Letter 2 America for October 14, 2014

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Dear America,
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Chuck Grassley is a senator from Iowa, and he is probably one of the ten most prominent names in the Republican contingent in The Senate currently.  Last week, he accused President Obama of playing politics with the nomination of the attorney general candidate to be named to take the place of Eric Holder, the incumbent.  Of course, if anyone is playing politics just before the November election it's Grassley, which begs the question, why do his constituents...why do all Republican constituents for that matter...keep sending these transparent political hacks to congress.  They accused President Obama of playing politics when he deferred issuance of executive orders to fill the interstices in our immigration laws left by the refusal of John Boehner to put any of the immigration bills passed by The Senate on the floor of The House for a vote.  No one on the Republican side of the aisle in either house of congress is accusing Boehner of playing politics with immigration, but when The President defers rectification of the abdication of responsibility to amend our outmoded immigration laws that Boehner's omission constitutes, that is political maneuvering in their eyes.  The hypocrisy is plain, yet the voters seem to be leaning toward giving the Republicans more power in Washington next year after the coming mid-term election.  Even this business about the nomination of Holder's successor is hypocritical.  There are many nominations to the federal bench languishing in committee because the Republicans have put "holds" on them, but when it comes to the attorney general, all of a sudden they are in a hurry.  That is plain and simple hypocrisy, but do the voters hold that against the Republicans? I don't think so.  Thus, as far as hypocrisy goes, the voters are demonstrating plenty.

All of the polls show that the American people are disaffected with both houses of congress to the extent that the popular approval rate for those two bodies is in single digits.  Nothing gets done, the people complain, yet when people like Chuck Grassley talk out of both sides of their mouths, they don't pay a price politically; they get reelected.  It's the same thing with the ISIL problem in Syria and Iraq.  The American people don't want us to get involved in another war there, yet when Republicans chide President Obama by claiming that he has been indecisive and they complain that he is responsible for the rise of ISIL--not the government of Iraq that George W. Bush installed and we all left behind, and not George Bush himself for getting us into this mess in the first place--the American people seem to respond by endorsing those complaints about the Obama presidency as if to say that we are morally obligated to baby sit the Arab world from here to eternity.  The fact that the Obama Doctrine embodies what the American people claim to want--that is, disengagement from Arab chaos to the extent that we will not send ground troops into the region again--doesn't seem to resonate with us Americans.  We don't want him to send troops, but when he doesn't and the Republicans complain, we side with them.  Then of course there is Obamacare.

At present, 10.3 million Americans have signed up for insurance through the healthcare.org insurance exchange.  That includes probably five million or more people who didn't have health insurance before the Affordable Care Act, many of whom have never had health insurance.  Those aren't statistics that demonstrate a failure of the program, yet not only is it the case that the success of the law isn't being touted, the Republican pule that Obamacare has been a miserable failure seems to continue to have credence among the majority of Americans.  Thus, the Republicans are responsible for another outright deception that the American people not only accept and believe, but agitate on the basis of as well.  Ask around about Obamacare and you will find that there are more people who think it an abuse of government power than a boon for the people of this country on the whole.  Frankly, I do blame President Obama for the failure of the American people to confront the truth about Republican politics.

I've said it many times, and I'll say it again.  If you want the people of this country to hear you, you have to go on television after the majority of them eat dinner, and before they begin watching the pap that television offers them every night.  Bill Clinton, for example, used to have press conferences that preempted regular television programming, and he probably did so on average more than once a year...usually at a crucial time politically...and he remains popular with the American people to this day, largely because he spoke directly to us rather than through Diane Sawyer and Scott Pelley on the nightly news.  Yet, when this president has a press conference, it is at some factory in the mid-west at lunch time, and all we hear of it is the few questions and partial answers that interest the network news programmers.  And I have news for our president, they are not on his side.  They say what they think Americans want to hear, and give short shrift to what they don't.  It isn't antipathy toward him; it's just pandering.  I am willing to bet that if President Obama held an evening press conference now, the trend of the November election would be substantially altered for the better, that is, for the Democrats.  Mind you, the Democrats have their share of hypocrites as well, but I would rather see them as incumbents in trouble for it than Republicans.

Your friend,

Mike

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This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on October 15, 2014 10:26 AM.

Letter 2 America for October 10, 2014 was the previous entry in this blog.

Letter 2 America for October 17, 2014 is the next entry in this blog.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on October 15, 2014 10:26 AM.

Letter 2 America for October 10, 2014 was the previous entry in this blog.

Letter 2 America for October 17, 2014 is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

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