November 2015 Archives

Dear America,

As the Republican campaign to reoccupy the White House wears on, the Republicans in it become more and more shameless.  The pandering and demagoguery become more overt and offensive with each passing day.  Rubio is campaigning against President Obama by offering the same strategy as the one we are already pursuing in Syria against ISIL, but he says he will send in more special forces...not how many more, but more...and claims that that is a distinction, though it is not a difference.  Cruz, on the other hand, is either nakedly opportunistic or nakedly bigoted, in either case an odious and foolhardy...Republican.  In the guise of a conservative, he now wants to infringe on religious freedom by denying entry into this country to Muslims.  Then there's the self-proclaimed "kinder, gentler" conservative, Jeb Bush.  I suppose we shouldn't expect more from a man who, in his middle age, has gone by and still goes by an anagram of his first, middle and last names to the extent that no one even remembers that that is what he is doing...except Barbara, W and HW of course.  Bush wants us to concentrate on the Christians among the Syrian refugees in hopes that no one will notice that he too wants to censor the religious freedoms that we are all supposed to be able to take for granted.  Of course the bloviator in chief, Donald Trump, has trumped them all with claims of thousands of New Jersey Muslims on roof tops cheering the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001: a fiction crafted by him from whole cloth, but believed by the masses of Republicans who adore him. 

But demagoguery and misdirection aside, while the Republican base seems to be eating this red herring with simpletons' glee, it never will be anything but a misdirection, like Jeb Bush claiming that his brother, president in September 2001, kept us safe.  Whether he did or not, whether ISIL perpetrators are always Muslims or not, whether the world is round or not, restricting the flow of Syrians into the country, Muslim or not, won't solve any problems.  Consider that the among the Muslims who perpetrated the Paris shootings were one Belgian and five Frenchmen, two of whom were residing in Belgium.  Add to that the fact that fully 10% of Frenchmen are Muslim and if excluding anyone from immigration could help, it would make more sense to exclude French Muslims than the Muslim Syrian refugees.  But after all, reason has nothing to do with all this.  Take, for example, the clamor over our screening process, which is the most rational suggestion the conservative, Republican far right seems to be offering.  In the New York Times last week there was a table of the course of an application from a Syrian refugee, which incidentally takes two years to process.  It entails investigations and interviews by the U.N., the State Department, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service and the Department of Homeland Security...at least.  And the FBI, the Defense Department's terrorism detection department and something called the National Counterterrorism Center are involved in some classified way as well according to the Seattle Times' November 18th account of the process.   But now the Republicans, albeit with the support of 40 Democratic Congressmen, have passed H.R. 4038, which is supposed to be a measure to strengthen our vetting process for Syrian and Iraqi nationals and residents.  It supposedly does so by requiring that the heads of three agencies sign off on the approval of each application for immigration to the U.S., and that the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security reaffirm those certifications every year.  That's the Republican balm to salve our fears about domestic terrorism: get three more signatures, one from the head of each department already investigating every application for admission to this country, and have an inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security recertify those applications a year after they have been granted.  And about this would-be dramatic improvement in our security screening process, conservatives who claim to oppose excess government intervention in our lives are congratulating themselves.  Meanwhile, our president has vowed to veto it even though it changes absolutely nothing of significance.  I guess he's going to borrow the Republican foot shooting pistol for awhile after they use it.

It is sound and fury signifying nothing, as Shakespeare might have said; a tempest in a teacup.  But the Republicans continue to try to beat the Democrats up with this issue, all the while refusing to look the American people...us...in the eye.  The reality is that someone who wants to blow up a building or shoot people can get into this country by eluding detection no matter how intense our scrutiny of Syrian refugees is.  There are visas of all kinds issued every day for people to come here to work, go to school or just visit, and there are lunatics in America just like there are in Syria, Belgium and France.  We do have to be vigilant, but being unrealistic partisan about it serves no purpose...unless you are a Republican running for president.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Since the attacks in France by ISIL terrorists, the Republicans have been almost univocal in their criticism of President Obama for a purported lack of a formulated strategy in Syria and Iraq, and in their calls for a full scale invasion of the Levant with American troops on the ground whether or not the states in the region participate.  They all say that the United States has to lead the invasion and that the Arab allies must be made to participate fully as well, but none of them have any suggestions as to how we manage to make them when they have shown nothing but diffidence so far, even though ISIL shows no signs of going away, or of limiting its ambitions to areas already conquered.  So what it comes to is that the Republicans once again advocate unilateral action by the United States on the other side of the world--unilateral because they surely must know that previous "alliances" were nothing but us and a few token soldiers from the Arab states, Britain and France, and that in reality there is nothing to suggest that anything different is going to happen now--as if they were on another planet for the past 65 years.

We joined the "police action" in Korea in 1950 and we still have just under 30,000 troops stationed there.  We had more than half a million soldiers in Vietnam at one point during the Johnson administration and we have buried close to 60,000 of them over the years, all so that we could wear t-shirts made there by the supposedly evil communists we were trying to expel.  We watched the French get their collective ass handed to them, and we did the same thing they did anyway because we didn't seem to learn from Korea.  Then, after a couple of skirmishes in places like Granada and the first time in Iraq--there really was some semblance of an alliance the first time--we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan again courtesy of the last Republican presidential administration...that of George W. Bush...and we are still fighting those battles.  Even though W. set the time table for us to be out of Iraq and Afghanistan by now, the Republicans are trying to blame President Obama for the collapse of Iraq and the chaos in Afghanistan because he tried to follow that timetable, and once again, they are refusing to learn the lessons of Korea, Vietnam, and the same war that they want to revive in Iraq.  It is nothing but a reprise of the jingoistic polemic that they always employ when they think American pride is at stake.  They don't want to admit that we now have ISIL and the various fragments of al Qaeda thanks to Bush...their guy...not Obama, and that doing what Bush did again won't yield any different result.  Doesn't it all make you want to ask, when will they ever learn?  Isn't it a mark of insanity to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result?  And if the Republicans are insane, what does that make us Americans.  We keep electing them.

Ted Cruz is out front banging the drum for a renewed war in Iraq and Syria, and not to be outdone by either Cruz or his brother, Jeb Bush is playing the same tune.  There's no need to mention that Trump wants to bomb ISIL back to the stone age and overwhelm him with the same army that couldn't save Iraq and Afghanistan from themselves.  What else would you expect from a bombastic blatherskite like him.  As to the rest of them, Rand Paul is the only exception to the proposition that Republican presidential candidates never saw an opportunity for war that they didn't want to seize on.  Some of them want to limit American action to things like a "no fly zone," which ignores the question, when the Russians violate it for the first time are we going to shoot down their jets and risk a nuclear confrontation?  Others want a full blown invasion, but except for the libertarian Paul, they all want to cover our troops in glory one more time, never mind the blood and tomb stones and the virtually zero chance of long term success that we can anticipate without the full participation of the countries in the region.  They seem undeterred by the fact that we haven't been able to motivate Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey (except for the Kurds), Egypt or any of the North African countries to make any serious contribution to the "alliance" that we are supposed to be only leading but that in reality is us, virtually alone, dropping bombs that accomplish very little in the long run without troops from the region to occupy the vacuums those bombs create.

Bernie Sanders is right.  Unless the Arab states, including Iraq, demonstrate the resolve to participate in the effort to extirpate ISIL, which is more of a threat to them than to the rest of the world...unless the Muslim population of the world takes a more active role in identifying and anathematizing the jihadists among them and expelling them from the faith...ISIL will kill more of them than anyone else by far.  So we have no prospect of success if we act unilaterally, and even predominantly, so let's wait until they get serious, and then we'll help them.  President Obama does have a strategy despite Republican fulminations to the contrary...and that's it.  It's the only thing that makes any sense at all.  It's the Republicans who have their heads up their...buried in the sand.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I have always thought that one day ISIL would go too far and the consequence would be that the world would be mobilized against it.  I thought that what happened last Friday in Paris was it, and it may be, but outside of the French increase in its dedication to the air war against ISIL in Syria and Iraq, there really isn't any sign of enhanced commitment to the task of extirpating ISIL on any other front.  President Obama gave a press conference on the subject in Turkey today, and it was surprisingly tepid in its tone.  We have been doing what needs to be done, The President said, and we will continue to do so in concert with our allies.  But despite foreshadowing that France would invoke Article V of the NATO charter, which reads in essence that an attack on one member is an attack on them all, nothing but foreshadowing has really occurred.  I am left to ask myself, if this attack on France with hundreds dead and gravely wounded left in its wake is doesn't suffice to galvanize the world, what would.  While it is pointless to pontificate on the subject of how the world should respond, here is what I think should occur.

First, ISIL has proclaimed itself a caliphate, which is essentially a Muslim nation with all that such entails: sovereignty within its borders, inclusion in the world of nations as an independent entity, and most importantly, responsibility for its acts as a nation.  When the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York were destroyed by terrorists dispatched by Al Qaeda, George Bush and Dick Cheney declared a "War on Terror" and got congress to enact the AUMF, or Authorization for Use of Military Force at the discretion of The President, and President Obama continues to rely on that authorization for his bombing campaign against ISIL today.  But it constituted in effect a declaration of war on terrorists...criminals, not a nation...which was not unlike the war on crime that had dismantled much of the Mafia in the preceding decades, but had in no way been a war in the universally understood sense.  Use of the term war was just a piece of demagoguery intended to inspire public support with jingoism and chauvinistic fervor.  There was no nation on which to declare war per se, and calling it war was just a convenient euphemism.  But now, in the war against ISIL, the concept of war is not so much of a stretch since there is a self-proclaimed nation to declare it on.  President Obama has been seeking a new AUMF to specifically include ISIL, but I think he should instead seek a formal declaration of war...a real declaration of war as prescribed by the US Constitution, and a real war should be waged against the Caliphate of ISIL, but only after all of NATO does the same, either through NATO's charter provisions or individually in compliance with Article V.  Then there would be arrayed against ISIL an alliance the likes of which hasn't been seen since the entry of the United States into World War II.  There would be no question of unilateral American occupation of Syria and Iraq after such a declaration, and the might of virtually all of the western nations would be unified and dedicated to a single purpose: bringing ISIL to its knees and gaining either a full, formal surrender from its leaders, or killing them all.  There would be no more problem of powerful nations and their weak sisters.  The nations of the world would be effectively one, and ISIL would be deprived of the propaganda opportunity to single out individual nations as targets in consequence of their individual actions.  ISIL are today's Nazi regime, and we should deal with them as such...all for one and one for all.

With the advent of what could pass as a real alliance of all nations, all of them participating in the war effort with unreserved commitment and vigor, an army could be formed and inserted into the Levant where ISIL claims its caliphate, and with a concerted effort, the alliance should be able to devastate the components of the ISIL caliphate in the physical sense in short order.  In the aftermath of that victory, some occupation of the area would be necessary, but it would be like the allied occupation of Germany after World War II rather than being an American enterprise like the after math of the Iraq war.  That is what would distinguish the war against the ISIL caliphate from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan too for that matter.  As a real international coalition, the responsibility would fall equally, or at least proportionally, on all the nations participating, and there could thus be no focused zealots' wrath against one nation, which I believe would go a long way toward disabling the propaganda mechanism of the forces of darkness constituted by ISIL, which has managed to create a movement by pointing a finger at The West, the United States in particular.  But let me point out one more thing that I have referenced before.

There will always be a religious and intellectual luddite contingent in the world.  And in the case of religious luddites like ISIL and the Taliban, they are sufficiently committed by virtue of the willingness of their leaders to order their followers to commit suicide and the willingness of those members to do so that they can continue to wreak isolated instances of mayhem and havoc for the foreseeable future no matter what the fate of the caliphate in consequence of military defeat.  So bizarre as it seems, and I concede that this idea sounds and probably is bizarre, I also believe that we have to give a caliphate like ISIL's a place to exist in the world as long as it allows those within its borders to come and go as they please and they refrain from obtrusive actions like continued terrorism.  And it seems to me that Afghanistan is the most logical place since in its history, no other nation has ever been able to dominate it for long, including Alexander the Great, Russia and the United States.  Such an entity, in that it would be definable, could be forced to comport its conduct with the basic comity of nations honored by the rest of the world.  As long as we can vouchsafe the exodus of those who don't want to live the ISIL-Taliban mode of life, I think we should consider such an arrangement, but for now, it seems that the status quo is all we can look forward to along with the next ISIL attack on civilization.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Marco Rubio scares me.  Donald Trump is a buffoon and his presidential prospects are limited.  Even if he were to emerge from the ill-conceived Republican nomination process with its incessant debates, he could never be the choice of a majority of voters in this country no matter who ran against him for the Democrats.  Jeb Bush is as inept and intellectually deficient as his brother was, and this time around, the Republican base isn't inclined, it seems, toward another sluggish witted Bush.  The others are so lacking in broad appeal...and in most cases substance...that their chances are equally minimal.  But Rubio, with his facile glibness and his reasonable solutions to some problems, has some appeal to voters for his competency when it comes to putting his ideas before them and what seems a rational approach to problem solving generally.  But hidden among those rational ideas--his approach to immigration for example seems fair and balanced--are other notions that are very Reaganesque in an era when Reaganesque is dangerous.  For example, with China, and now it seems Russia too, at their peaks of formidability, we cannot lapse into cold-war saber rattling with impunity, and the fact is, there still are large nuclear arsenals in the world, and some of them are in the hands of lunatics.  One peremptory move in too provocative a direction could release the crazy of a dictator like North Korea's "Dear Leader," Kim Jung Un, and we could find ourselves launching weapons in retaliation with all the imminent risk of spreading nuclear conflict that such would entail.

But even on the less dramatic levels Rubio is a little menacing.  He is a Hayek/Mises, supply-side, absolutely free-market economic Darwinist with Ayn Rand sensibilities relative to those who perhaps don't have either the internal or external resources that the more fortunate among us have at our disposal.  He is part of the crowd that espouses the notion that if you aren't rich, it's your fault because in this country, everyone can be.  But like the rest of his ilk, Rubio doesn't seem at all concerned that a person of limited intellectual capacity...and I don't mean impairment...can only expect to enjoy a certain standard of living no matter what he does.  Such a person working at a fast-food restaurant making $9 an hour will always struggle no matter how many hours, and how hard he works.  But his efforts are just as admirable as those of anyone to whom life comes easy because of inherited wealth or intellect.  So when someone like Rubio opposes a $15 minimum wage because it might diminish the number of low paying jobs, he ignores the fact that those minimum wage jobs are insufficient to raise hard working people, sometimes working more than one of those jobs at a time, out of poverty.  And then there is Rubio's tendency toward eristry to contend with.  When Jeb Bush confronted Rubio with his virtual abandonment of his senatorial duties in favor of campaigning so as to fulfill his own personal political ambitions, Rubio's response was an ad hominem attack on Bush to the effect that someone else had suggested to Bush that he could gain political ground by doing so, at which juncture Bush demonstrated that in a battle of wits he is an unarmed man.  Bush was incapable of reflecting Rubio's deflective, unresponsive attack on him back to Rubio by simply saying something like, the source of the question isn't important, the question is.  He might have added a couple of rhetorical flourishes like, the people of your state elected you to serve them, but you are out here serving yourself and your personal ambition after pleading to them for their trust and support.  He might have said, if you're not going to do the job, at least send the paychecks back...or he might just have repeated the question until Rubio answered.  But Rubio was well rehearsed, and he knows his adversaries well, anticipating that Bush would stand there like a deer in the headlights instead of rearing like a rampant grizzly bear.  There is no doubt that Rubio is smart, and that is what makes him dangerous.  Add to that the fortitude to admit his peccadilloes, such as his misuse of a Republican Party credit card and his loss of a house to foreclosure during the financial crisis, doing so with sufficient charismatic dismissiveness that his short-comings are just brushed aside and you have a politician who can basically get away with anything.

With a year to go before the election, and nine months, more or less, until the Democratic and Republican conventions, Rubio seems to me to be the bet to make in the Republican field.  While Carson may have the intellectual substance to match Rubio in public confrontations during late debates to come, he lacks Rubio's subtle ability to seem above the fray while knocking the oppositions teeth out.  It seems likely to me that those two will be the last men standing, and while Carson scares me not just for his politics but for his naivety as well, and in the end his lack of preparedness for high office, Rubio at least has politics in his background up to the U.S. Senate level.  He can claim the same level of experience as our present president, and do so while evincing the kind of force of personality that we can only wish now that President Obama had had for the past seven years.  We are probably safe in that Hillary Clinton has that same combination of qualities that Rubio demonstrates, but she has at least two advantages.  First she is a woman and most American voters...most voters are women...will see that as a qualification, and I am not sure I disagree with them.  Second, she is Bill Clinton's wife, and thus, he will be out there campaigning for her, which is an asset of such magnitude that it too cannot be ignored.  I'm confident that we won't see a President Rubio on inauguration day 2017, though in 2025 I'm not so sure.  Me, I'm voting for Sanders in the Connecticut primary, but we all know how that's going to go.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

To his credit, The President finally took a page out of John Boehner's Republican play book.  In order to prevent his partisans from being forced to take positions on the XL segment of the otherwise-already-built Keystone pipeline, he disapproved TransCanada's application for permission to build it.  It really doesn't matter anyway.  It might have generated three or four thousand jobs for periods of a few months along the course of the XL from Canada to Steele City, Nebraska, and it was supposed to create 35 (not 3,500 but only 35) permanent jobs, but that would have been barely a drop in a very large bucket that, incidentally seems to be almost full now anyway.  What bothers me is the inelegant way in which Mr. Obama handled it.

The XL segment of the Keystone was a red herring from the beginning, and the Republicans got away with using it to bash Democrats for a couple of years.  It should never have happened, and The President should have pointed that out in considerably more detail on Friday when he announced his rejection of the application.  He should have pointed out that Hardisty is already connected to our Gulf Coast by the rest of the Keystone system, which rendered the XL segment superfluous from the start.  Second, he should have pointed out that we are already exporting over 100 million gallons of petroleum distillates, including more than 40 million gallons of gasoline, every day, and that letting another country put our countryside in jeopardy so that it can make money from distillate exportation too is hardly in the best interest of the American people...that is, you.  Third is the proof of that point.  If TransCanada truly wanted to serve American interests rather than just increase its fortunes the easy way, the XL wouldn't have been planed to run from Hardisty to Steele City.  It would have run from the eastern terminus of the current Keystone system in Wood River and Patoka, Illinois to the refineries in New Jersey, not the ones in Texas and Louisiana.  We import oil into the refineries in New Jersey from the middle east because it is easier than hauling it in from the mid-west and the south.  But if we had a pipeline from the Illinois terminals and refineries to their counterparts in New Jersey, that would make eastern oil production, from which we in Connecticut among other places get our gasoline, that much more secure.  The Republicans never mentioned that American interest.  They just nattered on about the Democrats putting what they characterize as a dubious environmental threat ahead of jobs for the American people...you again.

This is a pattern...the Republicans eating the Democrats' lunch because the Democrats don't even resist.  And President Obama doing the same to them is nothing less than just deserts.  But instead of sticking it to them good, he just stuck it to them politely, and tacitly.  There should have been more noise.  When John Boehner complained about "jobs bills" languishing in The Senate controlled by Democrats, no one pointed out that what he called jobs bills included bills to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the like.  None of those bills--and he had the audacity to list them on his website--even mentioned jobs, much less extending unemployment coverage for the many who still hadn't found work to replace jobs extinguished by the great recession of George W. Bush and the Republicans.  This time, it is the Democrats that won't have to embarrass themselves with finger pointing about an issue that can only hurt them.  This time, instead of surrendering their lunch, the Democrats sat down, opened the brown bag and ate it...and the Republicans' too.  No doubt the Republicans will still try to get some mileage out of the XL, and they will probably succeed because The President didn't preempt them on Friday and the Democrats don't seem terribly interested in disabusing them of their erroneous and contrived arguments.  Just as in the case of Benghazi, the Republicans will keep on whipping the horse even though everyone can see its body laying dead there in the road.  They'll preach to their own choir so that their base digs in that much farther, but in the end, it won't change anyone's mind.  Still, it would have been nice to see our president hit that weak, center-of-the-plate fast ball out of the park.  That's the good thing about the November election.  No matter which Democrat is nominated, any Democratic president will have the sharper edge that the American people need to see.  If we can just get someone to hold press conferences  at 8:00 p.m. instead of in the early afternoon and stand up on his...or her...hind legs and object to the twisted rhetoric that Republicans foist on the American people...once more, you...maybe good things can continue to happen.  And the Republicans are losing access to some of the issues that they blindly turn to as old reliables.  Unemployment is back to where it was in 2008, which means that they can't credibly claim that President Obama hasn't fixed the job market.  Real wages have started up again too.  And as for the number of jobs being created without lowering taxes for businesses and the top 1%, the pace of creation is pretty impressive.  The Republicans are all but disarmed.  They still have their foot-shooting pistol though, and it just got reloaded.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I wonder how many voters have considered the implications of the Boehner brokered budget deal beyond the obviation of the factional problems that not having reached a deal would represent.  I wonder how many people are asking themselves what his ability to reach a compromise with Democrats on this occasion says about his inability to do so on virtually all prior occasions during his tenure as Speaker of the House.  Put concisely, I find myself asking why now and never before.  It's a rhetorical question actually because I think I know, but it is a question worth asking because everyone who votes Republican should be thinking about it.  Consider the kind of polemics in which Boehner indulged.

Whenever he couldn't get consensus within his party, he found a way to blame either The Senate and Mitch McConnell or the Democrats or President Obama.  When he couldn't get bills related to unemployment insurance extensions through, he would deflect criticism of The House by claiming that he and his party had sent more than forty jobs bills to The Senate and they hadn't acted.  But he made the mistake of listing them on his website, and none of them were anything but immigration strictures or economic relief for the select few who don't need it.  And of course there were the previous attempts to put together budget deals, all of which turned out to cause just as many problems when they elapsed by their own terms as had existed when they were agreed to.  But every time there was a struggle over the budget, Boehner blamed it on the Democrats by criticizing their insistence on raising tax revenue rather than balancing the budget on the backs of the poor and the middle class.  And of course on immigration, Ryan didn't invent the notion that The Congress doesn't trust The President.  That was Boehner's constant refrain after President Obama forewarned him and his party that if they didn't act he would take executive action, and when he finally did, instead of admitting the intransigence of the Tea Party, irrationally conservative wing of his party, Boehner said that Mr. Obama's unilateral act had poisoned the atmosphere for immigration reform and that The President couldn't be trusted anymore.  Put concisely, Boehner's priority was his own political career at the expense of governance in the interests of the American people.  He could have just allowed votes on all these issues and let the members take the heat for their own intractability, but instead he protected the forty or so well-poisoners in the "Freedom Caucus"--a euphemism for a small mafia of sanctimonious hacks who stand for the principle, "do what we want or we won't let you do anything"--by preventing votes on sensitive issues with parliamentary procedures.  The "regular order" of business in The House is that anyone can call a vote on a bill.  But through a special rule on a bill, The Speaker can change that rule so that only he or his designee can call a vote, and much like the filibuster in The Senate, that ability kept everything on which the conservatives might lose from coming to the floor for a vote.  It was pure politics...nothing to do with principle, and now Boehner's successor, Paul Ryan, is embracing the same rhetorical tactics, and probably will employ the same procedural tactics as well.

In local politics here in Connecticut, town council members are elected at large, meaning that the whole town votes on every seat rather than the town being broken down into districts in which people can vote for only one of two or three candidates.  The result is that town councils are populated by the same people over and over again, usually alternating with people of the opposite party, but being elected en masse rather than on their own individual merits...or policy positions.  So you get one party or the other being in power with only a small minority of the opposition on the council with them.  An individual running against them doesn't really have a chance because the only real change is at the bottom, relatively unpopular end of the ticket for each party.  The hacks are in control whether they are Republican or Democrat, and they are in control as a predetermined group.  The constituency never changes unless someone dies or gets bored and moves on.  This protection of members from bearing the responsibility of votes taken on difficult issues in The House has the same effect.  You can vote for Republican policies or for Democrat policies, but you don't get the chance to vote for the individual's policies because they are never manifested in votes taken in The House.  No one knows what an individual congressman stands for because he has to vote only when his party is univocal on a subject.  That's how they stay in power for twenty or thirty years in individual seats.  They shelter themselves within the party fold.

In my opinion, voters should protect themselves from this phenomenon by insisting that the next candidate for whom they vote in congress, either house, favors the elimination of the filibuster in the case of senate aspirants and that special order motions be banned in the case of would-be Congressmen.  That way, we would go back to the old precept that all politics is local, and we'd by so much the better for it.  Paul Ryan won't be any help in that regard, no matter what he says.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

It took Paul Ryan less than a week to manifest the old adage that the, the more things change, the more they stay the same.  The Republican modus operandi is to call things by different names and then claim that they are different.  Ryan has now pronounced that there will be no immigration bill until President Obama leaves office because the congress "doesn't trust him."  That is a euphemism for, "we can't get a consensus in The House...now my house...to allow people we don't like to stay in the country even when they are here because they were brought as children and are contributing to our society."  Ryan is actually admitting that, despite his claim that he has wiped the slate clean, all he has done is find a way to throw a tarp over it so that the American voter can't see it.  The reality is that there will never be a meaningful immigration bill that includes amnesty or citizenship for young people who are vested in our society but are not documented aliens as long as Republicans control The House and have at least 40 votes in The Senate.  Saying that The President's trustworthiness is the reason is such a thin pretext that no one will believe it...except the Republican faithful (read conservatives) of course.  After all, every president exercises executive power to implement the laws as he prefers in every arena from tax collection to immigration law.  To say that congress won't pass a law until a president who doesn't do that is like saying that congress just won't pass any laws...which is the new status quo anyway.  Ryan proposes to do things differently, but he has just made it plain that it is Republican business as usual, so what should we expect from the last year and a few months of this congress and presidency.

Well, more of the same is pretty vague, but that's basically it.  Boehner was smart in that he saved his party from self-immolation over the debt limit...again.  Each time the issue has raised its ugly head during his speakership, he has slipped behind the curtain and arranged a deal with Nancy Pelosi and President Obama that he could profess to abhor but accept and enough of his rational Republican buddies could do likewise so as to avoid a repeat of the 2013 government shutdown--over which Boehner had reluctantly presided on account of Ted Cruz's grandstanding-- with quite negative consequences in terms of public opinion about congress.  And since congress has been Republican...The Senate since 2014 and The House since 2010, a goal that was hard to achieve but would be easy to toss away with foolishness, McBoehnell saw the forest for the trees, with or without their Republican brethren, and they got together with the Democrats and the Republicans who aren't politically suicidal and saved the Republican bacon for one last time.  However, that was an anomaly possible only during Boehner's lame-duck speakership, and that is over now.  So what Ryan is trying to do is keep his party from firing its foot-shooting pistol just before the nation chooses not just new congressmen and senators, but a new president as well, but Ryan can't just come out and say that.  Thus, he resorts to the same tactics that his predecessor used: casuistry, eristry and prevarication.  Rename things so that they can be identified as something they aren't, then blame the other guy because you stuck a name on it that you can hang around his neck.  Hence, if you substitute presidential trustworthiness for internal party strife, you get a problem that the Democrats have to answer for rather than one that the Republicans have to admit that they are causing.  Unfortunately, it seems to work every time they use it.  At least, they seem to be able to glaze their actions in such a way that voters don't have to really look at the pot of you-know-what within and admit that it isn't really admirable at all.  Here's to Paul Ryan, the undistinguished gentleman...undistinguished from his predecessor and from all the other liars in Washington.

But it isn't all bad.  Under Ryan, there will be a lot more smiling in congress, and maybe, because he seems adroit when it comes to making excuses without taking blame, he will be able to prevent some of the acrimoniously self-serving shenanigans, like The House Special Committee for harassing Hillary Clinton.  We may get civility out of Ryan's tenure, but now that he has agreed to be javelin catcher, his presidential aspirations are behind him...at least prospects for successful presidential aspirations are.  By the time he is through, it will be obvious that he can't herd cats any better than anyone else, and when everyone is saying so, that will be his presidential death knell.  As for tax reform, immigration reform, reform of congressional rules in both house and senate, all things that Ryan promised by implication during his ascendance speech, don't hold your breath.

Your friend,

Mike