Wash It Clean

Last Friday Donald John Trump proclaimed that today would be a day of remembrance for Dr Martin Luther King Junior. As he left the room a journalist asked him a question in good faith, “Are you a racist?” He obviously ignored that question, as he has ignored virtually every attempt to seek truth. There were people in that room with him, and none of them could bring themselves to definitively refute premise of the question, because it is at this point a forgone conclusion. A man can only show you the absence of his heart so many times before you have to acknowledge that it’s not your eyes that have failed to see anything there. And on this day we are told to remember Dr King.

There is, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, an inconspicuous marker in honor of Dr King. It is stepped on daily by people who simply don’t realize it is there. On a daily basis, the generally malice-less ignorance of sightseers crushes dirt and grit into the inscription that humbly marks the spot where on August 28, 1963, Dr King delivered a speech for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. What more fitting a memorial could there be?

I have often lamented that many people only have a vague understanding of the entirety of Dr King’s struggles, and that for most people it is the case that they would struggle to utter any significant words of Dr King. Of those who can, the vast majority only know a snippet or two from that one speech he delivered in Washington, which are frequently misinterpreted and distorted to become an attack on any who believe that the cause of the Civil Rights Movement is not yet done. Indignity after indignity, lobbed against the very memory of Dr King on a daily basis.

But now here we are. A man who dodged the draft of the Vietnam War multiple times dodges uncomfortable questions on a day he was supposed to consecrate the memory of a man, who I guarantee you he doesn’t know, worked diligently to end the Vietnam War. A man whose father has a checkered history of supporting the KKK, a man who has been sued for discriminating against potential tenants, a man who took out a full page ad calling for the death penalty to be reinstated against five innocent people of color, a man who refers to nations like Haiti in terms I won’t repeat here; that man is the distilled muck that is ground into the memory of Dr King every day from his position of prominence.

In pockets across America, there are still those who refuse to even give this minuscule dignity to the memory of Dr King, who choose instead to commemorate the birthdays of traitors. They are, perhaps without exception, avid supporters of the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. They are, I expect, quite glad to see that Dr King’s memory has been eroded and tarnished. Perhaps they knowingly grind filth into the inscription on those steps, but I’m here to tell you that intended or not they are joined by the ranks of countless people who choose to not know and to not know better in demeaning the memory of Dr King. Their numbers are amplified and disguised by the countless many of us who choose not to see and choose not to learn and choose not to speak out.

It will not be today and it will not be tomorrow, but there will come a day when the stench that emirates from that odious bigot in chief dissipates. There will be a day when this country can reckon with its crimes, long past and ongoing. There will be a day when we as a people can remember the entirety of Dr King’s message of hope for the despondent poor and neglected; Dr King’s message of disgust at the indifference of the well-meaning, silent masses; Dr King’s message of urgency for the necessity of peace at home and abroad; Dr King’s message of justice for crimes committed against so many. When the sun rises on that day, when the specter of fascism and bigotry and ignorance has permanently vacated positions of prominence, I hope I will be there to go to that inscription with pure water to scrub the muck off. That I might wash away all that has been trod deep into the memory of Dr King. That I might join with all my fellow patriots to wash it clean.

It Could Have Been Worse: On The Normalization Of Fascism

As we move from 2017 to 2018, there’s one position that I see some political analysts taking that I find more repugnant and irresponsible than others. On the one hand there are still literal Nazis who are freely walking about today targeting various racial, ethnic, and religious minorities (among others), and one would certainly conclude that these drecks of humanity represent the absolute worst of who we are. But on the other hand, if the Overton Window could remain fixed far to the Left of literal Nazis, they would be an aberration that could easily be addressed by law enforcement and not by disingenuous discourse that treats all content of speech to be equal simply because the first amendment doesn’t explicitly condemn hate speech and calls for the violent end of pluralistic democracy. So I do find my stomach turns just a little more at the commentator who looks at what happened during approximately the first year of the Trump Administration and says, “2017 could have been a lot worse.”

This is, on one level, strictly speaking true. To the extent that we are not currently living in a dictatorship, wherein the various racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, gender, etc minorities are sent to death camps, yes it is true that it could be worse. To the extent that my face has not been eaten by a mountain lion in 2017, yes it is true that it could be worse. I frequently use the “could have been worse” mantra on a quotidian basis to try and keep a view of what privileges and blessings I have in my life, but to use that argument in this context is at best irresponsible and ignorant of the vast amount of work that went into keeping it from being worse, and at worst sympathetic to the positions and people who actively are trying to make it worse.

The single greatest asset the American people have, at this time, is the incompetence of Donald Trump as an individual, a businessman, and most importantly as a politician. His inability to form coherent sentences, let alone coherent policy, has limited his ability to enact a Muslim ban, for example. His inability to attract and retain talent has made it difficult for him to effectively get all of his horrendous policies pushed through the much more responsible career civil servants. However, there is a two edged sword to his impotence. His bumbling rhetoric and unhinged habit of lashing out can often do great damage, much like the directionless rage of a flailing animal is indeed still dangerous. What’s more, lurking in the wings are more competent ideologues who are just champing at the bit to pretend to be the adults in the room when Trump is finally vacated, while simply continuing his policies.

But I feel I’ve been rather vague, at this point. What is, after all, so bad about the Trump Administration in 2017? First off we’ve seen the ascendancy of the euphemistically labeled “Alt-Right.” These fascists have already taken the lives of people whose only crime is being opposed to fascism. Worse, the police sympathetically look the other way at fascist protesters while coming down hard on anti-fascists. Worse still, legislators in several states have attempted to pass laws in the last year to explicitly condone running over protesters with cars. The shift of the Overton Window to the Far-Right has been a steady effort for decades, but now we see what happens when a major political party feels comfortable openly embracing the worst of the worst of American society as a treasured foundation for their base. All of this is succinctly demonstrated when in the wake of the death of Heather Heyer, the president of the United States claimed that there were fine people on both sides, that there was violence on many sides, that opposition to fascism is morally equivalent to fascism, etc. Of course, it could be worse, we could have Brown Shirts marching the street, but for the moment all we have are Red Hats marching the streets.

CHIP has been left unfunded for months now, and most state programs will be lucky to get by on the funding they have through January. The Children’s Health Insurance Program should be the easiest thing to pass in the world, who could possibly oppose it? To be blunt, Republicans. Old guard Republicans like Orrin Hatch as well as the so called young guns like Paul Ryan assure us that we cannot afford such luxuries as keeping children from dying of preventable disease, because we need to inflate the military budget more and slash revenue by giving corporations massive tax breaks. Even charlatans like Marco Rubio see the benefit in at least pretending to be shocked at how crass the GOP has become at throwing the poor under the bus to give handouts to the rich because it’s gone so far. But hey, it could be worse right? At least they left in the charitable giving deduction in the tax bill… as far as anyone can tell.

The private prison industry has been booming under Trump as he funnels various DREAMers and DACA/DAPA recipients into de facto concentration camps. And before I hear people claim this is one Godwin’s Law too far, let me remind you Trump used his first pardon on Joseph Arpaio a man who bragged about what he called concentration camps, used to lock up undocumented immigrants. The window is fast closing to fix what Trump broke with the callous termination of programs that protect productive, law-abiding residents of this country, at which point we will get to see first hand how 2017 could have been worse.

Let’s next discuss judicial appointments. Trump supporters love to mention how many appointments Trump has successfully made over this first year, in part because it is one of the few metrics he hasn’t insecurely inflated. By blocking President Obama’s nominations for years, the GOP made a huge back log. You might recall that was the whole point of Harry Reid’s use of the “nuclear option” in the first place. They weren’t blocked because Obama’s nominees were unfit, but because they had President Obama’s taint on them. But Trump, by virtue of not being Obama, has been allowed to put forward ideologically pure, young nominees, with little or no experience and the Republican Congress looks the other way only unless it becomes a televised embarrassment just how unfit the nominees are. We will get to see just how much it will be over the next decades to have judges who are ignorant of the law, rule on important issues that just don’t sit right in their gut.

On the topic of nominations, Trump’s indifference to doing his job has the upshot of leaving vacant hundreds of positions that are necessary to the competent management of government programs. It’s never quite clear if this is intentional or not. Certainly the appointments he has made seem intentionally designed to be nihilistic sledgehammers, poised to undo the basic functions of government that go unnoticed until they go unfulfilled. One can’t look at Rick Perry, Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, and Scott Pruitt and imagine that these are the best our country can offer to manage our nuclear material, provide affordable housing, defend the right to quality education for all students, and prevent environmental abuse. However, Trump’s ignorance of even the most basic details of how government works is a plausible argument for why he’s incidentally destroying the various programs that everyone depends on, even if they aren’t immediately faced with that reality on a daily basis. But it could be worse I suppose, I don’t know how necessarily but I’m sure someone will inform me eventually.

I could go on like this, but even I have my limits when it comes to pedantry, so I’ll begin to wrap up by pointing out that what has kept things from being worse is the persistent resistance to Trump’s attempts to make things even worse. Trump and the Republicans tried to kill the Affordable Care Act several times, and only the dogged resistance to those callous bills kept things from being worse. Trump’s ban on military service by trans individuals seems to be overturned for the moment, and that’s because of the repeated efforts of patriotic Americans to uphold the rule of law against an administration that has open contempt for the legal process. Robert Mueller has thus far been successful in avoiding the unhinged and unfounded attacks made to try and stop the Russia Investigation, but only by repeated reporting on the facts and the dedicated effort of the people to remain informed in spite of cynical attempts to propagate “Alternative Facts.”

Look, it could be worse, and it likely will be worse in the next year. And that is because at every level the Republicans are in positions of power. All three branches of the federal government, the majority of governorships and state legislatures, and the judiciary all over the country are infected by a political party that has gone off the Far-Right cliff. The only way we will be able to make things better is to draw out this poison at the ballot box. The only way we could make it worse is to try and rationalize away all the huge threats posed by the Trump Administration by trivializing it, by shifting the rhetoric ever further to the fringes of the Right.

The GOP is the Antichrist

I went to church basically every week growing up, I went to youth bible study, I took communion, I went on mission trips all over the US, I got baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church, I went to a Lutheran college, I’ve read the bible three times all the way through as well as countless readings of specific sections that speak to me. Nevertheless, I’m no longer much of a religious person. Every so often though, I do feel echoes of religious belief reverberate in my head, and despite seeing the horrific things certain members and sects of Christianity still do, I have a great deal of appreciation for the Good News as I understand it. With my bona fides on the table, let’s get to brass tacks… the modern Republican Party is the antichrist.

In the past I have described how I do not necessarily believe in visions of heaven, but that I am convinced that hell exists and we allow it to exist on earth. Today, I want to explore how despite my ambivalence on the accounts of Christ, the GOP stands in direct opposition to everything that makes Christ a noble figure, and stands for a perversion of his message so profound that they are indeed “anti” Christ. The reasons for why this is the case would take a good deal longer to explore, and indeed others have tried to explain why conservatism and Christianity look the way they do in America, e.g. “What’s the Matter with Kansas” and “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America.” But I would like to just briefly look at the disgusting golden cow that is the modern Republican Party.

Let’s start with what I consider to be the most basic and essential issue that we refuse to face as a nation because of the immoral positions of the GOP, i.e. health care. Setting aside for a moment responsible debates that need to be had about how best to meet society’s needs, live within budgets, etc; the modern Republican position on health care seems to be that sickness is a moral failing. Congressman Mo Brooks’s comments about what contributions people with pre-existing conditions ought to make in the healthcare system is just the most recent salvo in the immoral position that the larger conservative movement has taken on the whole debate. A position that can best be summed up with the often repeated question “Why should I have to pay for sick people’s health insurance?”

On the face of it, this position always galls me for not simply being coldhearted, but utterly ignorant about what health insurance is and how it works. Health insurance is not a health savings account, nor should it be. The strange love affair the Right has with HSAs is perplexing, until you realize it’s simply an attempt to muddy the waters. When you purchase health insurance, you’re paying as an ostensibly “healthy” person on the expectation that if something bad happens, you will be backed up by the collective resources of everyone participating in the health insurance program. If it were simply good enough to expect people to out of pocket pay for potentially huge expenses, then we wouldn’t require auto insurance; however, in the real world we understand that people don’t necessarily have thousands of dollars at hand at all times to cover an accidental collision, so it is required that people make systemic small investments to prepare for situations we hope won’t happen to us but which we know happen every single day to someone.

But this is just the inanity of the position, it’s not the fundamentally wicked part of it. Christ tended to the lepers (Mark 1:40-42) and the blind (John 9:1-6) and the lame (John 5:1-9). He did not see their sickness as justification to blow them off. He did not fill his ministry with only the “healthy” people making “good decisions” because he viewed all of humanity as fundamentally and equally unwell, requiring outside assistance for the bad decisions we constantly make by our basic human nature. (Romans 3:23) This position that sick people don’t merit assistance, that the “healthy” are put under undue burden because of it is completely at odds with the figure who commanded that “he who is without sin cast the first stone.” (John 8:7) I mean for the love of all things good and holy, the Sheep and the Goats explicitly tells Christians that if they do not tend to the sick that they will go away to eternal punishment. (Matthew 25:37-46)

But what more can be expected from the latter day pharisees who love to be seen praying? (Matthew 6:5) These blasphemers who can’t help but take the Lord’s name in vain, who even carve the name of God on currency, their true lord. (Luke 16:13) and (Mark 12:17) These are the people who insist on dividing the phrase “One nation indivisible” in the Pledge of Allegiance by using their feigned piety. They have made a terrible idol for themselves and called it devotion, they made the Gospel of the poor carpenter into a justification to seek riches, and their high priest of Mammon now sits in the White House, although admittedly only part time.

“Again I tell you it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 19:24) In the attempt to justify the prosperity gospel people have lied that this is a reference to a gate that never existed, in the hopes of avoiding the reality of their choice as Christians they sought lies to make it easier to sin. Jesus was painfully clear on this point, even those who keep all the commandments of the Torah, even those who refuse to eat meals with women who are not their wives, lack one thing “Sell everything you own and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.” (Luke 18:22) It may not be money itself, but the love of money that is the root of all evil, and the modern GOP prizes money above all else: above the environment, above the poor, above the sick, above the imprisoned, above God. (1 Timothy 6:10)

The modern GOP sold its soul years ago when they put Ayn Rand on the same pedestal as the Gospels, but they proved it beyond a doubt with the head of their Party. Having read the Bible is not necessarily a shibboleth for faith, though it should be a tip off that someone hasn’t actually done much Bible study when they make up quotes like “Never bend to envy,” highlight Old Testament verses that Christ explicitly rejected like “an eye for an eye” (Matthew 5:38-42), mispronounce 2 Corinthians, and claim that they are both Christian and have never asked for forgiveness. This man who claims that he alone can fix everything stands in opposition to everything that redeems the scriptures, and this opposer is not an outlier, nor an aberration, but the exact culmination of everything the Republicans have strived toward ever since they abandoned actual Christian faith.

And here is the irony, I as an atheist find myself needing to defend the Good News from the very people who claim to believe it. I am not a Christian, but I’m far more Christian than these people who stand in direct opposition to Christ’s compassion and mercy, who lie that they believe in a God that commands them to do the exact opposite of what they do. We all fall short of what we aspire to be, but the GOP doesn’t even aspire to live up to the message of the Bible. They aspire to riches and make us all poorer as a result, they aspire to power and weaken the very soul of the nation. They claim to defend liberty, but they attack the freedom of the press. They claim to defend religion and refuse to defend the rights of liberal Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, etc. They claim to be the party of Lincoln, but now they defend White supremacist monuments of the CSA and claim that Andrew Jackson could have fixed everything.

So can we dispense with the charade that the GOP represents Judeo-Christian values? Can we stop deluding ourselves that conservative values exist in a moral framework or that the positions are based in evidence from this universe? Can we finally begin to recognize that on top of being anti-science, anti-choice, anti-diversity, anti-immigration, anti-working class, anti-LGBT, anti-environmental, anti-intellectual, and anti-woman that the Republican Party is beyond a doubt anti-Christ?

The Perversion of Dr King

Every so often there comes a time when you really wish there were someone who could pull a “I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. You Senator are no Jack Kennedy.” And I get the feeling that in the coming four years, those moments are going to come ever more frequently. So now on the holiday that we’re supposed to be remembering Dr Martin Luther King Jr, we are having one of those moments where some people are trying to corrupt the message of Dr King, to whitewash history; therefore, it might be nice to have someone we could look to: someone who served with Dr King, who knew Dr King, who was a friend of Dr King. If only there were someone just like Representative John Robert Lewis of Georgia’s 5th District. Oh, if only the Civil Rights movement weren’t so long ago that we might have a few voices like that of Representative Lewis’s that we could listen to in such times. Alas, we will have to simply believe whatever half thought out musings Rob Schneider might like to share on the subject of what Dr King stood for.

On the one hand, it is a sign of progress that Dr King’s legacy has gotten to the point where even the people who clearly would not have been and still not are on his side at least feel the need to recognize him as being on the right side of history. I mean, let’s not forget that it wasn’t until 2004 that John McCain recanted his decision to vote against MLK Day being a national holiday in 1983. But the trouble with the universalization of Dr King’s message is that it gets watered down and cut up into one or two soundbites that everyone recognizes, even though they lack any appropriate context. If I asked the average American to quote Dr King, I would get a paraphrase of, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” If I asked for more, maybe a handful of people would be able to pluck out a few words from “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” or else to quote the old spiritual “Free at Last.” And as great as those messages are, they are but a fraction of two speeches that comprise the tiniest bit of his life’s work.

First of all, to truly appreciate Dr King, it is critical that we recognize him as a human being and all that entails. When we set him up as some god of a bygone era, we minimize the struggle of those who worked with him, we set an impossible model for anyone to live up to including Dr King himself, and most importantly we set up a barrier for discussions about race and class and rights. Any time someone, in the cause of activism for the oppressed and the underprivileged, does anything wrong or controversial, the first thing out of the mouth of pundits will be a condemnation of their entire cause and an appeal to the better tactics and morals of Dr King. This means that any person who calls for justice is doomed to failure in the public eye, because the moment they prove their humanity and slip just a little bit, they give ammunition to their detractors and defenders of the status quo.

Dr King was a great man, but he was not a perfect man. If you cannot accept his lack of perfection, then you do not truly understand his greatness and decentness. For Jesus Christ to do a noble thing is ultimately boring, because as the son of God how can he do anything other than good? For a human being, an imperfect human being, capable of infidelity and plagiarism to inspire nonviolent resistance in the face of a brutal regime, to have that kind of fortitude in spite of human misgivings is what made him exceptional. He is inspirational because of, not in spite of, his imperfections. When we take away that humanity by putting him up on a pedestal, we take away the accessible model for civil rights activists and create a bludgeon for the enemies of justice to beat down any human being who dares dream of a better world.

Did Dr King call for violent resistance against the racism of the United States? No. Did Dr King own firearms to defend his family? Yes. Did Dr King fight racism in the South? Yes. Did he limit his scope to racism in the American South? No. Was Dr King a conservative? Well, according to J Edgar Hoover, the man was a communist. Dr King was everything that the modern GOP reviles, which is why his words have to be sanitized and his message simplified to the point where no one remembers his activism on behalf of unions, against the Vietnam War, in favor of Universal Healthcare, and his dedicated struggle alongside gay rights activists like Bayard Rustin.

But perhaps worst of all, is the perversion of his message of active nonviolent resistance. Near as I can tell, the only part of the words “active nonviolent resistance” that is acceptable to the vast majority on issues of race is “No.” And this is exactly the problem Dr King faced in his own time.
“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

No matter how mild the resistance, no matter how nonviolent, the fact that there is any resistance at all causes a great many people to simply say “No.” Representative Lewis did not call for his supporters to punch or in any way hurt Mr Trump. Mr Trump has on numerous times called on his supporters to attack demonstrators at rallies. Representative Lewis is exercising his right to simply not participate in an inauguration ceremony, and that is somehow the real offense. A group forms with the audacity to claim that Black Lives do indeed Matter, in spite of discriminatory legal and police practices, and they are seen as the real racists. It is astonishing just how unbalanced the playing field is, yet even the most marginal attempts to balance it is met with condescension and condemnation.

It could not be any clearer what game is being played when the “Alt-Right,” the white supremacists, find their way into power and somehow find the gall to criticize an actual hero of the Civil Rights struggle for bringing race into this. And no matter how much dignity he shows in response to such crass hatred, we are expected to pretend like all sides are on equal footing. So I can only hope at this point that the mere fact that Archbishop Desmond Tutu is still alive will allow people to hear this message as one from a real human and not some myth of a bygone era. “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

Paul Ryan is Trying to Kill Me

I’m not generally one for hysterics, but as we approach a new administration, I find it more than a little worrisome that the Speaker of the House is so dead set on repealing the Affordable Care Act before coming up with any replacement. At the present moment I am in between jobs (as the euphemism for unemployed goes), on a COBRA health plan, and still dealing with a chronic disease. Crohn’s disease is most certainly what would qualify as a pre-existing condition; one that has sent me to the hospital more times than I would care to remember. And the President-Elect’s newfound approval of certain ACA measures to bar insurers from denying coverage based on such pre-existing conditions notwithstanding, I am faced with the prospect of seeing those protections go up in smoke.

The GOP has still yet to clarify what their actual replacement to the ACA would be, and if there will actually be sufficient protections for people like me. All of which means that sometime after January 20th, 2017 I might not just lose insurance, but I might very well become uninsurable. And just to be blunt about why this is so viscerally important to me, my health insurance is what pays for the fairly expensive healthcare coverage that keeps me from endlessly vomiting and/or shitting blood. So I am left with the unmistakable reality that, no matter his intentions, the policies Speaker Paul Ryan wants to enact would very likely be the death of me.

Why does the current Speaker hate people like me so much? Is it because we are undeserving of the costs associated with medical attention? Is it because he watched A Christmas Carol one too many times and decided that Tiny Tim really was a leach on the generous Mr Scrooge after all? Well, if I were a betting man, I would have to guess that Mr Ryan is in love with ideology more than he is with governance. His ideology clearly tells him that government is incapable of doing anything good, and that the private market is always the answer. Incidentally, he is able to hear his ideology tell him this because the United States’ government has adequately funded a military to make sure the din of warfare is kept far from his ears. His ideology has so convinced him that government must be opposed that he has risen to one of the highest levels of the government to ensure that government never does any good for the people it was designed to protect.

It is astonishing to me that Mr Ryan is one of the highest ranking Republicans, because the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, described the proper function of government as doing “for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.” This seems like recognition that government is not simply a necessary evil, but rather a necessary good for those people who find themselves born, through no fault of their own, into a world that does not guarantee equal opportunities. A necessary good to unite the common efforts of citizens toward greater goals than mere subsistence. A necessary good to continue the efforts laid out in our founding documents and defend what were described as the unalienable rights of all people, e.g. life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is astonishing to me that the group of people who claim the mantle of the party of Lincoln are capable of so coldly writing off the needs of their fellow citizens, the citizens they are bound to represent, for the sake something which must seem worthwhile to them but which I am clearly incapable of comprehending.

I do my best to understand viewpoints different from my own. I try to understand the people who say they value free markets above all else, and therefore shun any unnecessary governmental function. I just find myself at a loss how anyone can argue that protecting the sick from the worst incentives that do arise from the private healthcare system is anything other than a necessary governmental function. I find myself at a loss how people can think it is sound governance to defend a healthcare system that is almost designed to ensure that Americans spend as much money as possible for results that are just not terribly impressive. Particularly when we see a wide range of national healthcare systems that deliver better quality and length of life for a fraction of the cost. I find myself at a loss how Mr Ryan is capable of so distancing himself from the true human cost his policies will inflict on this nation. But then I am biased, because after all I will almost certainly be one of those human costs.

The Affordable Care Act is not perfect. Hell, the ACA isn’t even a left wing piece of legislation. We are talking about policies that were first proposed by Nixon and his colleagues, supported by the conservative Heritage Foundation, and first put in practice by Mitt Romney. All of that notwithstanding, we are talking about a piece of legislation that does more good than it does ill. The ACA is just about the best that can be done with the existing framework of private healthcare. Any further improvements to cut costs, increase accessibility, and produce greater outcomes would require the government to create a public option, as is done with the more progressive French healthcare system; or at least force the government to take a much more active role in dictating to healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies what kinds of prices they can charge, as is done with the more conservative Singaporean healthcare system.

I mentioned earlier on that I am now on a COBRA plan. Such plans have their origins in the Reagan administration, back at a time when the Republican party still had the capacity to care for some of the sick and dying Americans they are charged to represent. Granted, that same administration was more than willing to watch as members of the LGBT community were sick and dying of AIDS, but let’s give some credit where it’s due. Yes, even President Reagan was capable of recognizing that as much as he might like parts of Ayn Rand’s ideology, she was wrong when it came to defining what are necessary governmental functions. He agreed that the government should require hospitals to admit patients in emergency situations, irrespective of their ability to pay for it. I would argue, given the reality that ER care is the most expensive, it is more expedient to cover preventative medicine too, but I’m not some bleary eyed optimist who thinks the Paul Ryan is ready to do anything proactive to protect American lives.

So the party of Lincoln and Reagan becomes the party of Trump and Ryan; God have mercy on us all. What does that mean for you? Well, if you commit to never getting sick, and if you commit to never finding out that you have a pre-existing condition, then you might be able to live long enough to enjoy a good, old fashioned tax cut. Nice. Now, that is of course barring the possibility that the new administration sets off a nuclear arms race that accidentally turns hot when the new president goes off on a 3AM tweet binge and gives everyone some more pressing concerns, such as immolation. And you’ll need that sweet, sweet tax cut when Social Security and Medicare get cut. But I’m sure that you’ll be just fine. Me on the other hand, the future is less bright than a thermonuclear blast for me. See, I know that I have a pre-existing condition. I know what happens to my insurance once the ACA protections go away. I know that the Remicade that keeps me healthy costs up to $10,000 each infusion, an infusion I need every 8 weeks. I know what happens to me when my insurance goes away, and it ain’t pretty… unless you think all toilet bowls would look better with a candy-apple red coating.

So Mr Speaker, I’m begging you, don’t repeal the ACA. At the very least, come up with and pass a plan that will protect people with pre-existing conditions before you do repeal it. To do anything less is an admission that you are not the party of Lincoln or Reagan and you certainly don’t give a damn about my right to life. I wake up every morning hoping to find out that the election was a great big joke, and that we can all laugh about the big hoax that was pulled. Unfortunately, you and I wake up in the reality we actually inhabit. So sadly, it’s not because I’m laughing too hard that I have to say to the Speaker, “Stop it, you’re killing me.”
Happy Holidays!

The Last of the Republicans

Despite what any rational person might expect or hope, Donald Trump is still the front runner for the GOP.  Granted we are still months away from even the first contest, leave alone the conventions where nominees are actually confirmed, but no one expected a candidate like Trump to even be a flash in the pan after his lack of performance in 2012.  The sheer spectacle that is the gilded campaign of Mr Trump has cast a shadow over a much larger story that is worth examining; that being the end of the Republican Party.  I’m not saying this as a political partisan hoping that the opposition is just going to defeat itself, I mean specifically that there is very little about the Republican Party that matches what it traditionally has been and the best representatives of what the GOP can be in a good year just aren’t even showing up any more.  The GOP has become, in more ways than one, a facade of its former glory.  Instead of a ‘Republican’ party that actually is dedicated to the United States, under a strong legal framework, with the goal of limiting the scope of government in people’s lives; we are now left with various factions, of which the three main ones are the Theocrats, the Good Ol’ Boys, and the Market Worshippers.

Let’s begin with what the Republican Party used to be, the party of Lincoln.  In this I’m referring less to the party platform of the mid-19th century and more to the party that fought for individual liberties, the rule of law, and a government that speaks softly and carries a big stick, to adopt a phrase from a slightly later Republican.  In this way it was a classically liberal party, which is why the GOP was the party that ended slavery and passed the 19th amendment.  Throughout the 20th Century, there were environmentalists in the Republican Party: from Teddy Roosevelt to Richard Nixon.  And even in our own time we’ve had some truly decent figures who held the banner of what the Republican Party had been, certainly before the Reagan Revolution at any rate.

Colin Powell is a prime example of a Republican who cared less about party politics and more about principled policy and effective government.  He supported both Presidents Bush and Reagan on the Republican side as well as Presidents Obama and Clinton on the Democratic side, because the success of his country means more to him than scoring political points.  He laid out a perfectly well thought out prescription for US foreign policy, the lack of adherence to which has resulted in needless war and the proliferation of terrorists.  As he grew up philosophically he let go of past prejudices against gay people and joined the cause of ending DADT and agreed with the cause of marriage equality.  While he has been more than willing to express his differences of opinion with President Obama on fiscal matters, he is not blind to reality and supports the Iran Deal as a workable solution to the problems at hand.  But Colin Powell is not running for president, is he?

Setting aside the way the George W Bush administration defamed his character by pressuring him throughout the UN speeches, there’s a very good reason why the Republican Party could not accept him, or even someone like him, as a candidate.  The reason is that the Republican Party he represents no longer exists, and the candidates that have recently tried to take up that mantle have failed miserably.  Take for instance someone like Jon Huntsman.  He was governor of a very red state, Utah, and was by all accounts a very effective and popular governor.  He was willing enough to work across the aisle that when President Obama asked him to serve as ambassador to China, a significant post to say the least, he did his duty.  When he ran in 2012 he was crushed.  The reasons why range from his acceptance of science to his ability to work with people who disagree with him, because that’s so 1970s.  No, the GOP can no longer tolerate tolerant people, they need to be willing to say terrible things about the ‘others’ of America and to do so in American.

And the unfortunate, or fortunate depending on your perspective, truth of the matter is that there is not a singular Republican Party to fill the gap.  There are the Theocrats like Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, etc.  They are Christian supremacists, by which I mean their own specific brand of Christianity.  The Constitution, far from being a secular legal document that was unprecedented in its tolerance of belief of any kind, is an instrument that must be used to impose religious values on a public that is already far more moral than any of these want to be preachers in chief.  The United States as a “Christian nation” needs to spend less time and money helping the poor, the imprisoned, the war-torn, etc and do more punishing, start more wars, and stop the insidious effort to make the world more educated.

They are joined by the Good Ol’ Boys, who share many traits, but whose central thrust comes less from dogmatism of a religious stripe and more from a nationalistic sense of superiority.  This is the camp of Donald Trump, Scott Walker, Rick Santorum, etc.  The central tenet is that American Exceptionalism means their own definition of what it is to be American is the metric of what a human being is.  Current immigrants are insufficiently American, regardless of their legal status, but particularly the illegal immigrants make a more widely accepted scapegoat.  And it doesn’t matter that they are all clearly the descendants of immigrants, in the case of someone like Santorum very recent descendant, there is a clear to them but never explained definition of what it is to be American and anything that deviates from the canon, with the exception of the holders of this opinion, deserves to be deported at best.  There is nothing at all cerebral about this position, as the core is not in the brain but in the gut, where it is just so obvious that immigration, far from being one of the single biggest drivers of the American economy, is a threat and must be destroyed… with walls if at all possible.

And last comes the Market Worshippers, though I’ll admit this is a less than ideal term for the group.  I could almost agree to a term like Neo-Con, but it seems to miss the extent to which candidates like Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, and Rand Paul truly believe that there is no question to which the answer isn’t to give more power to those who already control the private sector.  True, they tend to have slightly different rationales and justifications for these positions, but it always seems to stem from the belief that no matter how tyrannical the private sector can be at its worst, it will always be better than the government at its best, the same government that they almost invariably entrust with ever greater stockpiles of weapons.  People like the Koch Brothers are job creators, even when the policies that benefit them only send jobs overseas.  Industries that have a financial incentive to exacerbate the climate change problem we face need to be given even more power and fewer regulations, because the world may yet become inhabitable but we can’t risk even the slightest inconvenience to polluters.  After all it’s the EPA that is really responsible for environmental issues and not the polluters they try to stop.

Yes, there is indeed overlap in these groups, as a Market Worshipper like Jeb Bush does occasionally find it worth while to pray in public and throw a bone to the Theocrats, and a Theocrat like Mike Huckabee does like to play the nationalist card of the Good Ol’ Boys from time to time.  But the factions that have been growing in the GOP are becoming ever more entrenched and always at the exclusion of legitimately good candidates like a Colin Powell or Jon Huntsman.  The closest comparable thing you have at this moment, and even then he’s a poor facsimile, is someone like John Kasich who has garnered, at best, some 6% of the GOP’s support.  Everyone else seems to have learned to shut up and let the crazy people speak for them or else leave the party.  There are many examples of the past few years, where Republicans have finally recognized that their party no longer exists and either become independents or Democrats, not least of all someone like Lincoln Chafee, who is running for the Democratic nomination.  And if demographics are any kind of indication, the groups that currently fall in the camps of the GOP will not be enough to win national elections ever again.  If your goal is to have Democratic dominance in this regard this may sound like good news, but for those of us who would like to have a legitimate choice at the polls, who want to actually choose good candidates and not just the lesser of two evils, then it is a sad sight to behold the last of the Republicans leaving by hook or by crook.