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The Ostrich Solution

Something is all wrong when serious political writers advise us to stop watching the news; that we ought to ignore what is happening politically, else we will go raving mad.

The man we elected President is pathetic.  He cannot tell the truth.  He skips from one subject to the next, asserting stupid foolishness, then blaming everybody else for having said it in the first place.  I don't think he began with that birther nonsense--that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and somehow managed to get his birth announced in Hawaii, which made him ineligible to be President--but he was sure of it.  He said he had investigators in Hawaii finding things they could scarcely believe.  Remember that?  Racist crap:  that's what it was.  It was dancing all around the anger that a Black man had been elected President.  Don't even pretend it had to do with anything else!

The Russian interference with our election process is a stinking mess.  I do not know exactly what happened there, but something surely did.  Congress appears to be almost ready to get serious about that.  Too many people are telling lies about what they did, or did not, do.

Trump's budget proposals are criminal.  He wants to spend even more than we do now on our military; already the highest in the world, by far.  He proposes to cut the budgets of the arts, and parks, and children and Meals on Wheels, and anything that cannot be dropped from an airplane on Syria.  The Republican plan to end the Affordable Care Act is devastating to millions of people who cannot believe that Trump is doing what he said he would do, and which they voted for:  now they are furious that they will lose their health care; their favorite health care; their Obama Care.  Trump is doing his rotten best to stop immigration from Muslim countries:  don't even pretend, any longer, that it is anything else.  He wants to spend billions to build a Berlin Wall across America from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Stupid is stupid.  Racist is racist.  Anti-immigrant is anti-immigrant.  Ignorant is ignorant.  How can any sensible person just turn off the news and pretend that we have not elected a fool?  How can we pretend that we were not agreeable to electing a fool?  His administration is so confoundedly inept that the daily briefings about what is going on are a shambles.  Angela Merkel came here from Germany to be scorned by the man we elected President.  NATO is insulted, and Putin is praised.  Does anyone feel good about Donald Trump's finger on the nuclear trigger?  He authorized a special forces raid, and blamed everybody else when it went wrong.

How can anyone who cares simply ignore what is happening in America?  Turning off the news is burying one's head in the sand in order to see nothing.



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