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babylonsister

(171,070 posts) Wed Nov 22, 2017, 06:44 PM Nov 2017

Pierce: What a Disgrace

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13859971/trump-lavar-ball/

What a Disgrace
This week might have been the low point in an administration full of them.
By Charles P. Pierce
Nov 22, 2017

snip//

What a reeking, lifeless wasteland this man is.

Not that it matters. The Republican Party will live with him just as it will live with the concept of Senator Roy Moore (R-Food Court) if it has to do so. The Republican Party is the corrupt vehicle of corrupt interests and has been for so long that the party and the interests are no longer distinguishable from each other. A whopping percentage of Americans are opposed to the tax plan that the Senate is about to pass. On Wednesday, Senator Lisa Murkowski, briefly an independent voice against the shredding of the Affordable Care Act, announced that she would support a tax plan that did away with the individual mandate, which effectively would shred the Affordable Care Act. She’s also very high on drilling for oil in ANWR. The only real problem that the Republicans have with the president* is that his corruption is too obvious, too garish. It scares the donor class. It makes the good crystal rattle.

Never in my lifetime have the politics of the country seemed so removed from the people of the country. Never in my lifetime have the people of the country seemed so removed from its politics. Never in my lifetime have political decisions seemed so removed from their consequences. An election driven by fear and hate and abandoned wrath has produced dangerous chasms into which the entire system may one day fall, and nobody appears to have any idea what to do about it. Adam Serwer’s brilliant piece in The Atlantic is as good an explanation as any about what happened last November, and what may happen as a result.

It was not just Trump’s supporters who were in denial about what they were voting for, but Americans across the political spectrum, who, as had been the case with those who had backed David Duke, searched desperately for any alternative explanation—outsourcing, anti-Washington anger, economic anxiety—to the one staring them in the face. The frequent post-election media expeditions to Trump country to see whether the fever has broken, or whether Trump’s most ardent supporters have changed their minds, are a direct outgrowth of this mistake. These supporters will not change their minds, because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of.

You cannot run a democracy on that basis. You perhaps cannot even run a nation, at least not one that doesn't devolve steadily into savagery. These were not unavoidable choices. We made them in the clear light of day. What a poisoned country we have left ourselves.