Week One: Pillaging is hard these days.
Behind closed doors, Republican lawmakers fret about how to repeal Obamacare
Mike Debonis / Washington Post— PHILADELPHIA — Republican lawmakers aired sharp concerns about their party’s quick push to repeal the Affordable Care Act inside a closed-door meeting Thursday, according to a recording of the session obtained by The Washington Post.
It has taken precisely one week for the dominoes to have fallen in the manner that we all knew they would fall. Trumplethinskin is about to launch an investigation into the voter fraud in the election that “legitimately” elected him, of which nothing has yet been heard from The Man Who Filibustered Himself™ although Paul Ryan, “Ayn You Glad I’m In Charge®” of the lower house has undoubtedly said something brave, common-sense and tersely meaningless.
After all, they have the entire New Deal and its aftermath to undo, and after that, they’re setting their sights on the Reformation.
Dark Ages 1
Enlightenment 0
And it’s come at us with jackhammer speed. Its been a Twitzkreig of executive orders, photo ops, attacks on the press, scandals, and the overwhelming sense of a jackboot descending on the land. Government science agencies are muzzled. The National Park Service is muzzled (growly grizzly THAT!), global warming pages are ordered off government websites and then, due to public outcry, left back on.
And it is planned, of course, based on the old formula for flim-flam and college debate: if you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bullsquash.
And yet, it is so nakedly aggressive, so neurotically defensive and ever so arrogantly childish that Donald J. Trump is the textbook example of the enfant terrible for the whole danged U.S.A.:
a famous or successful person who likes to shock people:
In the 70s he was the enfant terrible of the theatre.
OK. I guess it’s evil and all, but there is a profound banality to it all. It’s mean and it’s wrong-headed; its motivations are hate and fear; it betrays a “populism” that is more the bray of the victorious barbarian than builder of social structures.
And that brings us back to repealing health care.
White House stops ads, outreach for last days of 2017 ACA enrollment
By Amy Goldstein January 26 at 10:18 PM
Washington PostThe White House on Thursday ordered federal health officials to immediately halt all advertising and other outreach activities for the critical final days in which Americans can sign up for 2017 health coverage through Affordable Care Act marketplaces. The directive stunned some staffers within the Department of Health and Human Services …
Vandals plundering, Charlotte Yonge, 1880
They are against Obamacare, so they must destroy it any way they can, and that translates into real people actually dying and that doesn’t seem to enter into their minds as they march for “life” and are hopeful that Planned Parenthood will be stripped of all funding even though abortions are at their lowest level ever.
There is no sentience to this. It is just a long sort of angry temper tantrum, sacking Rome and smashing the mosaic to see if there were real swans inside of it.
There is an active-seeming movement within the new regime to purge scientific facts and research, silence information, root out civil service employees not “in line” with the new masters, and that is truly frightening.
Again, we haven’t come to this suddenly. It’s been brewing ever since “controversial” evolution science was denigrated to the level of a “mere theory,” while a creation myth about a talking snake and a magic fruit tree was elevated to the level of nascent fact and equal theory.
And yet, it is banal. It is the evil of inadvertently feeding powdered donuts where the powder was rat poison mixed with sweetener instead of powdered sugar. Whoops!
The first week of the Trump Usurpation has been the narrative (and soundtrack) of an evil clown falling down stairs.
There are no rational points to be made here. On the one hand, you have a literally revolutionary agenda rolled out on successive days via executive orders rescinding whatever mercies had been granted and toughening up whatever severities would appeal to the visigoths who are perceived to be his base.
Oh, and increasingly we begin to understand that the polling WASN’T wrong. Instead that massive numbers of voters who believed themselves to be registered were fraudently kicked off the registration lists due to one Kurt Kobach of Kansas, Secretary of State — initials notwithstanding.
Thus: the Trump Usurpation as opposed to the Turnip Administration.
In one short week, in short, the Republicans have done their level best to see that I no longer have the insurance for health care that just literally saved my life this past fall.
So, as you can imagine, I’m agin’ it. And them.
I find it very strange for a sitting UK Prime Minister to first visit the “retreat” of the ruling junta, er, I mean PARTY and then the official sit down with the Resident. It angered me as an American when Netanyahu did it at the beginning of the Obama Administration (meeting FIRST with AIPAC and affiliated members of congress and THEN with the President) and it angers me as an American now. The office may be more informal, but it deserves the respect of foreign heads of state.
I await Canada and Australia doing something of equally monumental stupidity to rival BREXIT and Trump. If so: it may be some secret “virus” in the operating system we call English. Otherwise, it’s probably just coincidence.
Thus endeth the first week.
Last November, the American public (we are assured by those who file lawsuits to keep all those ‘legitimate’ votes from being recounted or, more importantly, audited) selected Donald Trump and a majority of Republicans in the House and Senate to rule America. Or, in short, they tossed the carefully undefined brown stuff at the rhetorical trope of the rotating blades.
And if you should hear a giant “plopping” sound? Do not ask for what the plopping sound means.
It plops for thee.
Courage.
Cross-posted from his vorpal sword
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.