Day after day, the bad news spills out: During last year’s presidential campaign, the Russians not only hacked into the Democrats’ e-mail system but also proposed a meeting with Donald Trump’s son, on at least the pretext that they had incriminating evidence about Hillary Clinton. A gleeful Donald Trump Jr. agreed to the meeting, and, for good measure, took along his brother-in-law and the Trump campaign chairman.
Republicans in Congress have responded fairly tepidly to signs of Russia’s meddling in our election, but they’re dead set on making it harder for Americans to vote.
Trump is alienating the leaders of foreign nations at a horrifying pace, and the damage he’s doing – to our reputation, to our history of international leadership, and to other nations’ trust in us – will last long after he’s gone.
Trump appointees and Republicans in Congress have their sights set on regulations that protect the environment and Americans’ health and safety.
Trump has walked away from an important international agreement on climate change, despite growing evidence that the world faces catastrophe if we don’t work together, quickly.
North Korea is testing missiles that could reach our shores, and our volatile, unpredictable president will determine our response.
Meantime, on Capitol Hill, Republicans continue to construct a war on the poor, the elderly, and the sick. The latest version of the Republicans’ health care bill – abandoned Monday night – would have let health-insurance companies charge the sick and the elderly far more than they would charge people with no health problems. That version of the Republican health-care plan was so bad that the two big insurance trade associations, America’s Health Insurance Plans and BlueCross BlueShield Association, came out against it.
The plan was “simply unworkable in any form,” the two groups said in a letter to Senate leaders, “and would undermine protections for those with pre-existing medical conditions, increase premiums, and lead to widespread terminations of coverage for people currently enrolled in the individual market.”
The senior-citizen lobbying group AARP said the plan would “make a bad health bill worse” and warned that it would tell its 38 million members how every Senator voted.
And here was the banner on the American Medical Association’s website: “New Health Bill: Tell Senate to Put Patients Before Politics. Join AMA and urge senators to stop Medicaid cuts & ensure meaningful, affordable coverage.”
None of that opposition mattered to most Republican senators, and the bill came close to passing. And with that plan dead, the Senate’s majority leader, Mitch McConnell, was urging his legislators to simply repeal Obamacare and come up with a replacement in a couple of years. That would get Republicans past the midterm elections, but it would throw millions off of health insurance, reinstate the atrocities of the old system, and throw the insurance industry into chaos.
This is just incomprehensible.
In his column late last week, the Times’ David Brooks traced some Trump family history and said that a “moral obliviousness” was bred into our current president and his namesake son. “It takes generations to hammer ethical considerations out of a person’s mind and to replace them entirely with the ruthless logic of winning and losing,” Brooks wrote, “to take the normal human yearning to be good and replace it with a single-minded desire for material conquest; to take the normal human instinct for kindness and replace it with a law-of-the-jungle mentality.”
Trump Sr. and Jr. aren’t the only ones who seem to have lost the normal human instinct for kindness, though. That loss is evident throughout the Republican Party.
So here we are. Conservatives’ grip on the Republican Party seems permanent. Even if Donald Trump doesn’t fill out his term, Mike Pence will take his place. And Ruth Bader Ginsberg won’t live forever.
Good merciful heaven: how did we let this happen to this country? And how will we fix this mess?
This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2017.
“how did we let this happen to this country? And how will we fix this mess?”
I think the answer is with intense grassroots political involvement. I think with more dynamic political drama. The comfortable, educated middle class have become indifferent to politics, but now, thanks to Trump and the Right, we are all at risk.
And what about City Newspaper?
What can you do to open your pages more to citizen involvement, at the local level?
=============================================================
My own concern has focused on student motivation in failing schools. Will you seek out creative opinions and ideas from people like me, or will you disregard them?
Trump wakes us up, with nightmares. Give us hope, City News!
—————————————————————————–
http://www.SavingSchools.org
One man-Donald Trump is almost single handedly taking on the Washington establishment. The left, the right and the media. He’s fighting to take back the country from the ruling class and give it back to US. Our reputation in the world has been restored. Where do you come up with this stuff Mary Anna???
The real news is out there. You have to search for it and read differing viewpoints.
johnny – Demagogue Donny is certainly taking back the country. The only question is how far he’s taking it back.
Given the extent of the arrogance, ignorance, irresponsibility, religious jingoism, nepotism, saber rattling, borderline graft, and disregard for the rights and needs of the common men and women, it looks like he’s taking us back to about 1898.
I’m sick of the defeatist attitude City Newspaper has taken when it comes to fighting back against Trump (or not fighting back, according to them). According to this editorial, we might as well all commit suicide because there’s actually no hope. Trump might as well be dictator and our world is officially now a living Hell and there is nothing we can do to change it.
I thought the media was supposed to inspire us to fight back against Trump? To inspire us to make a difference and change things? This is what the media should do, not tell us to sit down and take it because everything we will do is in vain. No hope? It’s the media’s job to find hope. Not shove hopelessness so far down our throats that we’re not motivated to do anything.
Are you really going to let the Trump regime kill your fighting spirit once and for all? Are you going to let them win for eternity? Because I’m not. Unlike you, I don’t have the resources to move to another country and run away from the problems we face. I have no choice but to stay and fight. And you owe a responsibility to your readers to do the same.
Phillip – I don’t believe that City is being defeatist. I think they’re being realistic.
Trump came to power because he was able to rally millions of lowest common denominator voters , both fanatic followers and traditional Republicans, by appealing to their baser and basest instincts. Hillary lost because in key states other millions of Democratic voters sat on their hands either because they underestimated the threat that Crazy Donald posed to America and/or because they got the little feelings hurt after she trounced Bernie in the primaries.
Now, despite Trump’s record low poll numbers, there’s no reason to believe that things will be different in 2020 (if you’re waiting for the moral cowards in the GOP to impeach and convict Trump before then you’re wasting your time) given that the Democarts have no obvious presidential candidate and Trump will still have his hard core of millions of brown shirts.
The best that we can hope for, and the best that media such as City can do, is to beat the drum for Democratic voter registration and attendence at the polls in 2018 to give us either a Democratic House or Senate to block the agenda of Trump and the Republican Party. But even then I wouldn’t be sanguine about our chances of taking back either house. I suspect it’ll be 2022 or 2024, before enough voters wake up to the danger posed by Trumpism.
Well, Pres Trump may be a buffoon, but there’s a great deal about the current scene in Washington that is contrived against him. There is zero evidence the Russians did anything concrete to influence the last election cycle other than pump out alternative news – none of it accused of being false, but slanted. This is SOP for Western media. In any case, our own SCOTUS has ruled news outlets have no obligation to report the truth and are not accountable even if they publish outright falsehoods.
The Russians didn’t hack the DNC – Seth Rich did, and was killed for it. The latest evidence (which supports what is already known about Mr Rich’s extensive contacts with Wikileaks) shows it was originally downloaded by someone in physical contact with DNC servers, not hacked half a world away.
Legislatively, Obama was no more environmentally friendly than Trump is turning out to be or Clinton would have been. Fracking took off under Obama’s watch. The WOT expanded to a number of countries under Obama’s watch, leading to the destruction of Libya and Syria, and the destruction of Ukraine under the manipulations of Clinton protege Nuland. Obama did nothing while public sector unions were attacked in many states, Clinton would have done nothing either.
As bad as Trump is, at least he’s galvanizing folks into action. Empowering the Democrats as a response is pointless. With few exceptions the Dems at the federal level share do NOT share the goals of the Center or Left leaning citizenry.
“Out of the mouths of babes…”
=======================
I once was talking to a friend and his 3 year old son. Suddenly, the son said, “you said a bad word.” What did I say I asked. The father spelled out the word ” S T U P I D”. Then he suggested that I might say “silly”, instead.
Perhaps, with Trump and company, we have to find ways to use silly humor to try to reach them and to try to reach the American people, with reasoning.
For example, there are the Trump impersonations on SNL and Comedy Central. But perhaps the humor could be turned into reasoning, that makes sense even to Trump, and the Right.
No matter how stupid Trump and the Right might seem to be, they have power and they must be dealt with, one way or another, until they leave office…
http://www.SavingSchools.org