Congenial-speak #9

Fun-House Mirror

It became clear to me. I saw an incensed, defiled, infatuated by promise fulfillment, Trump leaning over senators' shoulders telling them to legislate faster. He concluded that health care was complicated and ran from the challenge. He didn't do the leg-work. He pointed fingers, he half-assed it and, in writer-speak, he pantsed it. No executive, no matter how much experience they bring to the WH can, or should, introduce a bill with out much contentious debate, research, and consideration.

America is not real-estate. It is people with wants and need. It's people who had promises made to them, written and those implied in moral fiber. The ACA was not rushed, it was a culmination of work, of several plans since FDR. I think the ACAs biggest deficit is that it ever earned the euphemism Obama-care.

It is just an educated guess, but I have a nagging feeling that if the “law of the land” speaker Ryan (and Butch Patrick look-alike) conceded to yesterday was called what it actually is from the get-go, vast amounts of contempt, protest, party disintegration may have been avoided. It simply amazes and confounds, it astounds me how much who stamped a bill figures into the acceptance of its actually good (or partially good) content. I was thinking about this juxtaposition, this empirical cognition, this refusal to see the good in something because of an irrelevant, incidental factor, some nit-picky arbitrary facet like a skin tone.

Rabid baseball fans had a fit in 1947 when Jackie Robinson stepped on the field. Seeing a good contest, one in which new talent made the Brooklyn Dodgers a better team. Who threw the ball, who caught, the ball, who hit the ball, who scored a run for the team was more important than the contest itself. It was more important than the worth of a ball game. That was 70 years ago! 70—almost an average male lifetime. After seven decades, something in the dynamic suggests to me that color is still thicker than the pursuit of happiness, the enjoyment of the American pastime, or the easy passage of health care legislation.

The vengeful tweet

Oh, I see now. The G.O.P. has a base, a team, a core of a currently rotting apple. They couldn't issue a ban—twice. They can't get a bill past the House, they can't execute a raid with any accuracy (with a host of intel equipment at their disposal), they had Japan steel their water-wings, they could not find the lights in the Oval Office. This is the Keystone Cops of transition teams, cabinets, legislators, commanders in chief, of administrations. The generals are the only ones who seem to only feign playing the fools game. But it is a slippery slope, and one by one cabinet pez are falling into the Trump trap, the vat of vindictive, paranoid fake news. The web of lies, the pathogens that dance so blithely to dumb down, to ease into speakable, unencrypted determinable words that ping-pong between the press and Spicer, Trump's lucky leprechaun.

Afraid to cross him? Afraid to cross him from within. He's the fricking POTUS (see what a slippery slope that clever acronym was: first POTUS, then SCOTUS, then FLOTUS and now FDOTUS. What about Jarrod? FSILOTUS?) what can he do, have a tantrum? Those have passed. I suppose termination like Sally and all those Ags. But afraid, afraid of an insane, delusional, narcissistic blow-hard hack in a democracy? It is the most cowardly, UN-American, inhuman, selfish thing I can think of being. Maybe this is the difference between the two parties. Who, for the most part, fights and, even dies, for their values? Who, in 1967, was not AFRAID, to join a campaign to dump an incumbent POTUS. Who was there in Selma, Montgomery, lunch-counters, the back of the bus, freedom marches, taunted by hoods, peaked sheets of burning crosses. Who took on the state trooper on the bridge? Who was not AFRAID to compromise their integrity, their jobs, their families, their freedom, their lives. John Lewis, MLK, Fredrick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Susan B. Anthony all put ideals and morality far ahead of their own wealth, safety or freedom. The most recent Republican protest I can think of was that quasi-reciprocal pro-life march. But, as soon as those specula stop waving, those ersatz fetuses stop, support will go to the NRA to put a gun in every hand. Guns that could end up killing. . . .women with expectant LIFE. But that is another can of worms.

A macrochistic society

Isn't there something bigger, a scintilla of difference between night and day, life or death, war and peace? Tillerson and the rest knew, like Roy, Thurston, Mary ann, the risks of boarding the SS Trump. They must have sensed he wasn't even a Republican with the rationality of. . .say. . .George H. W. Bush, that he lacked (as they did) any leadership or governmental experience. I have not checked, but I doubt that after his hard-to-watch sycophantic unrewarded stewardship to Trump, his disastrous tenure as NJ governor, that Chris Christie has much of a political career left. Their base is eroding, imploding, entombing them every day. Where's Ryan in a year if he crosses Trump? Where's McConnell if he pulls his head out of his posterior long enough to see the insanity. Actually, any one of his cabinet could just tell Trump to go f--- himself, recede into the good night, and live quite comfortably. (I would pay 200$ to see that.) So it all comes down to a base (see I knew baseball was involved), a glib penchant for government pensions, an altruistic shot for a next generation G.O.P. The elephant has been dying since Lincoln when it was turned ass-backwards. Time for euthanasia. Oh, that's right, the pro-life deal, the appeal for the right to life—not to LIVE—from the people who proposed a health care bill that would deny access to 24,000,000, from senators and congressmen who looked constituents that were dying square in the eye and tap-danced around life.

I really think it is a merciless sickness. It is. . .GREEEEEEED. Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Sacs, Koch, Dodd-frankly greed. It's what keeps each party going. Imagine a government of Bernie. Imagine no loop-holes, imagine no perverted religious principles that justify actions that end in pockets of the rich. Imagine no clogged drain-pipes that never trickle down.

They are either gutless, heartless, or brainless. It is the lion, tin man and scarecrow, a menage of duplicity. Can anyone pull the plug when democracy is in the hands of murderous people? I guess there isn't a health care directive. So on they travel down the gold-bricked road, the yellow spats on a dossier that pulls them toward the Kremlin where the wizard sits shirtless on a horse.