Category: Howard Sosbee’s posts

All Trump knows about Puerto Rico’s disastrous situation is what his underlings tell him. And everyone by now has learned that Trump is unable to handle bad news. So, everything is, of course, going swimmingly on that poor beleaguered island. But when someone reports from ground zero that inefficient bureaucracy is hampering distribution of relief supplies, Trump takes it as an attack on his administration, and thus, an attack on him, personally, and, of course, he must “punch back”. The thought of the President of the United States attacking the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, somehow doesn’t have the appearance of a fair fight, especially since the mayor was pleading for more help, not criticizing any one person. And if any one person deserves a critical postmortem, even at this early date, it would, indeed, be the Donald himself. Has he made any attempt to get volunteer truck drivers to the island to speed distribution of relief supplies that are stacking up on the dock? How long did it take to get the hospital ship going? Punching back may give Trump some satisfaction, but it doesn’t help the Puerto Rico victims one little bit.

After watching the PBS documentary on Vietnam, one could be forgiven for asking: did we learn anything? Then, after counting the cost in lives and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan, we come to the painful realization: obviously not!

So far, we have seen numerous, specific, characteristics displayed by Donald Trump which are not necessarily the most desirable for President of the United States. For example; egotism, everything is always and only about him. Other specific traits were either displayed or hinted at during the campaign which should have presaged various degrees of trouble. Trump has shown himself to be, among other things: mendacious, indifferent, insensitive, selfish, class conscious, mean-spirited, autocratic, divisive, and if these faults were not scary enough, the Trump situation is now demonstrating incompetence to a degree that threatens to make a terrible situation in Puerto Rico much worse than it needs to be. Trump obviously has no idea what to do next or how to do it.

Demagogues need an identifiable enemy, someone or something guaranteed to get people riled up enough to dislodge their better angels (if they have any). Donald Trump road to fame on the backs of Mexican immigrants who come in illegally, pegging them as druggies, rapists, welfare cheats, and worse (if there is such a thing). But Trump is wrong. Mexicans and other Hispanic immigrants, both legal and otherwise are some of the best, most productive, people in the country. The real enemy of our great and grand experiment in participatory democracy are not immigrants, but those who would take the country back to the bad old days of Jim Crow, of institutional racism, segregated schools, and all the problems in human misery that goes with it.

Republicans know full well that Americans want the Affordable Care Act to be improved, not repealed. Everyone also knows that when any Republican politician was campaigning anywhere in the 2016 presidential election, they could always get a cheer and applause with the promise to “Repeal Obamacare!”. Notice they never referred to it by its correct name, the Affordable Care Act, and of course, never described what would replace it. They had no idea. They still don’t. It apparently matters only that the name Obama is involved and that the Republicans have not yet erased every trace of anything with that name attached. It also matters not.to some Republicans that repeal without suitable replacement will, in many cases, cause direct harm to many of their own constituencies, nor does it matter that so many institutions, important ones, and many of our largest and most influential corporations, have declared their opposition to repeal. But still the Republicans persist, not through traditional legislation, but sneakily, in the darkest of night, almost, to force their members to vote, sight unseen, on a bill that will haunt their party for years to come. As my wife said, “it defies logic”.

Amy Warner’s recent warning (September 19, 2017): “…you will be sorry”… was true, so true, that it bears repeating, but also warrants the additional prediction of the opposite situation, that is: the rewards you can expect if you bear the child rather than the regrets if you don’t. You should know that there is no greater happiness in life than what derives from raising children, and it is multiplied over and over when those children have children of their own, and so on and so on. If you are unable or unwilling to raise the child, there are bound to be families who would take it into their home and raise it with love and care. Think of the unborn child as a soul, a spirit, not yet a person, just waiting to become a blessing in someone’s life.

Can the Republicans really be serious about yanking health insurance away from so many people, knowing the unnecessary additional load on emergency rooms across the country, the serious diseases untended, the unnecessary deaths? Is Republican hatred of Obama so ingrained that it compels this added insult?

Conservatives can always be counted on to pull every trick in their book to suppress the vote whenever the stakes are high, including: extreme gerrymandering, arcane voter ID laws, and even a Supreme Court nullification of part of the Voting Rights Act. With conservatives currently in total control of government, it is unlikely that anything will be done to eliminate the various obstacles already enacted to suppress the vote. Further, anything done by a future, more liberal, Congress could easily be undone the next time the conservatives get control. Therefore, what is needed is a constitutional amendment that would survive any attack by future conservatives. So, someone in a position to do so should introduce an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, to wit:
Voting rights amendment
Voting is both the right and the duty of every adult citizen of the United States of America. To this end, it shall be a federal crime to take any action, direct or indirect, which shall have the effect, direct or indirect, of suppressing or discouraging the exercise of any part of the voting process in a national election.

Conservatives can always be counted on to pull every trick in their book to suppress the vote whenever the stakes are high, including: extreme gerrymandering, arcane voter ID laws, and even a Supreme Court nullification of part of the Voting Rights Act. With conservatives currently in total control of government, it is unlikely that anything will be done to eliminate the various obstacles already enacted to suppress the vote. Further, anything done by a future, more liberal, Congress could easily be undone the next time the conservatives get control. Therefore, what is needed is a constitutional amendment that would survive any attack by future conservatives. So, someone in a position to do so should introduce an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, to wit:
Voting rights amendment
Voting is both the right and the duty of every adult citizen of the United States of America. To this end, it shall be a federal crime to take any action, direct or indirect, which shall have the effect, direct or indirect, of suppressing or discouraging the exercise of any part of the voting process in a national election.

Occasionally, you hear people talk about a president’s “legacy”, meaning “what did he leave us?” It is too soon to speculate who will write Trump’s legacy, but you can be sure people are taking notes. In the meantime, we are forced to live with Trump while he is creating his legacy, and judging from the people with whom he has surrounded himself, it will probably be one of callous regression. So while the Donald is doing his thing, let us not forget that it was the GOP, the Republican Party, that put him in the White House for the sole purpose of grabbing control of the government, not because they had any delusions that this particular con man would make a decent President of the United States, not at all. Gaining control of government will be the GOP legacy, and that one is not yet written.