While the world talks about the Mueller report, finding in
the news whatever confirms previous expectations, my life goes on
regardless. I am coming off a week from
hell that started with oral surgery requiring three lengthy sessions in the
dental chair and then got worse with news of a leak from the apartment above
mine in Paris that caused most of the false ceiling to fall just as two renters
arrived. The statements from William
Barr just capped it all off.
Now my
attention turns to the meeting this afternoon of the residents of the building
in which I live in my retirement community.
I am the “Precinct Representative,” which means I must conduct the
meeting and keep up everybody’s spirits as we contemplate the beginning of
plumbing work that will require groups of us in turn to move to temporary lodgings. Since several of my neighbors are ninety-six
years old, this is not a trivial undertaking.
I realize that my teeth and the affairs of Building 5 are not the stuff
of news flashes or Twitter storms, but they are my actual life.
The only good news this week was word that Trump has decided
to celebrate his victory over the Deep State, the Fake News, and Robert Mueller
by launching an all-out assault on the health care of tens of millions of
Americans. If pursued with his characteristic
vigor and sadistic energy, this should all but ensure his defeat and the defeat
of his party across the board next year.
Alarmed Republicans are trying to dissuade him from this suicidal plan,
but they will fail, I predict. Needless
to say, this has nothing to do with policy or even with politics. Trump feels emboldened, and so he has set out
to settle scores with McCain.
7 comments:
The Mueller report is by no means wrapped up, ofcourse. But I would hope that News outlets might now turn with equal vigour to analysis of the damage Trump's Cabinet is doing to the country. What a bunch of grifters and charlatans, nevermind the ideologues. Such as Betsy DeVos are beyond the reach even of satire.
I’m sorry about your health problems and the practical problems. This is a time of life when these things seem to arrive rapidly and relentlessly. I try to escape by reading when I have the energy and playing computer games (spider solitaire, free cell) when I don’t.
As to Trump and health care, I don’t believe he cares one way or the other about health care per se. He just wants credit for the system, whatever it is, and does not want Obama to get any credit whatsoever. If this means “socialized” medicine, so be it. Just so long as he can take credit for it. I think he’d like “Trump Care” to be his monument. So he’s playing chicken with the Congressional Republicans, and if he loses, and the Administration’s new position prevails in the courts, millions and millions of people will lose their health care. He doesn’t care. Neither do most of the Republicans.
David, that's astute. Trump brings to mind Bonfire of the Vanities NYC of the eighties. Trump is a master of the universe writ large
I’m sorry about your health problem
My sympathies, Bob - dental work and leaking roof are problems I know all too well, and dread greatly. I hope that both pass with no more than minimal difficulties. As for Trump's newest attack on the ACA, let's hope it ends with him and the Republicans being crush, and more support for better health care. Let's hope that everyone knows that will depend, even more than on who is president, on the Senate, and having as many Democrats there as possible.
Off topic, but here's excerpt from an article in the London Review of Books which I found worth reading.
But this is premature. As of today, two years into the Trump presidency, it is a gross exaggeration to talk of an end to the American world order. The two pillars of its global power – military and financial – are still firmly in place. What has ended is any claim on the part of American democracy to provide a political model. This is certainly a historic break. Trump closes the chapter begun by Woodrow Wilson in the First World War, with his claim that American democracy articulated the deepest feelings of liberal humanity. A hundred years later, Trump has for ever personified the sleaziness, cynicism and sheer stupidity that dominates much of American political life. What we are facing is a radical disjunction between the continuity of basic structures of power and their political legitimation.
Link to complete article:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n07/adam-tooze/is-this-the-end-of-the-american-century
To Howard
Trump actually appears as a character in 'Bonfire of the Vanities'. From memory, he explains how the lead character's father (a lawyer) dissuaded him from 'solving a problem' with the aid of his Mafia buddies rather than the law.
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