Letter 2 America for July 14, 2016

Dear America,

The Republicans are like a dog with a bone.  They have been harping on Hillary Clinton's emails and the Benghazi murder of American diplomatic staff for years now, and they have yet to find anything about which anyone cares more than they would if she had scratched her nose without saying "may I."  And while hunting their purported witch, they have revealed themselves to be what they are.  They are Republican shills and political operatives--perhaps I should say operators--with the most self-serving of motives: Republican hegemony.  You can't even say that they are ideologues,  If they were ideologues, we could at least say of them that they are fighting for a cause, but they aren't.  What have you ever heard that Trey Gaudy or Jason Chaffetz stands for?  I've never heard either one of the articulate a policy principle for their inquisitions, and Gaudy in particular seems to go from persecution to persecution without interruption.  At a trial, when an attorney asks a question that is meant to make a point rather than elicit an answer, the apt objection from opposing counsel is "irrelevant," or "immaterial."  Irrelevant means, the question is not designed to elicit testimony that relates to the issues at hand, and immaterial means that the question, even if relevant, doesn't make one iota of difference with regard to the issues.  So, if an attorney asks a witness where he was born, unless he can show why that information is significant in the case in some way, it is immaterial at least, and perhaps irrelevant as well.   So when Trey Gaudy assumes his ex-prosecutor's demeanor and asks a question as if to say, "Aha.  What about this," what remains is the question, why does it matter, and he never seems to get to addressing that.  Chaffetz, on the other hand, is just a moralizing, overly pious critic who will take exception to anything that any Democrat...Hillary Clinton in particular...does.  And what is the result of this extended game of "Gotcha?"  Trump.

I believe that the American people, even the Republicans, are sick of the game that the Republicans play.  And while the gerrymandered majority would rather have a Republican playing it than a Democrat, they really would prefer neither.  That's where Trump comes in.  Sure he is a Republican, but that is just a matter of convenience.  Being a member of the party gives him access to their slot on the ballot in November, but he has already said openly that he doesn't feel that he needs the party mechanism, nor does he care whether those who operate it are on his side.  And by the way, that's how Bernie Sanders got so close to being nominated for the Democrats.  He essentially disavowed the party in its then-current state and went about publishing his own vision of what the party should be.  But Bernie's problem was that too many people thought he was unelectable, and there was only one other choice: Hillary Clinton.  He didn't get quite enough of a chance to gain the necessary momentum  Trump, on the other hand, had competition from fourteen others, and they diluted the opposition to Trump's outlandish xenophobia and closet support for the plutocracy...and to cap all that off, the Republicans had nothing to lose in the presidential election.  They already have congress, so they have de facto control of our national government;  nothing to lose but they can gain the elimination of the only check on their power: the presidency.  The Democrats however have only one thing protecting them from rampant conservatism, and that is the presidential veto.  They lose that and they've lost everything.  So, when it came to preserving that buffer against the new gilded positivism that the Republicans want to foist on the rest of us, it seemed risky to put Bernie up against them in the presidential sweepstakes.  Thus, Hillary.  Thus, Hillary vs. The Donald.  It's like a game of Russian roulette...with two bullets.

I still have faint hope that the "stop Trump" movement will succeed.  I don't want a Republican president, but I'm afraid of a Trump presidency...like tens of millions of others.  I also have hope that at the Democratic convention, Hillary will conclude that the Republicans have sufficiently defamed her that the best thing she can do for the Democratic Party is to withdraw and let Bernie, who leads Trump substantially in every poll, don the mantle of nominee.  But let's face it.  Neither prospect is any more likely than meteors striking both convention halls and wiping out all of the pols, who are really the problem in the first place.

Since the play "Hamilton" gained so much attention for the eponymous "founding father," he has ascended into the pantheon of popular heroes, but no one seems willing to do any research on who he really was.  Just read "The Federalist Papers."  In number 63 in particular, Hamilton touts the bicameral nature of the proposed federal legislature for the fact that there would be a rambunctious House of Representatives, sure, but there would also be a Senate, which in his version of the government would be chosen from among the elite, not elected.  Hamilton seemed like a democrat, but in reality, he was as much an oligarch as...well, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.  He too believed that grayer--and that translates to "richer"--heads should prevail...and more importantly, control.  That's what we have now, and assuming that there will never be a President Bernie, that's what we  will still have after November 1, 2016.

Your friend,

Mike