There is only one political party in the tragi-comic, third-rate banana republic that still calls itself the United States of America.
It is an amalgam of angry white male ignoramuses, rich and powerful oligarchs and military-industrial despots, titularly headed by a perpetual adolescent devoid of ethics or morality whose mental stability is questionable.
The last vestiges of opposition are rotting in the political sewer where a moribund Democratic party went to die after declaring itself “centrist.”
Recent special elections, especially yesterday’s fiasco in Georgia, have affirmed that American voters neither want nor deserve good government. They want only to have their mindless rage and hatred ratified by hearing it repeated by the unfit little demagogues they have put in public office.
Have recent electoral surprises in other democratic nations given a glimmer of hope to those thinking few who seek to save a semblance of our own original democratic republic? Two years ago, Emmanuel Macron’s Le Republique en Marche party did not exist. Now Marcon is president of France and his party firmly controls Parliament with a mandate to clean up the sleaze of traditional politics. In France, Marcon and his followers are called centrist, but in America their positions would be well to the left of the corrupt notions that now govern us. Could a brand-new party of the left pull off a Macron miracle in the U.S.? Not likely.
Once dismissed as a silly sideline act, Jeremy Corbyn, who heads the United Kingdom’s lefty Labour Party, led an electoral surge in the recent election that all but unseated Prime Minister Theresa May’s repressive Conservative coalition. Could, say, Bernie Sanders become America’s Jeremy Corbyn?
There remained in France and Britain pockets of thinking voters to whom Macron and Corbyn could address their appeals. Such voters amount to a mere handful here. Those who still espouse an enlightened liberalism that might yet rally a redemptive revolution are dispersed, dispirited and seemingly incapable of actually organizing anything like a movement.
As a people, we are stuck with the fading, failing system of so-called government that we deserve. We voted for it.
Tom, we have indeed reached the cesspool of politics. We have few members of the press with a badge of integrity that existed back in your days and we have few politicians that truly work for their constituents if they do not carry a blank check in their back pocket. The network most people in the country looked at as centrist a few years ago has now brought itself down to 'junk' status.
ReplyDeleteWe have a President that has resorted to childish tweeting. We now know former President Obama was willing throw the country under the bus by refusing to act on intelligence of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election so as to allow Hillary Clinton to win the election. We know that there were members of the Democratic Party that were out to undermine Sen. Bernie Sanders campaign. We know former President Clinton had another inappropriate relationship….this time with Attorney General Lynch on an Arizona tarmac to talk about ‘grandchildren’! We now know all the issues that Bernie Sanders was supposedly going to clean up, was happening in his own house with his wife and her college cooking of the books. We now have accusations by our former FBI chief that AG Lynch was pressuring him to not call the investigation into Hillary Clinton an ‘investigation’.
We have a Republican Party that has had 8 years to consider options to replace the Unaffordable-ACA and have fired a series of blanks. We have the Democratic Party that has truly become the party of ‘No’ and will not seek solutions to scrap and recreate a healthcare program that fixes many of the cost over-runs of the ACA , loss of healthcare exchange options, etc. We ultimately have come to SCOTUS becoming our legislative branch because Congress and the Executive branches for years now have represented so much dysfunction.
The question now, can a Convention of States resurrect what the framers of the constitution envisioned within our government or will they also become so dysfunctional that a ‘Government of the People and by the People’ is a lost battle? Can physicians who have devised wholesale pricing for pharmaceutical products in an effort to keep patient costs down be brought to the forefront to bring healthcare costs under control and be more realistic?
I know you will disagree with me on this but I steadfastly believe a single payer system will not work. We have 2 primary examples of this:
1) We already have a single payer system in place. It’s called the VA. We know how grossly mismanaged that is!!!!!
2) Should we give 1/6 of our economy over to the federal government? They can’t prevent gross waste/”pork” with anything they do!
Again maybe a Constitutional Convention of States is the answer. We need people of various beliefs to craft a healthcare bill that does not raid yours and my retirement and we need costs to be brought more under control. We need the federal government to do what it was supposed to do ….. protect the people of the country and let the states determine how to spend our (it is not their) money wisely.