It should come as no big surprise to anyone that we live in a severely broken country. The government is broken. Our economic system is broken, and our national psyche is quickly deteriorating to the point of broken. Donald Trump and friends are certainly not the cause for all of these troubles, which have been a long time in development, but their intentions and their conduct were and are certainly not what is needed to help us become the more perfect union to which we aspire and to which our most cherished declarations proclaim are our goals. A Democratic Republic and an economic system of (hopefully) enlightened capitalism are delicate and fragile systems, which require people of good intention and good will to operate them. Good intentions are the desire to do good; good will is the will (ability and determination) to do good. It only takes a few people of bad will to insinuate themselves into positions of authority to start to ruin the whole thing, and that is exactly what has happened with the election of Donald Trump.
A brief review of the landscape will reveal how we went from bad to way worse in the four short years of the Trump administration. We begin with a look at the most recent debacle, the mismanagement of the Global Pandemic known as Covid-19.
The following is an excerpt from “Lancet”, a well-respected British Medical Journal, which a short while ago most clearly and concisely described our sadly inefficient ability to combat the COVID-19 pandemic
“The Trump Administration is obsessed with magic bullets — vaccines, new medicines, or hope that the virus will simply disappear. But only a steadfast reliance on basic public health principles, like test, trace, and isolate, will see the emergency brought to an end, and this requires an effective national public health agency. The CDC needs a director who can provide leadership without the threat of being silenced and who has the technical capacity to lead today’s complicated effort.
The Trump administration’s further erosion of the CDC will harm global cooperation in science and public health, as it is trying to do by defunding WHO. A strong CDC is needed to respond to public health threats, both domestic and international, and to help prevent the next inevitable pandemic. Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.”
Partisan politics have been the recipe for every other mismanaged, destructive policy that has been served up by this group of scoundrels for the last four years. Consider, the suffering of innocent children, incarcerated in prison camps for the “crime” of seeking asylum and protection in our country from the murderous criminals in their native lands; the abandonment of our Kurdish allies in the Mideast; the blackmail of our allies in Ukraine, leaving them vulnerable to Russian aggression during a “hot war. Not to mention withdrawals from positive agreements with NATO; withdrawal from the Paris accords for international environmental protections; the breach of the Iran Nuclear Agreement; all of which have made our country less safe. And finally, there are the continual attacks on our institutions of government, and on our patriotic public servants and watchdogs, who get punished and fired for doing their jobs, the results of which may be contrary to presidential liking; or worse, the firing of Senate approved inspector generals for no other reason than they were appointed by former President Barrack Obama; not to mention the ordering of phony investigations into the legitimate investigations of possible corrupt activities by a variety of Presidential inspired programs; all of which have wrought a wreckage that has left our government and our country in shambles. The list of outrages are so endless that our “outrage receptors” are numb.
Suffice it to say further that our newly elected President in November of this year cannot be a sociopath or a psychopath, which if you have not noticed by now, is exactly who you have in Donald Trump. The psychology experts say that the key difference between these two personality types supposedly is that a sociopath at least has a small amount of a conscience, that little voice inside your head that that tells you “Don’t even think of doing what your evil little mind is considering”. The key similarity these two societal misfits share is that they are habitual liars, Compulsive Pathological Liars.
Historians and criminologists can tell us that our history is replete with these types of sociopaths (CPL’s), people whose dedication to a life of lying, cheating, and taking advantage of others moves them into the higher category of Criminal. Criminals are people, who no longer deserve the privilege to live freely in society. They belong behind bars in prison, away from normal everyday hardworking people whose lives they prey upon and whose lives they often ruin in their quest to unjustly enrich themselves. There is a special place in hell for these criminal sociopaths who have additionally gained positions of authority or leadership, and who in those positions betray the public trust which they were honor bound to uphold.
That special place in hell should begin during their lifetimes when they should be consigned to the humiliation of prison, where they are no longer free to abuse the rights that free, civilized people recognize as the basic, cherished rights that a democratic society expects its citizens to honor.
For the last four years we have lived with the most Grotesque and Corrupt, Racist and Divisive, Harmful and Inept, Presidential Administration in the history of our Republic. Never has so much damage been done to so many by so few. Many lessons have been learned during this bleak period, first and foremost which is, “This is no way to run a country”. Many systemic changes will have to be made to become that more perfect union to which we aspire. So many problems must be solved.
Between now and election day we must be vigilant. The lies will fly, the cheating will escalate, the phony promises of “great things to come” will reach epic proportions of “fantasy”, while the reality of brutal thuggery on the ground will be encouraged. And the bully pulpit, with GOP complicity and Russian meddling via social media and all other forms of voter tampering, will reach new levels of desperation and duplicity.
And among all of these abuses, “truth” is always the victim, and not one shred of conscience will be evident.
This is no way to run a country!
