To Democrats everywhere: (GOTTA GO TO CHURCH. I’M POSTING THIS NOW BUT I’LL PROOF READ IT LATER)
I only caught the Senate roll call vote on the first charge of impeachment I didn’t listen to it all but I was pleased that Mitt Romney vote for the impeachment. Its a very small sliver of decency but I’m glad Mitt was more concerned about his legacy than any short term popularity with the Trump Crowd.
I can’t predict the arc of history for the GOP. I hope my conviction that its centrists will flea to Democrats. As I explained in my recent Reader article no one can count on that. Honorable do not want to dishonor their past and the Republican party aura is still in people’s memories if not in current reality. There have been a lot of news stories recently about how those who find Trump somewhere between disagreeable and and abomination might be able to get his supporters to second guess their support or their incredulity. Taunting won’t do it. Has Trump’s taunting made any of you change your minds?
I think the stakes are too high. Self righteousness on the anti-Trump part could give Republicans enough control to further their slow steady progress towards improving their mal-reapportionment and setting it in stone. Justice Roberts will not save us and if someone palatable to the reachable center is not elected there will be four more years of Court appointees and another ten years of reapportionment disasters for Democrats. It will take a consititutional amendment to change the constitution’s imposition of electors to elect a president.
This can be stopped with the cool calculations, not unlike Mitch McConnell’s to build toward a government that will protect the Earth. But shooting for full on change the way a lot of twenty-somethings will like is probably doomed. Your potential friends scare easy when you start frothing at the mouth in desperation.
I am an unrepentant socialist. Though they wouldn’t admit it so have almost all the Republicans I’ve ever met. Unless they are willing to face the electoral consequences of ending Social Security they are all Socialists. Until Trump energized a lot of voters who would benefit from a single-player-plan with fears that Socialism a is Marxism and Dictatorship. We have to talk these voters down from the ledge but not with Trumps bragadoccio and false confidence. I believe his confidence is paper thin but well practices skirting financial disaster over the last fifty years. He’s a bully but he ain’t the biggest fish in the Presidential campaign. Any other candidate than can win the electoral vote is a bigger fish. And one of them who intrigues me is a billionaire 60 times over. And as he said in response to some tweet at least there is one billionaire in the campaign.
Few young people are familiar with New York state’s unorthodox political history going back 60 years or more. Both Trump and Bloomberg have been both Dems and Gops. That’s because for decades there was a serious third party in New York called the Conservative Party. It was in line with famed conservative columnist William Buckley. In a three way race in 1970 the party elected James Buckley, Bill’s older brother to the US Senate.
Bloomberg and Trump were both pragmatists about politics donating to candidate from each party. But there the comparisson ends. Bloomberg earned his billions. Trump inherited, squandered them, lied stole and cheated to preserve them, and will say whatever he has to to get people to sign on the dotted line. His supporters have no idea how empty his words are. They see a wall. They see a pro life savior, If lying gets them what they want its a small price to pay no matter what harm befalls them that you can be sure he will blame on Democrats.
Bloomberg like you and me abhors Trump but unlike you and me he lived in the same town as Trump and knows his vile past far better than anyone except perhaps the whole corpus of the New York Times.
This isn’t an ad for Bloomberg. I will vote for whoever the Democrats put up against Trump. I like them all. The issue for Democrats who become delegates to the national nominating convention is this. Which candidate will beat Trump with candor and honesty. I hope when the decision is made some of the players do what they did in 2016 – Decide that neither Trump and the other guy’s democratic candidate preference is worth voting for. God Damn you. My Grandchildren need an American President who doesn’t lie, understands the perils of climate change and who will do his/her best to bring Trumplicans back to their senses.