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Republican selfish cruelty
It takes ones breath away. If what they did in the House ever becomes the law of the land, they will have much to reckon with. The crowd outside the House had it right with its “Shame, shame shame!” Democrats inside singing should also be shamed. It was not a party victory or defeat. It was a victory for the rich and infamous who have thoughts only for themselves and their wallets. Amazing that some can still call themselves “Christians”.
Let’s face it, anything Barack Obama did as President is anathema to those now in power because he is black. The hatred underpinning the latest Congressional and Presidential actions is barefaced and appalling. It’s even likely to bring on a backlash that will change the make up of the House of Representatives if the Democrats don’t throw away their advantage in their glee at opponent’s seemingly fatal mistakes. It’s much too soon to crow. There is still real danger that this white-men-supremacist measure could become law.
If anyone out there still reads, check this article in today’s Washington Post, and then take a good long look at all of those smug, self-satisfied faces in the Rose Garden as they celebrate taking away health care from those in society who need it most. This is America? Isn’t it time for the USA to join the rest of the civilized world and provide basic government healthcare for everyone?
(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Those guys turn my stomach.
How many people are aware that the Trump administration has been doing its best to pick apart the ACA even before the “replacement” by cutting funds for pass through payments to insurance companies and doctoring the healthcare.gov website just so they could say it was failing? All that for white supremacy?
If Peter Suderman is correct that this is not a health care bill at all, but a bald effort to cut taxes for the wealthy, then the House Republicans may well have snookered the “Deal Maker” himself (as well as the rest of us) since Trump apparently has little knowledge of what is actually in the bill.
Trump’s continued ignorance about the policy details should worry House Republicans, who are being pressured by the president and his team to support deeply unpopular legislation that the president doesn’t himself understand. (That problem will be compounded and repeated if the bill eventually manages to clear the House, because the Senate is all but certain to significantly alter the legislation, and because those alterations are likely to shatter whatever fragile consensus may exist in the House.)
In a way, Trump’s inability to understand the bill means that he cannot really be said to support it, or at least that his support is far from stable. Privately, Trump has questioned whether or not the bill is worthwhile. During the initial push to pass the bill, Trump sometimes expressed his anxiety about the bill’s merits, according to The Washington Post. He did not possess sufficient understanding of its particular to judge its quality for himself, so he repeatedly asked his aides, “Is this really a good bill?” If you have to ask, the answer is probably no.
ETHICS?
What ethics? Trump’s “newsconference” proves, as if there were any doubt, that he has no idea of ethics. He’s the spoiled child who insists on having his cake and eating it too, both the Presidency and his business, all for the glory of Trump, and to the sorrow of all those Americans who thought he would be their savior. Seems to me that he would rather have his business than be President, and it may possibly happen that he will get his choice. How long will Americans put up with the kind of childish behavior he showed on Wednesday – piles of papers so we’d see how impossibly complicated divestiture would be for him, a baseless attack on a CNN reporter, and an imported audience of employees who cheered and applauded like those at his rallies. Not all of us are stupid enough to be fooled.
It wouldn’t hurt to remember the history lessons we once knew about state sponsored propaganda and the kinds of skepticism needed when approaching performances like Trump’s Wednesday news conference. I wonder if it will be as easy or easier even to stage such performances once in the Whitehouse. Common sense says we’d best be on our guard against manipulation by TV performance by a man who is something of an expert showman and manipulator.
Hillary
Popular vote or no, she didn’t win, and while I’m sorry she didn’t break the glass ceiling, I think she was her own worst enemy. The emails on the server in the basement and “the basket of deplorables” did enormous damage for the opportunities they gave her critics. One also got the sense that especially in the early appearances on TV with her nose in the air and body language seeming to see all the rest of us as beneath her – she entitled after all those years of hard work – to be elected President just because she felt she’d worked hard enough to earn it. The sense that she felt entitled to the office merely because of who she was I think turned off a lot of people.
There’s no such thing as a perfect candidate for President (or any other office), but perhaps there should have been more deep thought at the DNC and in the higher reaches of the party about the Clinton legacy and what that would mean to the millions of those who felt forgotten by Washington and voted for Trump. I voted for her, but I was never happy about it. The thought of both of them back in the White House curdled. What if there were more Libyas? Worse ones? What if there were more careless dismantling of protections put in place to free us from the vagaries of financial melt downs?
And if she and he were so darned intelligent, why did they think that using a private email server was such a great idea? Was it really so very “convenient”? Were they just playing with the new technology without knowing enough to realize the risks? After the experience of intense criticism about the emails, wouldn’t you think she’d warn others near her to beware of what they said in emails in case of hacking? It’s not as if hacking was unknown in 2015 – 16. Our own NSA was doing its share of it on foreign leaders and got caught in the act. The stupidity (ignorance) of intelligent people is sometimes appalling and inexcusable.
And now we’re stuck with Trump. What a tragedy!