Four More Years

The next four years promise to be a steady march in the wrong direction. Since his inauguration just three weeks ago, the new occupant of the Oval Office has been leading the march. From what I can tell so far, the unifying principle of the New Occupant’s theory of governance is to push limits until they break and then some. Thus, he recognizes no limits.

Republicans as well as Democrats could enforce new limits on Occupant’s authoritarian urges, but Democrats are not in charge of the congressional agenda and Republicans too often are not in control of their own better judgment and fail to act in the public interest.

The result: we are witness to dictatorship replacing democracy. The New Occupant may pursue whatever cockamamie scheme pops up in his beautifully perfect mind, with no checks and balances from a now-moribund Congress, with no guidance from independent-minded cabinet members having any subject-matter expertise, and with the abject cooperation of a Supreme Court that has collectively lost its mind.

There is no point in trying to identify the worst thing. Harder still is trying to identify something good that has occurred in this first month of the march. The New Occupant’s cabinet nominees seem deliberately chosen to be intellectually inferior to himself, if that is possible. I presume that unquestioning loyalty was the prime directive in selecting this Team of Fools. Not one among them seems capable of articulating a thoughtful argument in opposition to whatever the New Occupant decides.

All matters of domestic policy have been turned over to the reputed richest man on earth. It may be that the New Occupant does not want to be seen getting his hands dirty. By letting Elon do it, the occupant can claim to know nothing about it.

Under the guise of rooting out waste and fraud, Elon with his gang of newly post-pubescent gamers have been given full access to the codes that run the nation’s payment systems, and they have been given everyone’s “private” financial data as well. All this data will be easily downloaded and monetized in the private sector so that Elon can become even richer. Although the gang has not produced proof of any significant fraud or waste, they have proposed (and have already implemented) arbitrary cuts in federal spending, possibly to facilitate tax cuts favoring the already wealthy. Who can say for sure what the Supreme Court will decide, but these cuts (“impoundments”) violate the Constitution’s vesting the power of the purse in Congress. Ripping away some arbitrary percentage of funding will destroy many agencies of the federal government, leaving a vacuum to be filled by the whims of the New Occupant operating out of the Oval Office.

The occupant places himself in a position not of leadership or command but of ratification of whatever Leon does. He seems downright joyful at the demise of critically important federal agencies including, for example, the United States Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Education, and the FBI.

A notable focus of all this greatness-making are clumsy efforts to level the social playing field by abolishment of words and phrases deemed too dangerous for anyone to be thinking, such as “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” “accessibility,” “affirmative action,” or any other similar words or phrases under whatever name they appear. These words alone are deemed unacceptable by the government thought police, because they put at risk the civil rights of the non-diverse among us, who through no fault of their own were born white, male, American and heterosexual.

The rest of the civilized world must think us totally nuts. The New Occupant’s foreign policy involves kissing up to the Russian dictator and assisting him in the war he started against Ukraine. It involves kicking NATO aside. The Europeans can simply fend for themselves. Our occupant thinks he can solve the Israel/Hamas conflict by “owning” Gaza and building a Mediterranean resort complex there. The Palestinians, well, why would they want to stay in a place that’s destroyed? The Palestinians will go somewhere else, where they will build beautiful homes and live in peace and harmony—somewhere. The United States is due for expansion, and the New Occupant proposes making Canada our 51^st state and buying Greenland.

Republicans as well as Democrats in the Senate and the House could raise meaningful objections to where all this is going. I have to believe that there are a significant number of people in Congress who recognize nuttiness when they see it.

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Some other stuff for later,