Thursday August 6, 2020
87 Days until the election on November 3rd
167 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
I was sitting in bed thinking about focus, specifically political focus. I was wondering what it is that Trump wants, that the Republicans want, and I can’t figure it out, and yet I can. As I see it, the problem is that they really don’t want anything and therein lies the answer and the problem.
Yes, he and they want to stay in power, but beyond that they have little or no interest in governing, and by that I mean they have no plan to make the lives of the people they govern better. They aren’t interested in improving the conditions of the general population. If anything they would argue against doing that under the guise of someone getting something for nothing.
I am struck by two comments I have heard in the last few years. One was Bill Clinton’s statement when Hillary was running. He said that the Republicans biggest complaint about the Democrats was that, “We didn’t clean up their messes fast enough.” The other was a much more recent comment. It concerned the report that the reason that the Trump administration decided against doing any nationwide about a corona virus response was that Jared Kushner (and I’m sure Trump too) saw the virus as affecting Democratic states only and that they were not “our people.”
The Republican Party has for as long as I’ve been aware always taken an us versus them attitude. Tip O’Neil in his book, “Speaker of the House,” talked about politics in Massachusetts. This before he moved on to national prominence. He talked about the head of the house in Massachusetts, who was a Republican, who was cordial to Tip, but wouldn’t pass anything or do anything that the Democrats wanted. Not that he didn’t like or agree with a lot of what Tip and his fellow Democrats wanted, but simply because it was proposed by Democrats, ie “the other side.”
I have seen no change in this attitude at a state or Federal level. Okay, so then I have to ask myself, “What do they want?” What do Republicans want? One of the presidential historians summed it up best when they spoke about George H. W. Bush becoming President. When he got to the office he really had no clear idea of what he wanted to do.
There was another anecdote that Tip O’Neil spoke about that illustrates this. Someone on George H. W. Bush’s staff was having a crisis at home. I forget exactly but George felt bad for him so they literally “passed the hat” and gave this guy whatever was in the hat. While a nice if not a condescending gesture, Tip thought to himself that Bush had vetoed a measure that would have similarly given the same kind of help to thousands of people in a similar situation. But there you have what I see as the fundamental difference between the governing philosophies.
The Democratic philosophy seems to be to help as many people as possible while the Republican one seems to be more of a concern that someone may get away with something and they don’t want that to happen so they try and prevent it. Or to put it another way, when I’ve tried to have conversations with people who hew to that sort of philosophy I mention the idea of a rising tide lifting all boats. What I get in response is some concern that someone may be doing something they don’t like or I get what I’ll call the “rugged individual” argument, which can best be summed up as, “Screw you, I got my yacht in the water. Good luck.”
So what does Trump want? I have an image of a blimp right in front of my face. I’m nose to nose with it and I’m trying to figure out what it is. It’s so close that it’s hard to know what it is. But like a helium balloon that you hold close to your ear you can feel something. You know it feels different. You can sense it, but you can’t quite identify what it is. The thing with Trump is that it’s so obvious and convoluted that it’s hard to believe.
I remember recently he said, he had done “more for the blacks” than anyone else. Okay, here’s the first thing to know – whenever Trump claims something outrageous it’s a lie. It’s easy to know when he’s doing so because he precedes the lie with a statement like “no one has done more.” Secondly, what does he really believe? To the extent he believes anything you can find it in Mary Trump’s book. She mentions the casual racism and the attitude of cheating as a way of life.
Trump has cheated his whole life. He knows it, because he tries so hard to hide the fact. He paid someone to take his college entrance exams. His sister did his homework. What he was doing during that time is hard to say. He is incurious about everything it seems. He is constantly fighting a rearguard action to stop people from knowing who he is.
How does this differ from the Republican Party? Not much, if at all. Trump is the logical outcome of this screwed up way of looking at the world. Whenever I have tried to understand a Republican viewpoint it is always held up by magical thinking somewhere along the way. The right wing media outlets and their people either outright lie or they quote some wacky obscure study, article, or person. None of it is mainstream and by that I mean generally accepted.
When I was a kid I remember studying about President Grant. Following the Civil War he had one of the most corrupt administrations in our history (present day excepted.) He used to go across the street and sit in the lobby of The Willard Hotel and read the newspaper. People learned this and used to hang out in the hotel’s lobby to ask favors and hence the term “lobbyist” was born.
I always thought that we would repeat that history of corruption again, one hundred years later, and that what would follow would be another depression. Maybe, I was off a bit in my timeline. I also forgot about the 1918 Flu epidemic. But here’s the thing I’m really struck by, the times that we as a nation have had the biggest problems a Republican has been President and their reaction has been to ignore the problem.
It is not until a Democrat gets in office that things get addressed. Once the Dems have cleaned things up a Republican gets back in and things start to slide downhill again. You have only to look at the charts of middleclass wealth since Reagan to see that. Ie Things have gone down hill for the average person since Reagan. This is not an accident.
However, you can actually go back further. Nixon was trying to figure out how to stop inflation and what to do about healthcare. He changed healthcare with his allowing his buddy, Edgar Kaiser, to set up an HMO. Not that there weren’t those kinds of things before but Nixon kind of set it up like a super highway to try and fix the healthcare system in our country. A problem that was caused during the Truman administration, when he couldn’t get Republican support for universal health care and went instead for an employee mandate. (How’s that working out btw? Oh what? You get fired and then you’ve got no health insurance? Hum, Republican response would be “too bad, so sad.”)
So Nixon couldn’t solve health care. Ford didn’t try; he worked on inflation. Carter came in and fixed the inflation issue. It cost him the Presidency. Reagan made things worse for the middle class. He gutted unions and made a deal with the Pope that killed off the zero population movement. Those two things meant that the average person no longer had a way to negotiate with big business for a decent wage and that poor women would be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.
And the cycle of screwing over the middle class and Dems trying to fix things has continued until the present day.
Now, with Trump, it is plainly clear to a majority of the people what Trump and the Republicans are up to. However, to quote Lincoln, “You can fool some of the people all of the time.” We now have a pretty good handle on that as a percentage, somewhere in the high thirty to low forty percent.
Oh, I’m sorry. Did I offend someone?
When will this pandemic end? That’s easy. There are two solutions: The Trump/Republican solution or the Scientific/Democratic solution.
The Trump/Republican solution is that it will magically go away. Well, they are right. It will go away. When? Under their plan when enough people die that the virus can no longer spread. You can look at the 1918 Flu epidemic to see what that would take, about 3% of the world’s population.
Or we can try another way, Andrew Cuomo showed how to do it, because he did it in New York. Other countries have done it too. We could try that.
Me? I think the Republicans should have a big convention, have some giant beach parties and the rest of us can hunker down and let them pass. (Hey, nice term huh?)
Okay, I’m kidding. But some of the reddest states are having this minor minor problem – where to put the bodies? Maybe, those states will have to do like they did int he 1918 Flu Pandemic? Let folks bury their own.
BTW We still aren’t sure where that pandemic started. It was attributed to Spain, but that is because Spain did not have as much censorship on its news as other countries. It appears that the flu was spread by returning soldiers from WWI. It may have come from Kansas of all places, but we aren’t sure. Turns out that what made this virus so deadly was three genes that allowed the bronchial tubes to get infected.
Okay, so until we get some real leadership we’ll go with the Trump “lot of death” plan, okay?
Then we’ll get a real leader in there – hopefully – if Trump and the Republicans don’t figure out a way to steal this election and we can shut this virus down in a couple of months here and then in a year or two around the world.
Have a nice day!
Thank-you.
I’m here to help.
You’re welcome.
PS What I need is a bigger Pumpkin Patch!
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