Dear America,
I happened across a love-fest between Sean Hannity and Marco Rubio yesterday, and to those of you who read these letters, even if only once or twice before, it will be no surprise to you that I found their mutual admiration society repugnant. So the fact that my criticism of the event is centered on the repetitive nature of Republican politics won't surprise you either, nor, perhaps, will it be of any interest to you since I have covered all of the topics I heard them discuss before. But I cannot resist pointing out that, while some in the Republican Party want to label Marco Rubio a "fresh, new fact" with prospect for success in national politics that were lacking during the preeminence of Mitt Romney, Rubio is just one more practitioner of stale old Republican tactics and strategy. Their strategy is to ascend to power by whatever means necessary, and their tactics are surprisingly uniform from electoral event to electoral event: they vilify the opposition for its ideas, and but proffer no ideas of their own. To put it concisely, with regard to everything that the Democrats and President Obama have suggested and done over the past six years, their candid appraisal is, "nope, that's not it." Their presumption, I presume, is that no one will notice that what they mean, but are not saying, is, "I got nothing here." Rubio made use of that tactic overtly on at least one occasion during his conversation with Hannity, which I have to admit I could only tolerate for about fifteen minutes.
Hannity lobbed Rubio a soft-ball something like, how are you going to defeat Hillary Clinton--whom the Democrats are going to coronate rather than nominate--and the Democratic Party. Rubio's response was a long-winded observation that the problem isn't that the candidate and the party are not good, it's that the Democrats' and President Obama's ideas are bad... Let me point out, gleefully, that there was nothing after that...no sign of an idea of his own. He mentioned "Obamacare" obliquely, that is, he said that it could never be repealed while President Obama is in office, but if a Republican president is elected to work with a "hopefully" Republican congress, Obamacare would be repealed and replaced. At that point, if Hannity were intellectually honest he would have asked, "with what?" Need I say that no such question was asked...at least during the period for which I could stomach their mutual preaching to their one note choir. What neither Rubio nor Hannity conceded, or even hinted at, was the fact that more than ten million people who never had health insurance before--millions of them voters--have health insurance now, nor did they offer anything more probable to replace it even though Rubio said that replacement was part of the repeal package. It was one more retread of the now ancient Republican litany on the subject of the universal healthcare system that they never will support, not because it constitutes government overreach, but because they really don't care about the 48 million Americans who had no insurance before the Affordable Care Act and the ones among them who died in droves not because they couldn't be cured of virulent disease, but because they couldn't afford to be. At least one other potential Republican candidate has proposed the health savings accounts that they are trying to sell as an alternative to a single payer system, but when the trappings of such a program are stripped away, it becomes apparent that such a plan helps only those who can afford them, and even they don't get the coverage for catastrophic illness that almost everyone needs.
And of course, they touched on international affairs...Iran in particular...and Rubio spewed the list of complaints that old-line conservative jingoists have used to justify war after war, four of the last five of which--Vietnam, the first Gulf war, the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan--we have prosecuted without a scintilla of progress toward the putative goal of democratic liberty for all. In each of those cases, our opposition ultimately prevailed or the government we installed turned out to be a kleptocracy that oppresses the parties we deposed instead of the deposed oppressing those whom we placed in power. As to Granada, the only possible exception to my assessment, I don't know what the outcome was. I don't even know what the war was about, nor does anyone else I suspect.
As to Rubio and Hannity, I assume that they also went into the Obama administration's efforts to mitigate the damage done by the post- Glass-Steagall economy that the Republicans touted as an alternative to Keynesian economics that would create a self-priming economic pump that would last in perpetuity. And in that context, they probably panned the Obama recovery legislation that passed in his first year in office by observing that, while the unemployment rate had been cut in half, the deficit grew astronomically and so did the national debt while the jobs created were inadequate, both in terms of the wealth they produced and their relationship to American dependence on foreign talent. Rubio puled that we have ceased to train the tradesmen we need in our public education system though we spend billions on Pell grants and college loans, which he didn't seem to understand to mean that he supported creating a population of tradesmen with tax dollars, but he had no use for the use of government funds to create a population of professionals with aspirations to join Rubio in the middle class. It was as if he said that he was all in favor of training maids and nannies, but he didn't see the need to train teachers for a public school system.
The idea that a narcissistic, self-deluded recipient of the largess of his great nation could succeed in deluding the electorate into the same set of beliefs about him without including the fact that if it weren't for that largess, he wouldn't be where he is gives me a dramatically sinking feeling about our national future. I do not support converting our secular humanism into sanctimonious social Darwinism, and that is what a Rubio presidency concomitant with entrenchment of a Republican congress would constitute. Fortunately, it doesn't look any more possible now than it did before Sean Hannity tried to suggest otherwise last night.
Your friend,
Mike
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