Opinion/Editorial

THE DISASTER OF DEMOCRATIC DEMOCRACY

The greatest gift that Donald Trump can make to the country he claims to love so deeply is exactly how he is conducting himself in office. His service is so terribly flawed, mentally, physically and in communications and actions, that he cannot possibly be re-elected, except for one thing.  The Democratic opponents he is facing cannot come together as a party and concentrate on a quality alternative to this man or a response to the policies of the conservative movement.

Not Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or oh, so many more. What are they offering, other than old age and/or a voyage through a sea of such policies that it boggles the mind to consider the sophomoric silliness of them?  Reparations to former slaves?  There are no former slaves still alive.  Are these reparations to go to the NFL, NBA, and rappers across the land, or are they directed only at inner-city gang members?  Free College for all?  Is anybody in this camp thinking about the fact that only about forty percent of the public is equipped intellectually or scholastically to get into, or get through, college?  Forget about the money.

I was a professor in Hawaii and we had military contracts that went right around vetting for qualifications.  I had to fail at least twenty percent of every class I taught for failure to be able to read or write.  The Democrats are being gifted by Trump, maybe the only real positive gift the man is capable of giving and he will not see it as a gift at all.  But if the Democrats are going to continue to the final days with the kind of performance they have been delivering in selection, policy, presentation, choice and more, they are going to remain the majority of the population while living in the minority of power.  John Kennedy had a dream and he had the ability to not only present that dream for a better society, he then was able to demonstrate that he might, indeed, be capable of working to deliver it.  The dream he had, though, was so dangerous that he was killed over it. Is there any wonder that Obama went into the office for eight years and basically came away from the experience having fancy danced his way along doing a bit of Obama care here, some drone killing there, and an easy talk throughout?  He lived and lives today with money and fame.

How can anyone vote for a democratic president when almost everyone knows the president cannot deliver on almost anything without congressional support: the Senate kind.  How did Obama do with the attempted appointment of Garland to the Supreme Court?  If one party controls the senate then the rest of everything basically doesn’t matter, unless the Supreme Court steps in, and that branch is republican to the bone today.  What could a democratic president really do in the face of voter identification restrictions, gerrymandering, and the fraud of allowing total accountability free and limitless political contributions from the super-wealthy?  Obama could only bring the financial disaster George Bush encouraged and then supported by paying off the people who stole the money. The Republicans would let him do nothing else.  Bad mortgages were determined to be the fault of the people who got the loans, so the banks had to be given the property back, the property owners were kicked out, and then the banks were reimbursed for every dollar of what had been lost on the loans that should never have been given.

Today the 1% has eighty percent of everything anyone knows about.  They have a whole load more offshore, where it cannot be revealed and everyone or every agency that goes after that information is paid off and comes home declaring that the banks out there in these supposed tax havens are bad, but the offshore account holder identities cannot be revealed.  The United States should be at war on two fronts.  The first war should be fought against Davos, Switzerland, where all the one-percenter’s meet once a year to direct the actions of the rest of the world in the year ahead.  The second fragmented front should be a war against the offshore havens where the secret trillions are kept by these same people. Those wars will never be fought because no democrat is going to get elected that might indorse such action.

Any and all of these hopeful democratic candidates want what Obama found; great wealth and great fame, and protection for his extended family forever. Watch House of Cards, the HBO special series. Nowhere in that show did the knowledgeable screenwriters ever have even one single representative, senator, president or any other political person, say anything about caring for the benefit and keeping of the voting public that put them into office.

All that Americans can do today is gird themselves down and wait. They cannot know what might come that they are waiting for. But they must wait or revolution becomes the solution and that deadly solution is too brutal and chaotic to consider on any level. At least so far. The greatest possible form of government is a benevolent dictator. That it is nearly impossible to find a benevolent dictator much of the world is stuck with democracies and republics.

And we all wait…
~ James Strauss