THE AMERICAN POSEIDON ADVENTURE

As I listened to Texas Republicans plead with Trump to open his pocketbook so they could deluge the Texas market with propaganda about Paxton’s supposed virtue, Trump’s choice to represent the people of Texas in the U.S. Senate, I was struck by the irony. Using the word virtue in the same sentence with Trump seems almost oxymoronic, especially when his actual record is compared with the fabricated record he continually promotes. His insistence on repeating his own version of reality begs the question, is he simply dishonest, delusional, or mentally unstable and why hasn’t his behavior triggered consideration of the 25th Amendment?

While the comic strip above is humorous, it sadly also captures the quality of Trump’s Cabinet meetings. Trump and his circle continually sell their supporters a mixture of falsehoods, flattery, and self-serving pablum. But as time passes, the real consequences of those policies are becoming harder to disguise because Americans are beginning to experience them in their daily lives.

The bluster, chest-pounding, childish cartoons, personal insults, and blatantly false statements are coming home to roost. Unfortunately, much of the damage already done will not disappear when the rhetoric stops. The consequences may affect ordinary Americans, and America’s standing in the world for years to come.

The larger question is this: 

• How did Congress allow the president, the head of a separate and coequal branch of government, to pursue policies and actions that were so obviously capable of harming the country?
• How did Congress support an unnecessary war costing billions of dollars?
• How did it tolerate business arrangements that undermined American interests while potentially directing financial benefits toward the president and his family?
• How did Congress allow a president, whom it possesses constitutional powers to restrain, to weaken American security by damaging alliances built over eighty years while personally cozying up to nations and leaders whose interests may be hostile to our own?
• How did Congress enable this administration to erode the civil rights of Americans through alleged ICE abuses and the domestic deployment of military force in circumstances that risk intimidating or suppressing political opposition?

The answer, in large part, is that we elected political chameleons more interested in preserving their own power, position, and financial interests than in defending America’s fiscal health and constitutional principles.

Every one of those chameleons should be held accountable at the ballot box and only the voters can do it. If we fail to act, this black comedy of errors will continue. And in the end, the victims will be us.

VOTE!!!

RESIST!!! & EDUCATE!!!