Irish Stew #47…
[All politics today, along the lines of “Did we deserve all these bad presidential candidates?” I’m seriously depressed….]
Item. Daughter Chelsea shows her stripes. It’s not enough that Hillary trots out old Bill to try to sell her brand of snake oil, but she also employs their daughter Chelsea. Apparently the couple has coached her well in the art of dirty politics. Her spin on Bernie Sanders’s healthcare plan? She said he wants to destroy Obamacare. Even Hillary had to backtrack on that one! What Sanders wants is to improve Obamacare by eliminating the insurance companies and Big Pharma’s stranglehold on it. It’s called single payer, folks, and I’ve been pushing it for years (Hillary did too, for a time). That’s socialism, you say.
OK, is Medicare socialism? Maybe. Aren’t all government services? In the tristate area, you can hear Wall Street bankers complaining about socialism while they ride in on the commuter rail from their million-dollar mansions in posh areas of Connecticut. Socialism is only a necessity that recognizes that capitalistic corporate America isn’t service-oriented but profit-oriented. But ask any elderly person whether we should eliminate Medicare and you’ll get a ration of you know what.
Sure, Medicare has some problems (not enough pursuit of scammers, for one), but it mostly works. And it’s much better than Obamacare because it’s 100% single payer for Part A and 80% for Part B. I’d upgrade Part B to 100% (insurance companies offering supplement plans would resist that, of course) and make Obamacare single payer too. Even generalizing the current Medicare to all ages would be better than Obamacare. That’s what Bernie is proposing. Chelsea’s spin is a lie.
Item. Where’s my freedom of religion? Did you notice the two nuns in the audience at Obama’s State of the Union address? The new Speaker of the House invited them. I thought it was a nice touch at first—who doesn’t love Mother Teresa?—but I wondered why they looked pissed most of the time, a bit like nun-teachers in a parochial school. Turns out they’re business moguls because they run thirty for-profit nursing homes. Because they’re a business with so many employees, they have to offer healthcare to their employees. They fought paying for birth control services to female employees under Obamacare. A work-around was offered so their female employees could go to a third party for birth control meds. The nuns are still fighting it, though, because they don’t want anything to do with that dirty business. Why do these nuns have the right to force their religious preferences on their employees? That IS a failure of Obamacare, but it was imposed by the conservative Supreme Court.
Along the same lines, I saw Kim Davis in the crowd, another person who tramps on other persons’ rights claiming freedom of religion. Was she another Ryan invitee? Or Ted Cruz’s (more on Ted’s religious credentials below)? Of course, the leading GOP candidate panders to these religious wackos too—Mr. Trump will say anything to get elected, it seems. But imagine the hypocrisy of Ryan. On one hand, he applauds when Mr. Obama says the Donald shouldn’t be intolerant with Muslims, but on the other he kisses the asses of a couple of nuns and possibly Kim Davis. There’s no freedom of religion from Ryan’s perspective—it’s all politics, and going after MY rights to pander to the GOP base.
Item. Why do evangelicals love Cruz? David Brooks, a NY Times columnist who writes op-eds that I usually deplore, did a good deed by bringing this little item to my attention in “The Brutalism of Ted Cruz” (NY Times, 1/12/16). Ted Cruz, as solicitor general for the Texas Republic (I wish it was a separate country sometimes), showed none of the characteristics evangelicals swear by in a case he took to the Supreme Court. He’s not humble (if you didn’t already know that, you’re not paying attention), he shows no mercy or compassion (not even to fellow GOP members), and has the grace of an irate ogre with a case of the runs. So what did Cruz do in this Supreme Court case?
The history: In 1997, Michael Wayne Haley stole a calculator from a Texas Walmart. Ignoring the fact that Sam Walton and his family should have shown some humility, mercy, compassion, and grace on their own part and suggest community service for a crime that should have two years max in prison—it was Haley’s first calendar offense (to be fair, others closely followed on its heels, something Brooks neglected to mention)—the Texas legal establishment screwed up and pushed for the max sentence for a repeat offender, sixteen years, and that was his sentence. Sixteen years? C’mon!
The Texans legal establishment later “discovered” their error, but the Texas Supreme Court declared the calendar slip-up should make no difference, and, upon further appeal, Cruz took the case to the highest court in the land. Wayne’s sketchy life aside, and forgetting the fact that a ton of money was flushed down the drain (a taste for the DC good life in the city’s posh hotels for Mr. Cruz?) by pursuing this case—didn’t Texas voters know about this and other moral atrocities (see below) when Cruz ran for the Senate?—the mean spiritedness exhibited by Cruz should disqualify him as an evangelical’s favorite candidate at the very least. He’s a more Old Testament eye-for-an-eye type of guy. That’s not the New Testament message offered by Christ.
Item. Candidates’ morality. Cruz is also a liar, of course, but most politicians are. Here’s one egregious example: He has often expressed that, as a Washington outsider (yep, his own party in Congress finds him despicable), he can fight Wall Street and the big banks. Nobody rarely mentions how he financed his run for the Senate, though. You guessed it: through a loan from a big Wall Street bank, none other than Goldman-Sachs, a bank that was “too big to fail” but one that should have met the same fate as Bear-Stearns in the 2008-2009 financial implosion that nearly led us into another Great Depression.
While Cruz allegedly used his own stocks as collateral, he didn’t comply with FES rules, but that’s not the point: he can’t be trusted. If you didn’t already know that by his threat to carpet bomb innocent civilians in Syria (another act of Christian charity for evangelicals to consider?), please note that the negatives on his political rap sheet are adding up. (BTW, the “birther issue” that Trump keeps poking at is nolo contendere. My own children were born outside the country and are U.S. citizens. The only issue is whether he was registered in the U.S. embassy or consulate in Canada.)
Cruz’s recent insults directed toward New Yorkers were less over the top than the above, but he made up for it with his infamous “apology.” You won’t often hear me supporting Trump in this election season, but the Brooklyn-born GOP candidate not only called Cruz out on this issue but stated the truth on ABC’s This Week: Cruz is one nasty SOB that no one really likes. Electing him would be like electing Hitler, Attila the Hun, and George Wallace combined, except that he’s a Princeton and Harvard graduate, so he has to be smarter than all of them, right? But he certainly doesn’t merit the support of born-agains and evangelicals.
Item. A dirty election season. But Teflon Ted continues to be the left cheek of the GOP elephant’s dirty rear end and has many followers (the right cheek is Trump, of course). I’d like to have someone in the White House who has a few Christian values at least. Better said, irrespective of their religion or lack thereof, I’d like someone who isn’t a mean-spirited SOB, has some moral spine, and seems truly sympathetic to the plight of Americans beyond that infamous one percent. That can’t be found anywhere in the group of GOP candidates, or most of the elected Republicans in Congress, of course, and it’s doubtful whether the Clinton family (see above) and most other Dems have any positive moral values either. I don’t know enough about O’Malley or Sanders, but at least Bernie shows some true compassion for the poor and middle class, while the Clintons just mouth platitudes to obtain votes and hold out their hands to special interests asking for money, including Wall Street banks.
And so it goes….
