Nation at Risk

A recent discussion with a teacher friend went like this:

Teacher:  Politics in Washington is broken. Maybe we do need someone like Trump to go down their and break it up so we can start all over.

Me: Well,  yeah, our federal government isn’t functioning, but not everybody is to blame. The dysfunction is the result of one party, the Republicans party, going completely off the rails.

Teacher:  What do you mean?

Me: The country elected Obama TWICE by significant margins, but Republicans have not only insulted both him and the Office of the President but also worked overtime to thwart him at every turn. Remember when Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said his primary goal was to make Obama a one-term president? He didn’t say his goal was to get Kentucky off the federal dole, or to rebuild American infrastructure, or to make health care for our citizens more affordable, or raise living standards of working Americans. No, his goal was simply to block everything and anything the first African-American President tried to do.

Teacher:  Yeah, but I still feel we need to send Washington a message.

Me: Well, tell them it’s time to bring civility back to government.  Tell them to stop denying facts and refusing to negotiate. Our founders created a government in which compromise is absolutely essential, but the GOPers refuse to acknowledge it. They’ve thrown a wrench into the machinery of government and now are screaming that it doesn’t work any more.  And they’re all to willing to suppress voting rights to retain power.

And no, Donald Trump isn’t the answer. He’s brought political discourse down to gutter level and seems to think a President is given dictatorial powers to run roughshod over the Constitution. In short, he and his Republican colleagues have become a real threat to our democracy, not the savior of it.

“As Matt Taibbi puts it in Rolling Stone:

“… Washington is freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron. That’s really what it comes down to ….

“We’re about to enter a dark period in the history of the American experiment. The Founding Fathers never imagined an electorate raised on Toddlers and Tiaras and Temptation Island. Remember, just a few decades ago, shows like Married With Children and Roseanne were satirical parodies. Now the audience can’t even handle that much irony. A lot of American culture is just dumb slobs cheering on other dumb slobs. It was inevitable, once we broke the seal with Bush, that our politics would become the same thing.”

Republican senators filed out of Mitch McConnell’s office today and promptly announced they will not hold hearings on any Obama nominee for the Supreme Court.  Remember this when you go to the polls: These are the people who, by their very actions, want to turn America back to the era of Jim Crow, making our country, in the words of Jeffrey Toobin, “a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy.”

Why do they hate America(ns)?