Dear America,
A couple of days ago, Donald Trump was complaining that the media give him no credit, even when it is obviously due. He said that he had been criticized for accomplishing noting legislatively since he took office, but that he had signed 88 bills into law, which he said was more than any other president...and that by the way, Harry Truman was second. However, when the facts were checked that night, it turned out that only George W. Bush had passed fewer than Trump since at least the Reagan administration. Then he says things like, people are very, very (one angry is never enough for him) about the way in which the FBI has handled the Russia collusion investigation and the Clinton emails, which he can't seem to let go, and that the FBI and its reputation are in tatters. Yet, the current director of the FBI had testified before congress just two days earlier that just the opposite was the case. You can go back to the inauguration when photos showed that the national mall was half empty while when President Obama was inaugurated...both times...the mall was overflowing, but according to Trump, he had the biggest crowd ever--again, not one of the biggest, but the biggest. That was the time when Kelly Ann Conway invented the concept of "alternative facts," which NBC's Chuck Todd famously pointed out was a euphemism for actual lies. From thereon it was one canard after another being pawned off as nothing more offensive than a little hyperbole to the point that now, a Fox poll shows that Trump's approval rating even among Fox viewers, Trump's loyal base, has dropped from 90% to 58%. But the implications of Donald Trump's lack of veracity won't be felt until the 2020 election as I fear that impeachment is too dramatic a fall even for him, but the Republican Party has 2018 to worry about.
First, there was the attempt to repeal and replace "Obamacare," the approval of which exceeded 50% for the first time once the Republicans introduced the several iterations of their alternative, even the last of which had to be abandoned because they didn't have enough votes in their own ranks to pass it. And now, there is a tax plan that is so obviously skewed to the rich that it has a popularity rating with the public in the 30% range, which anyone would have to admit was low for a tax cut, and everyone likes getting his taxes cut, but still, there is no way to speculate on the way in which you American voters will turn next November. It seems that the Republicans have some kind of invisibility shield that they can hide their insidiousness behind, and the result seems to be a kind of incongruous impunity, but now we have the Republican controlled FCC abolishing "net neutrality," and there's no cloak to hide that.
About two and a half years ago, my daughter bought me a "Roku" device for our television at home. We set it up and we would start to watch, say, a movie on Netflix only to have it interrupted with that little spinning icon that said it was buffering. Or the film would be interrupted and a notice would come up saying that the signal was lost and we should try again later. It was annoying. But then the following spring, that buffering and those interruptions stopped and reception was great. That was about the time in February 2015 in which President Obama prevailed with the then-Democratic FCC to impose the net neutrality rules that kept internet service providers...ISP's they are called in the trade...from fast tracking what they liked--most often what the content provider had paid more to broadcast--and slowing down what they didn't...what the ISP didn't get the vigorish payments for. So now, everything is jake thanks to Obama era regulations, but those regulations became a think of the past two days ago when the Republican chairman of the FCC oversaw the ramming through of repeal despite millions of comments from the public protesting his efforts. Apparently the regulatory process known as "notice and comment" doesn't mean much to Republicans if they don't like the public sentiment that the regulatory rules require them to solicit in the federal record. So, starting any day now, net neutrality won't protect us anymore, and we'll see what happens. The industry says there'll be no change, but did you ever see big business pass up a chance to gauge others when it arises? Me neither, but here's the rub.
If in a couple of months that rotating icon begins to interrupt the television viewing of tens of millions of television viewers again, there are going to be a lot of pissed off American voters whose grievances will be directly attributable to the work of a Trump appointee, new FCC Republican Chairman, Ajit Pai. He'll be the most hated man in America, and everyone will know that he's Trump's creature. It comes to this. People won't really notice if their paycheck go up or down a few dollars--and there'll be plenty of both--every week. And as for Obamacare, it's still here and tens of millions of you are benefiting from it, but how many of them does any one of us know. But if you start interrupting peoples television programs, everyone is going to notice that, and if you don't think the Democrats are going to hang that albatross around the Republicans' necks, you are underestimating even them, which is hard to do. I can't wait for November 2018. See all you fellow television-watching Americans at the polls.
Your friend,
Mike
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