Day 812

Day 812 Friday March 29, 2019

584 Days to the 2020 election and 662 Days to Inauguration Day

Yesterday I wrote about:
The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Today I write about:
The Stupid, The Hypocritical, and The Insane
But first:
BACON

Yes, that’s right bacon. I had a dream. (Seems like that could be a good line for a speech, tense isn’t right…)
Most of the time when I dream they are very vivid and I know I won’t forget and by the time I wake up I can’t recall exactly what was going on, but I can tell you this – I’ve never dreamed about bacon before.
In this dream a bunch of people, me included, were debating whether we should have bacon at funerals. I think it was at funerals. I went with someone to the bathroom. On the way we had to go by trays of bacon already cooked. They were laid out on big flat baking sheets. We had to literally part the tables to get to the bathroom. It occurred to me at that moment in the dream, “What are we arguing about? Is it the cost of the bacon or is it who is going to cook the bacon?” It did not seem to enter into the dream whether bacon was the proper thing to serve at a funeral.
This led me to rethink something I had seen earlier in the day on facebook. It was a copy of a tweet by Rand Paul asking people to send him money so he could defeat socialism. Underneath the copy of the tweet the question was asked, Isn’t Rand Paul using socialism to ask people for him to defeat it? Indeed, he is/was.
So we can label that either stupid or hypocritical. With Rand Paul hypocritical seems to always fit better.

Then we get to the Republican attempts to once again repeal the Affordable Care Act and “replace it with something great.” They are now trying to throw out the whole law in the courts. The head of Trump’s reelection campaign outlined the strategy last night: first, repeal Obamacare, then put really smart people in a room to come up with a really great plan, and Congress will have to pass it because they will have a gun to their head and nothing gets done in Washington unless there’s critical deadline.

Okay, let’s review. The Republicans have tried to repeal the ACA almost 70 times and haven’t succeeded. The ACA was created by getting some really smart people who knew health care really well and putting them in a room. The plan was the one proposed by the very conservative Heritage Foundation. A plan they loved until a black man, a Democrat no less proposed it. The Dems also held open hearings, lots of them to get input. They reached across the aisle to include Republicans. They also based many of the practical parts of the ACA off the plan instituted in Massachusetts, by the Republican governor of that state Mitt Romney. In reaching across the aisle the Democrats and President Obama added most if not all of the concessions into the bill that the Republicans demanded. Then it came time to vote and not a single Republican went along with it.
After the bill was passed the Republicans bitched about it. What did they specifically point to? What did they not like? What did they say didn’t work and wasn’t working? Why the very things they wanted put in the bill.
That’s hypocrisy for you. It’s also stupid, maybe insane.
But wait, there’s more (hypocrisy, stupidity, and insanity.)

Let’s recall that the Republican idea of putting a bunch of really smart people in a room to figure out what to do has been there operating mantra for quite awhile. It was Paul Ryan’s. It was Trump’s election promise. It is also Howard Shultz’s plan.
When asked like the Iowa voter did of Chuck Grassley, “Why not fix what’s there?” They seem to have no answer other than it was done by the Democrats and to fix it would give a kudow to the Dems and they couldn’t do that.

The last time I know of in American history that a bunch of smart people were put in a room to figure out a plan was the Panic of 1907. There was no central bank at the time. The central banking function was being done by J.P.Morgan, not the company but the man himself. (Okay, and his bank of the same name.) Before that it had been done by Fiske and Gould until they got greedy overextended themselves and went bankrupt. In fact, if you go back through the history of our country before the Federal Reserve’s creation this country was in a perpetual cycle of boom and bust. (Something both Rand and Ron Paul ought to review to realize that their ideas on this are nuts, but that’s a different tenet of another story.)

In the Panic of 1907 many banks had over extended themselves. Morgan got all the bankers together and literally put them in a room and told them to come up with a plan. He sat outside the door and played solitaire and smoked cigars.
He was a big man. I think six foot seven and weighed 350 pounds. To be fat in that day was a sign of wealth, no one else could afford enough food to be fat. He also wore a beaver skin stovepipe top hat so all in all he must have cut a high wide swath when he walked. He was also driven. One time he climbed a roped runged ladder up the side of a ship. He had to because a lot of people were watching. Climb he did, with a cigar clamped in his mouth. He got to the top swung over the side and promptly collapsed.
The bankers came out with a plan. Morgan looked at it and said it was no good and sent them back into the room.
They came out with another plan. Once again, no good.
They came out with a third plan. He looked at it, said it would work, picked up the piece of paper, strode down Wall Street, went into the Stock Exchange, held up the paper and said he had the answer. Thus ended the panic.
We don’t have men like that anymore.

There are two important pieces to the put-smart-people-in-a-room scenario. One) they have to know about the subject they need to deal with. Two) there needs to be someone outside the door who keeps them in the room and knows even more than they do about the subject matter.
Given the people Trump has appointed, and given the people that Congressional Republicans have called on before for such tasks, there is little question in my mind that they couldn’t find a group of people to find their way out of an open paper bag.

So their plan, such as it is, is insane, because there is no plan. They have no smart people, and if they did they’d pick the wrong people for the task, and they certainly don’t have someone smarter than the bunch to lead.

What they will do is say the right things, criticize the other side, and then if they get in power appoint their plutocratic and religious bigots to do something. Either steal from us or constrict our freedoms depending on which group they put in place.

Can anyone name a time when the Republicans put a group of really smart people in a room and came up with a plan? How about a reasonable plan? I can’t. So why would we choose to let them try it now?

Moving on: The most depressing thing I saw while in Washington DC were groups of young students with some in their midst sporting new red sweatshirts or hats with Make America Great Again emblazoned on them. They were all young boys with that kind of smirky look like the kid who stood in front of the native American.
We need some t-shirts and hats with RESIST in cartouche style being sold.

584 Days to the 2020 election and 662 Days to Inauguration Day

PS Tintoretto “Paradise” 1583 at The National Gallery until July 7, 2019.