Letter 2 America for October 17, 2018

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Dear America,

A few days ago, Mitch McConnell uttered an oft used canard about Social Security and Medicare, that they were the real cause of the federal deficit, not the tax cuts that McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Donald Trump had shepherded through congress.  In fact, the federal government has never paid "one penny" of Social Security benefits or Medicare in that both are funded by working people who pay into a trust fund.  And just to put appropriate emphasis on the point, I put one penny in quotes because that is the phrase used by Ronald Reagan in an October 1984 debate with Walter Mondale on national television.  You can find the debate and that utterance on the internet for yourself.  I know because I did.  So, who is responsible for the credence that people like McConnell, Ryan (he has made the same claim in the past to misdirect blame for deficits from his then current political agendas related to tax cuts) and many Republican and conservative politicians are given?  We are, America.  We don't educate ourselves.  We don't check the facts that our politicians shamelessly lie about.  We don't their erroneous claims of law, and most importantly, we don't publicly call them out on their indefensible deceit.

But that's Medicare and Social Security.  There isn't really anything that McConnell, Ryan and Trump can do about the facts, so our benefits are safe from budget cuts, though recalculation of the amount that earners have to pay to keep the system solvent will likely be necessary within a decade or two.  However, both Trump and McConnell have been throwing around the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty as if to demonstrate for everyone's benefit that they don't know what they are talking about.  That right is a constitutional right that is derivative of actual clauses and phrases in our constitution.  They relate to criminal guilt and innocence.  They relate to the right to a public trial and/or a jury of one's peers.  They relate to the right to be at liberty unless you are properly convicted of a criminal act.  They do not relate to confirmation to a seat on our Supreme Court.  And they certainly do not relate to the likely murder of a member of our free press by a foreign government.  Yet, both McConnell and Trump have invoked that purported right in favor of now-Justice Bret Kavanaugh and most deplorably, the son of the monarch of Saudi Arabia, who likely ordered that murder in a Saudi consulate in Turkey.  

Set aside the fact that our president, the controlling, Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, and by implication Senator Lindsey Graham don't know better than to misappropriate what is probably the single most crucial protection from tyranny that any American has.  Forget that they all valued a misguided, political attempt to endow a probable attempted rapist and certain liar with a cloak of immunity more than the integrity of the institution that the advise and consent clause was intended to protect...if you can. Their lack of understanding of our fundamental rights and the nature and guaranties of our personal liberty is a cause for despair, but what may be more disturbing is the willingness of our president to sell our morality as a nation for some contracts to build jets in this country.  Are our souls now to be monetized in service of economic expediency?  Is our president, and are those who elected him by extension, so meretricious that the commission of a despicable, abhorrent atrocity of a murder, almost unimaginably involving dismemberment and probably torture, to be swept under our national carpet?

We have seen Donald Trump's "moral flexibility" in action many times since he started running for the presidency.  We have watched him apparently manipulate the government he leads to enrich himself.  We have heard him tell outright lies and then essentially admit that they were lies by attempting to explain them away, or even retract them, and in some cases deny that he ever said them despite the fact that his lie had been heard tumbling from his greedy lips on television by hundreds of millions around the world.   But this thing he has done on behalf of Saudi royalty is an abomination.  I am at a loss for more words than that even though I feel a raging need to say more.

America, this should be the last straw for even Trump's most ardent supporters.  The prince in Saudi Arabia who ordered this is as odious as Stalin or Hitler, and our president has aligned himself with that crown prince, Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud.  If we don't reject Trump's demonstration of this ultimate kind of immorality, we are to blame for all that he wreaks on us.  No one else.

Your friend,

Mike

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This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on October 18, 2018 6:43 PM.

Letter 2 America for September 25, 2018 was the previous entry in this blog.

Letter 2 America for October 26, 2018 is the next entry in this blog.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on October 18, 2018 6:43 PM.

Letter 2 America for September 25, 2018 was the previous entry in this blog.

Letter 2 America for October 26, 2018 is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.