I have been shunning cable news since the House vote
yesterday on the Republican health bill.
I simply could not stomach endless replays of the gloating and
celebrating by Trump and the Republicans.
There is not the slightest chance of anything remotely like it passing
the Senate, and there is good reason to hope that the vote will cost the
Republicans some House seats in 2018, but the mere passage of the bill will apparently
so roil the insurance markets that large numbers of people will lose coverage
or experience unaffordable increase in their insurance costs. In short, people will die as a consequence of
the vote.
I fear some on the left have allowed themselves to be buoyed
by the inability of the Republicans to pass major pieces of legislation. Even in that absence, Trump has managed to do
an extraordinary amount of harm. People
have been bemused and misled by the scattering of unexpectedly liberal things
that come from his mouth or from his Twitter fingers. In fact, every single domestic appointment of
this administration, without exception, has been appallingly, unimaginably bad. Department after department has been put in
the control of someone who is publicly, on record, opposed to its core
purpose. The only saving grace is the
fact that Trump has filled virtually no positions below the top, thus depriving
the departments of the ability to carry out the ugly policies of the man or
woman in charge.
We must continue to organize from below, putting forward
progressive candidates and supporting everyone who is an improvement over the
existing office holder. The truth is
that America is, for many different reasons, a morally and politically ugly
country, and I honestly do not know how much we can do to change that, but this
is where I live, so I have to try.
Now, that is as much air time as I am willing to give to the
little Eeyore struggling to push his way past my inner Tigger.
3 comments:
Speaking form the inside, not entirely true on the Department heads but DoD core principles have grown so bizarre over the last 16 years that it doesn't need any help.
I'm an Eeyore, through and through, but I absolutely love your Tigger, Prof. Wolff.
Bad Day at Black Rock! Wow!!
That was the first movie I ever saw. My parents didn't ever take us to cartoons or movies for children, but from time to time they took us to movies that they wanted to see and the first one I recall was Bad Day at Black Rock. I didn't understand it entirely at the time, but I got the general idea. I recall some scenes very vividly still.
My father was very anti-anti-Japanese, since one of his good friends was a Japanese man whom he worked with as an accountant. For those who haven't seen the movie it's about a World War 2 veteran trying to find the father of a Japanese man who died saving his life in combat, only to discover that the local racists in small town America murdered the father.
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