05-05-2020, 02:46 PM
(05-05-2020, 01:47 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:(05-05-2020, 11:09 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:Are we now like the closing pitcher in a baseball game facing the team’s most feared slugger(s) in the bottom of the ninth with game on the line?(05-05-2020, 09:06 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Tea Party never had much appeal to youth...
I agree pretty much with what you say. The moderates who have been swinging back and forth in the unravelling are also swinging again. The idea that you should leave neither party in power to long, let neither ideology take hold in power, may end as the Republicans have totally discredited themselves. Their lack of serving the people, their service to the elites and corporations, their unwillingness to confront problems, have become obvious. The Tea Party is shrinking. It is quite possible we will have a crisis heart plus high and awakening making up a new progressive era. Even the self centered greed of the next unraveling should be built on the baseline of the culture the civics are theoretically about to create.
But right now the conservatives are still expecting a return to the last unraveling. There have not yet been enough deaths for many of them to embrace a new normal.
Never fear. The conservatives are working on it.
It is worse. You are the closing pitcher and you have inherited a 3-0 count with the bases loaded and nobody out against a batter who will foul off pitches until he gets the pitch that he can easily hit for a single that can tie the game... or in the event that he gets a horrible pitch easy to hit he might hit a double or home run that turns a lead into a quick loss. If you throw ball four to him he takes a trip to first base and a run scores. Your team still leads, but by only one run, and the opposing team has another such hitter that pitchers prefer to face with nobody on base.
Say what you want, but it is a hitter like Rod Carew who gets on base a lot who makes a Reggie Jackson all the more dangerous.
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We do not quite have the unity necessary for meeting a clear and present danger well. You can say all that you want about someone like Barack Obama being better suited for the role. Obama is far more like FDR or Lincoln than is Donald Trump, but even his wisdom is out of the question for formulating policy because the infantile personality who now takes the role of Top Leader treats him as a pariah for having mocked the current President's "birther" stuff. Anybody else would see Obama as a treasure for the time. Trump's waste of a competent predecessor to soothe his delicate ego is itself a disgrace.
If voters do not treat Trump appropriately in November (and yes, his dithering has caused nothing but harm) then historians will judge the American people of our time harshly.
As it is we can deal with COVID-19 piecemeal to the benefit of states with Governors wise enough to do right if the others pay the price in mass death.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.