Archives for January 2019

It’s crazy. ‘If I don’t get my wall, I’m going to shut down the government.’ ‘If we don’t open the government, you can’t speak in our chamber,’ It’s a bunch of 2-year-olds, you know? Let’s figure out border security, and let’s get people to work, and let’s let the State of the Union take place like it always does.” Larry Hogan, Governor of Maryland

This old and tired Bogeyman of Equivalency is regularly called out by “moderate” Republicans whenever they find themselves losing a fight that they started. The tactic is to do something totally outrageous and when the opposition calls them on it to then blame the opposition for not being willing to negotiate. To suggest – as Hogan does – that Nancy Pelosi shares blame for a government shutdown unilaterally ordered by a Republican President is like blaming England for refusing to give up the Cotswolds in order to stop German bombs.

Trump unilaterally put almost a million government employees on unpaid leave and said he was happy to take responsibility for doing it. He was also forcing thousands of others to continue working without pay – all to threaten the Congress into giving him his essentially ineffective wall. Nancy Pelosi simply said Trump could not use the Capital as a soapbox to feed his insatiable ego until he opens the government and pays employees for their work. These are in no way equivalent and Hogan is basically acting as an enabler of a maladjusted president. That much of the press gets sucked into the nonsense of equivalency does not make it right.

Whether or not Hogan believes that Trump has created this mess and has full responsibility for cleaning it up, he is just another Republican afraid to take an honest stand against his party’s current leader. We have had over two years of Trump and he remains an embarrassment who governs to fill his pockets and his narcissistic ego. It is beyond time for “moderate” Republicans to put the country’s interests ahead of those of the President.

Hogan is being mentioned as a possible primary opponent of Trump, but the party and the country needs better than a so-called moderate. If Hogan really does not support the closing of the government, he needs to have the backbone to confront his party’s leaders – Trump and McConnell – and to recognize the cynical sham of his statement, above.

Democrats, many Republicans and specifically Speaker Pelosi, have figured out border security and it does not include Trump’s wall. If Hogan really wants to run for President he might start with acknowledging the reality of the damage that Trump has done and the fact that the House of Representatives is now managed by a smart, mentally stable woman – who, as it turns out, is a proud daughter of Baltimore.

A summary a la Bob and Ray

It was that wonderful year in which the British voters and their even more comically gifted parliamentary representatives managed to bring to life and then perform over and over again LIVE and on stage exaggerated adaptations of several of the most brilliant satiric skits first put by the great Monty Python troupe. Leaving that crew in the dust they brought together a bevy of characters beyond the imagination of the Pythons. Who could invent such wonderland creatures as the mad hatters who demanded the liberation of their brave and threatened kingdom from their slummy neighbours who were hunkered down in Brussels, Belgium of all unimportant places.

When they actually won the vote for a breakaway independence by the slightest of margins, having lost by the largest in their colonial outposts in Scotland and Northern Ireland, not to mention Gibralter, the leader of the hatters and his merry revolutionary men acted with remarkable speed when they began to get the news that their declaration of independence from the nasty Europeans appeared to be succeeding. Never having imagined that possibility, their leader and his unrobinhoody band ran for the hills after someone must have told them of the problems they would be facing on the island of Ireland and Northern Ireland , and the existence of custom unions across the English Channel and the chunnel to France. And the leader of it all disappeared and was never seen agin. Okay this is only true in the Trumpian sense, as we actually did see Sir Robin today on the BBC, as he began to strike out on a run in his bathing costume through the streets of London. Not even the Pythons could come up with that for a display of bizarre chutzpah.

And now the stage was really set for chivalric disaster as they named a fearless and brave female warrior to defend their new borders and after more than two unarthurian years of agonizing behaviour yelled out against her heir from their secure halls of power, they threw their fearless female warrior princess right under the bus with a shocking crescendo of linguistic shabbiness. If you think this is the end of a miserable tale, think again. On the very next day they asked her to go back out onto the field of battle and take on the dragon again. again. Now they had confidence in her. And they didn’t even apologize. nAnd she said she would gve it another go. Bully on her but no one seems to think this will all have a happy end at the end of March, when the end must happen.