Whitnebrat: you are a bitter racist with a terribly bleak outlook for the future! Only God can change your heart, and I pray that He will move....
whitnebrat wrote:
I just finished going through Cold Iron's initial post. Twenty-four-hundred words carefully strung together to give a semblance of truth and fact. Each of the nuggets of partially minimal correctness is surrounded by vast expanses of uncorroborated fiction with just enough of a ring of factualness to be accepted by unchallenging minds. If you're already of that mindset, then this is the screed for you. I admire whoever originally wrote this for being able to create massive amounts of fiction from a few grains of fact. They gleaned every element of right-wing theology from the Sean Hannity / Alex Jones playbooks and archives. An amazing excursion into fantasy.
A friend of mine had an argument with a fellow camp follower of yours the other day. They were discussing politics, and got around to just why this fellow was so dead-set against Obama and his policies. It was like peeling an onion. When each reason was countered by reality, another popped to the surface. After about ten layers were expended the truth finally came out … 'it's a nigger in the White House.'
This more than any one thing drives much of the rhetoric against Obama. The entire presidential campaign was driven by hate and fear. Trump was a master at exploiting the fears of middle-class Americans who are experiencing a shift in the society towards a majority-minority population structure and are discomfited by that change from a white-dominated hierarchy. They feel that their cultural underpinnings are being uprooted and long for the non-existent times of 'Leave it to Beaver' and Donna Reed. Their jobs are being lost, their values are being challenged, and they're looking for someone to pin that on and blame for it.
Couple that with the inherent racism that has always existed either outright or just below the surface in our political system, and you have the potent witches brew that put Donald Trump in the White House. It was a masterful campaign of stirring up that 33% plus a few camp-followers to skew the Electoral College in his favor, while losing the popular vote by almost four-million votes. Whether there was outside interference and aid from the Russians is pretty much irrelevant at this point. It's a done deal and we're not going to get a do-over.
Mainstream Republicans saw in the victory a chance to accomplish some of the goals that they have been salivating over for the last seventy years. First, repeal of as many of the New Deal programs (Social Security & welfare) as possible. Second, repeal and destroy Roe vs. Wade, and gay rights/marriage equality, both of which they considered abominations to their orthodoxy.
Repealing the New Deal stuff is in the works, and anyone who currently recieves Social Security and Medicare should be very nervous about now. The latest tax fraud … cuts program runs such massive deficits that Congressional Repubs are already talking about having to severely cut both of those programs to the bone in order to reduce the national debt. It's the underlying reason that the tax cut bill was passed by a party that has always been for reducing government spending until this last year. They myoptically refused to see the examples of Kansas and Louisiana, who massively cut state taxes and are having to both repeal the cuts as well as cut major expenditures such as education and infrastructure repair to balance their budgets.
The second part is the drive to repeal abortion rights and gay marriage/gay rights. This is driven primarily by the evangelistic religious right, who are pretty much rabid about eliminating this heresy from the 'Christian nation' that we were founded as. This was the reason that the Senate held up the Scalia seat on the Supreme Court for over a year, and then promptly confirmed Gorsuch to the court once the election was over. They used the 'nuclear option' of a bare majority to do this, which hadn't been done in the Senate for over a hundred years until then.
Trump is just a tool for these two factions. If it weren't him, they'd be happy with Pence in the driver's seat for accomplishing these ends. Both factions know that this is probably the last chance they'll have to accomplish any of these end results and they're desperate to do as much as possible before the mid-term elections. Last year was lost by the futile attempts to undo Obamacare, and the only thing that passed this year was the tax cuts.
Rehashing Obama doesn't accomplish anything except to keep the racial fires burning. Trade wars and tariffs just give false hope to workers in industries that will never recover those lost jobs.
Those corporations that benefited most from the tax cuts aren't giving their employees any wage increases but instead are doing one-time bonuses for political cover as they do massive stock buybacks to increase the share price and dividend distribution.
Basic manufacturing and extraction (steel, coal, aluminum, oil) will see increases in productivity because of technology, automation and efficiency. They will not see increases in jobs except in the technology sectors to keep the robots running. Those assembly line jobs just won't magically reappear. The new plants that are touted as returning to the U.S. will be highly technology-driven, and the former workers won't have the skills to apply for or exist in those jobs that are available without massive retraining.
In short, this administration is trying to drive us back to the 'good old days' that never really existed, and we, the people have been sold a false bill of goods that will benefit no one in the future.
Good luck and enjoy the government you voted in. You deserve it, and the rest of us will pay the price for it.
I just finished going through Cold Iron's initial ... (
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