Dear America,
I forced myself to watch the Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night even though I find those guys...and that woman...infuriatingly dishonest intellectually. They managed to blame Barrack Obama for what they construe as the miserable condition of our country without giving even passing notice to the conditions he faced when he took office thanks to his Republican predecessor and a congress that had one Republican house and one Democratic one with neither able to function because the Republicans use procedure to control what they can't control by democratic right. Unemployment was near 10%, we were bleeding jobs at the rate of 750,000 per month and we were in a recession, not that the GDP actually is an indicator of anything other than corporate profits. More than ten million Americans who never had it have health insurance now, and though they complain about the Iran nuclear deal, we at least have some kind of understanding with that rogue nation that we never had before relative to acquisition of a bomb. So for them to call the Obama administration a catastrophe is nothing but self-serving hypocrisy...the crassest kind of politics, and the false claim that W kept us safe is nothing but whistling in the dark. We may not have had a second 9/11 type attack, but the incubator for all the attempts that have been thwarted since was built under George W. Bush's aegis through exactly the same kind of policies that the Republicans are promoting now.
But the one fortunate thing about having watched the debate was observation of the spectacle that the Republicans have made of themselves over the past twelve years. Huckabee contrived to defend the ultra vires acts of a red-neck town clerk by invoking her first amendment religious freedom while ignoring her attempted violation of the other constitutional freedoms--freedoms confirmed by the Supreme Court very recently--of other people they don't like. Trump was his usual bombastic self, but the hard-core audience, ultimately a small electoral minority, applauded for him anyway. Jeb Bush stumbled through without saying much of anything at all and Carly Fiorina was the surprising bully on the stage, ramming her jingoistic drivel down everyone's throat as if she had the personal magnitude to bring Vladimir Putin and the Ayatollah down to their knees just because she ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground, which she sees as a success despite the vast consensus to the contrary. Ben Carson was the low key adult in the group, but even he committed a couple of faux pas, at least in my opinion, albeit subtle ones. John Kasich was unsurprisingly, repetitively and self-aggrandizingly self-promotional and Chris Christy was his usual self-serving, positivistic self. Surprisingly, Rand Paul sounded reasonable, at least on foreign policy and the absurd argument over marijuana laws versus states' rights. But overall, the party didn't present anything that looked like a viable presidential candidate. As a Democrat, it all looked pretty good to me.
But then there is the fact that people like Donald Trump can gain the kind of popularity he has with ideas like one that was presented to him yesterday at a campaign event: that as a nation we need to get rid of the Muslims among us, including Barrack Obama, whom the questioner claimed was a Muslim himself. Trump responded by saying, essentially, that he will be putting out some sort of policy statement on the issue soon. I can hardly wait. But meanwhile, no one seems to have risen from the crowd to protest either premise...that we need to cull Muslims from American society or that our president is a Muslim. I happen to believe that Muslims need to do more to eradicate its violently radical contingent, small as it may be, but I can't believe that anyone sane clings to the myth about Obama's Muslim affiliation, good, bad or indifferent as such would be. That's what scares me: the resurgence of American xenophobia and jingoism, both of which got us to where we are today in the world. And amidst that groundswell of fatuous nationalistic conceit, fifteen Republicans have stood up to volunteer to lead the movement, and thus this country into oblivion. We are fortunate as a nation that, at least for now, there isn't enough of a moron constituency to represent an electoral majority, but what if their numbers grow. What are we going to do as a nation if they take power and propel us in the direction they seek for us. They cling to the idea that Reagan was a great president, but they ignore the fact that we have Putin today because Reagan pushed Gorgachev out of office in favor of Boris Yeltzin, which prepared the Russian political ground for the rise of the hard-line, former head of the KGB. They don't acknowledge that the demise of the Sunni empire of Saddam Hussein was the fertile ground in Iraq from which ISIL sprang to life as the scion of Al Qaeda and took to invading Syria. They don't acknowledge that the Republicans gave us unemployment, concentration of wealth in a ruling class and wages for the working man that have not allowed for progress toward the American Dream for over 35 years. So much of all of it is self-destructive for those who would put one of them in high office, yet they are so zealous...so anxious to preside over their own debacle.
In the end, it looks like the rational among us will still be safe after 2016. My question is, what then?
Your friend,
Mike
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