decent health insurance policy for the price of an iPhone, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

11. To answer a friend’s question, der Sturmtrumper’s continual paranoid ramblings about Obama are in fact a new low, and largely without precedent.  Partisans continue to snipe; journalists continue to complain – for Fox News to blame Obama for everything that’s happening now would be entirely within character and without any hint of novelty in American history.  But for a sitting president to take continual swipes at his predecessor is unheard of.  These guys are members of one of the most exclusive clubs in the world, and for that if nothing else they tend to be fairly respectful and even downright friendly, even across party lines.  Obama rarely ever mentioned George W. Bush and when he did it was often positive, and W. returned the favor.  W – a catastrophic president, but from all accounts a decent human being – treated Bill Clinton that way, and Clinton returned that favor for both W. and Bush Sr., and so on back to the beginning.  Even Andy Jackson – a notorious hothead and the center of his own universe – generally left his predecessors and successors alone.  Underlings fight those battles.  The press fights those battles.   For der Sturmtrumper to sling random mud the way he does is just another sign that this is someone who neither understands nor respects the office he holds.

12.  Does der Sturmtrumper even know that the campaign is over now?  That he won?  Someone should let him in on this.

13. Oh sweet dancing monkeys on a stick, they didn’t really entitle the new Republicare bill “World’s Greatest Healthcare Plan of 2017” did they?  They did?  Quick, somebody should check if these halfwits ever graduated from fourth grade.