The problem with US politics today is that it is just
plainly worse than any time before.
Truthfully, I can’t remember a time where it was good. Even when Obama was president there were a
lot of horrible things that the US did to the World. Like the start of drone strikes, the law that
allowed migrants to be detained, mass deportation of a million people. Before him there was George “W” Bush, who
relaxed security and allowed 9-11 to occur, and after that he attacked
Afghanistan, and while that was understandable, he then attacked Iraq for no
good reason and that was the legacy of his time in office. Bill Clinton was the least bad president we
have had in decades, and he was impeached.
He lied to congress about having an affair in the oval office. That was an impeachable offence back then. He also went to war as a peace-making mission
in Europe and well he solved the recession at the time. George Bush before him was bad, he was
involved in two wars in 4 years, the first was the Gulf War when Saddam Hussein
attacked Kuwait and the world stepped in and completely destroyed Iraq’s
infrastructure with air raids which caused him to retreat from Kuwait and then
the Allied nations bombed the hell out of the retreating army, killing 100,000
soldiers. And then they went away, when
what they should have done was remove Saddam and invest money in Iraq until all
the damage was fixed. Instead they put
embargos on the nation so that it could not rebuild anything that was
destroyed. And then there was Reagan,
famous for Cowboy movies and now Cowboy Diplomacy. He nearly started Nuclear War, did instigate
the Iran Iraq war, saw the end of the
Cold War, when the Berlin Wall fell, and Soviet Russia fell. He also paved the way for the Religious Right
to form political in roads in the Republican party and he tried to destroy the
Left. Basically, when it comes down to
it, there is very little that has come out of the US that is good since the
Marshal Plan and the Space Race.
All the poor and horrible stuff that I just tallied compares
not a drop to what is happening in US politics these days. Partisan Politics has come to its natural
conclusion from the days of Reagan to today.
Both sides are delusional. They
believe that the other side is treasonous and is selling out the country. Neither side is correct absolutely, one side
has a leg to stand on, but it is still not a good leg. The Republicans have elected a president that
lost the popular vote, but won the Electoral College, a system that is broken
because one vote in a rural part of the country has the same weight as a
thousand votes in a urban part of the country.
Fine, the Republican won. But it
turns out that is all that matters for most of the Republican Party. What is also a little scary, more than a
little scary, is that because of the infiltration of the Republican Party by
the Religious Right, many have declared him divinely ordained by God, and
therefore to argue against him is blasphemous.
Luckily it has only been a small vocal fringe that has been saying
this. It goes further, though.
Apparently, the average Republican voter does not watch
Mainstream media. They listen to
Alternative News Media. They do like Fox
News, but they also get most of their news from alternative sources that don’t
use real facts. They use conspiracy
theories and they say things that are not true.
One Alternative news source suggested that there was a child sex ring
organized by the Democrats and Hillary Clinton that was run out of the basement
of a New York Pizzeria. No facts backed
up this claim, but they repeated it constantly, until one listener, who
believed that he was going to do something about this crime, that the police
were just letting it continue, he stormed the building shot and killed someone
and demanded to get into the basement to free the children. Only there was no basement. Never had been a basement. Another claim was that there was a mass
shooting in a elementary school, and it was all faked. The parents were all actors and the dead
children did not exist. The listeners
sent threatening letters and death threats to the parents whose children had
been murdered. The mass public that
voted for the Republicans do not believe the Mass Media, because they were told
that they are lying to them, but that the Alternative Media is telling the
truth. So, when they voted in the
current President, a president that does not watch Mainstream Media, he called
them all Fake and their news reports all fake.
He accused them of lying to the public.
And that was the situation when President Trump was elected. Alternative news outlets spreading false
information were deemed as true, and Mainstream Media viewed as biased and
fake. Fake, by the way, is news that the
Right does not like, it is not necessarily false, just not what they want to
hear.
The First news story of this Presidency was how many people
attended his inauguration. He claimed
that more people attended his inauguration than Obama. The photographic evidence shows that more
people came to see Obama, but Trump attacked these people and called them fake
news. Later things got worse. It became clear that President Trump was
using the Presidency to enrich his pockets, he would stay for free in his
hotels but charge the government for lodgings of his secret service
entourage. His wife did not join him in
Washington, so there were secret service people in the Trump hotel 24/7 for six
months. And then there were the frequent
trips to his golf course in Florida where the Secret Service had to get
accommodations too. Frequent trips. It was estimated that he took more trips to
golf in his first year than Obama did in 8 years. His cabinet was not ready to be sworn in the
day he took control of the office. Sure,
it takes time to vet out appointments, but he has never had enough people to
fill the appointments and there have been vacancies all through his term to date,
and then there was the scandals. Almost
from the beginning there were election irregularities and when the cause came
to the surface, Russian Meddling, it was ignored by the President. There were many scandals. People quitting his cabinet and other
appointments, constant claims that when someone quit it was because they were
really Democrats. On and on the scandals
continued, the resignations too. Beyond
the scandals were the redefinition of basic terms and words. Double speak from the Dystopian novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four, became common.
Fake News for News, Illegal Immigration for Refugees or asylum seekers
and many more. There was a period where
the president tried to deny entry into the US by countries where “terrorists”
were from but most of them were from nations that did not participated in
9-11. These attempts were constantly
struck down by the courts as unconstitutional.
And then there was trade.
The first thing he did was scrap as many trade plans that he could. He tore up the Trans-Pacific Pact, he tore up
the North American Free Trade Agreement.
He then started imposing tariffs and embargos on every country who
imported anything into the US that the US used to make itself. Apparently, anyone who thought he was bad at
trade, was clearly Fake news. Anything
he has touched foreign or otherwise has suffered from his reverse Midas Touch,
it crumbles into dust, and yet the Alternative news treats him like the second
coming, except some of the Alternative News Sources have ACTUALLY claimed he is
the second coming.
He does not believe Climate Change is real. He removed the US from the Paris Accord. He has been advocating for a rollback on
environmental regulations. He has been
telling people that it is important to be wasteful, install high water capacity
toilets, not to use LEDs and to burn as much coal as they can.
The only good thing that can be said for this government is
that it is mostly incompetent. They were
only able to pass one piece of legislation in two years, back when they
controlled both the House and the senate, and that was to reduce taxes for the
rich. Literally the only thing that was
passed. Since the House became Democrat
controlled, many laws have been passed, but they were all voted down by the
Republicans in the Senate. Incompetent
but mean. Apparently guess who also
watches alternative news? Racists and
White Supremacists, Nazis and others. In
the first year, a Neo-Nazi attacked and killed a protester and the best that
the president could say was that there were people wrong on both sides. And that was okay with the KKK, they liked
not being called the only wrong party.
When Trump won the election, he was surprised, he thought he
was going to lose. He had a speech ready
to tell his supporters that the vote was rigged. If he had lost there would have been maybe a
riot, but nothing else. If Trump loses
this election and he claims that there was voter fraud, there might just be a bit
more than a riot.
I forgot to mention that the United States has concentration
camps where they put Latin American refugees that turn up seeking asylum; they
even separate the children and if the kids are sick, they let them die. They have forgotten which child belonged to
which parent and so they can’t reunite these children. The thing is, they are still doing it. They are building a wall but a wall can’t
stop refugees and so they still imprison these migrants, they still may even be
separating the children. Today it is 75
years since the liberation of Auschwitz; something most people don’t know is
that most Germans did not know that they were killing Jews there and in other
concentration camps. They knew that they
moved the Jews around a lot, but they did not know the trains were full or
empty. No-one knows what they are doing
in these concentration camps, because media is not allowed in them. We don’t know, we are concentrating on yet
another Scandal where Trump has been impeached and his Republican Party will
not believe he has done anything wrong.
We are focusing on that and not on other stuff. The rhetoric has been kind of dark
lately. Rebellion and deathcamp
dark. What happens when politicians and
religious zealots become the same.
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