Imagine that for one week President Donald J. Trump received the same kind of media coverage that former President Barack Obama received throughout his eight years in office.
It would mean that for one week the mainstream media would write and talk about Trump being a great president and how all his ideas were wonderful. They would go on and on about Trump being a great speaker and communicator. His administration would be hailed as one of the most open and transparent in history.
The assumption on everything Trump did for a week would be that it was the right thing to do and best for the country.
It’s never going to happen because the starting point for any Obama action was that it was correct and he was doing it for all the right reasons. The mainstream media might find small flaws or things that could have been improved, but the starting point was always that Obama was right.
With Trump it is the opposite; the starting point is always that he is wrong. He is doing whatever he is doing for all the wrong reasons.
Take tweeting for instance. The mainstream media hates the fact that Trump tweets. They say it isn’t presidential, he shouldn’t do it, that his staff is trying to take his phone away from him and it is embarrassing. It is never even considered that he might send out some funny tweets.
However, it’s possible to look at tweeting from an entirely different viewpoint. Remember how excited the press was that Obama insisted on keeping his BlackBerry so he could text like a normal person. Obama’s use of his BlackBerry was considered a great innovation by the press.
Tweeting could be looked at the same way. It is Trump communicating directly with the American people without filters or prepared statements, without speechwriters or aides getting in between what the president wants to say and the people he wants to address.
It is certainly possible to paint tweeting in a good light. It is not inherently evil to tweet and for Trump it makes perfect sense for him to continue to tweet just like he did all through the campaign. It’s proving to the people who supported him that the same man is residing in the White House that they saw out on the campaign trail.
It has often been the case that getting elected to office changes the person drastically. Trump is saying that being president hasn’t changed him at all, which in Obama would be considered marvelous and in Trump is considered malevolent.
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I keep reading about this terrible thing that Donald Trump Jr. did, meeting with a Russian woman who he was told by a questionable third party had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
It clearly wasn’t a smart move because of all the controversy that it has caused, but if you wipe away the controversy, I can’t find anything he did that was wrong. Perhaps some law I don’t know about was passed that makes it illegal for members of a Republican presidential campaign to meet with a Russian, but I haven’t been able to find it.
I think it’s evident that if he had it to do over again Trump Jr. would not have met with any Russians, or even anyone who spoke Russian or knew a Russian. And I think Trump Jr. would not have agreed to the meeting, mainly because it was a waste of time.
The reason it’s a big story is because the media says that it’s a big story. No reports that I’ve read indicate that anything untoward happened at the meeting. This Russian lawyer wanted to talk about adoption and Trump Jr. wanted dirt on Hillary Clinton. Despite what the mainstream media and the Democrats say, it is not illegal to talk about adoption or to try and find dirt about your opponent.
It appears that what Trump Jr. did was naïve and, because of the problems it has caused, dumb, but it wasn’t wrong or illegal.
At the time Trump Jr. didn’t know that his father’s political opponents would accuse him of colluding with the Russians and launch a seemingly endless campaign to prove it.
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It appears the Republicans are going to fail to do what they said they would do for the past seven years – repeal Obamacare.
This is not a failure of Trump. It is not his job to get legislation through the Republican Senate; that is the job of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
When the Democrats needed votes to pass Obamacare, senators who were on the fence or didn’t like the bill got billions of dollars for their home states for their votes. It wasn’t done in secret, because that would have defeated the purpose. The Democratic leadership wanted the constituents of the holdouts to know that either their senators could bring home billions of dollars or they could vote against Obamacare. Passing Obamacare was right down to the wire, just like repealing it is.
The difference seems to be the will to get it done. The Democratic leadership was willing to do whatever it took to get the votes for Obamacare. The Republicans are not.
Evidently McConnell doesn’t really care whether Obamacare is repealed or not. Or else McConnell doesn’t know how to pass a bill. It could very well be the latter because he has a long history of not getting bills through the Senate.
Back when Obama was president, members of the House called the Senate the place that bills go to die. McConnell wouldn’t hold a vote on bills passed by the House because he didn’t want them to be vetoed, or that’s what he said. Now McConnell doesn’t have that excuse and he still doesn’t want to pass bills.
The Republicans are playing with fire. Elections are coming up in 2018 and, although it will be tough for the Democrats to win control of the Senate, it is not impossible and the House may be up for grabs.
One thing the Republicans do have going for them is that if the Democrats win control of the House then Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi becomes speaker, and Pelosi appears to be having even more difficulty making sense than she did a few years ago.
However, if the Democrats are smart and replace Pelosi with some young, hard-charging representative who can make rational statements and stay on one topic through an entire sentence, they may well take the House, unless Republicans get together and decide to take action.
There seems to be this odd belief on the Republican side that every Republican has to be completely in favor of every aspect of every bill in order to vote for it. Politics doesn’t work that way – whether it is a partisan or bipartisan bill, there is always compromise. The final product may be a bill that nobody loves, but its one that everybody can support.
It is incredible that Republican senators who voted to repeal Obamacare when they knew that repeal would be vetoed are not willing to vote to repeal Obamacare when they know that it counts. Politicians are two-faced by definition, but most of the time they at least make some effort not to appear to be taking actions for purely political reasons.
How could any Republican in the Senate go back to their constituents and explain that, when given the opportunity to repeal Obamacare, they voted against repeal? What do they say? That they never really wanted to repeal Obamacare but said they did to get elected?
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The talk by liberals of impeaching Trump is silly. First of all, a president can’t be impeached because you really thought the other candidate was going to win. A president can only be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” So far there is no evidence that Trump has committed a crime. Firing the FBI director, for example, is not a crime.
But even if some crime were invented, the Republicans control both the House and the Senate. The Republicans in the House are not going to vote to impeach a Republican president.
Only two presidents in US history have been impeached and none have been removed from office.
The first was President Andrew Johnson, who was from Tennessee and took office after President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. But even then the Senate did not vote to remove Johnson from office.
The other was President Bill Clinton. There was overwhelming evidence that Clinton committed perjury, but the Democrats and some Republicans in the Senate would not vote to remove him from office.
In fact, it is almost never mentioned in the mainstream media that Clinton was impeached, and because he was not removed from office many people say that he was not impeached, but he was.
So far the crime for which the Democrats want to impeach Trump was defeating Hillary Clinton, and although the Democrats think that was a horrific thing to do, there is no law making it illegal to beat a Clinton in an election.
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It is incredible that the investigation of Trump colluding with the Russians during the campaign continues. He has been in office for six months and no evidence has been found. It would appear that the investigation will continue for the rest of his presidency.
The mainstream media continue to talk constantly about the fact that Trump Jr. met with a Russian woman who wanted to talk about adoption as proof of some collusion.
State Rep. John Blust on Facebook said that what Trump Jr. should have said when he was asked what they talked about was that they talked about grandchildren and that would have ended the discussion.
It certainly worked for Bill Clinton and then Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Nobody with any sense believed it, but also no one has investigated to find out what they actually talked about.
What the Republicans should be doing now is investigating every meeting that Chelsea Clinton had during the campaign. Perhaps they could find that a Russian attended one of her campaign rallies; considering how few attended most Chelsea Clinton events it shouldn’t be hard to check out. Maybe she rode in an elevator with a Russian or ate at the same restaurant as a Russian.
But none of that would matter. Chelsea Clinton could have met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the mainstream media wouldn’t care.
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Former Vice President Al Gore is coming out with a sequel to his movie An Inconvenient Truth. Perhaps he’s going to explain why some of his predictions in the first movie, which came out 10 years ago, haven’t quite played out the way he predicted.
Gore in 2007 said that in 10 years the sea levels could rise by 6 meters, about 20 feet, because of the melting of the polar ice caps and the glaciers on Greenland.
The sea level has continued to rise at a relatively steady rate, but it is measured in centimeters, not meters.
Polar bears, which he said would be wiped out due to loss of habitat, are doing well, and by some counts there are more polar bears than 10 years ago. The polar bears don’t seem to know they are supposed to be dying.
Gore predicted that there would be more hurricanes and they would be stronger. Instead, the US went through the longest hurricane drought in recorded history. There are also fewer tornados when Gore said that there would be more.
Man continues to pump more and more carbon gases into the air, which according to Gore should cause Earth’s temperature to rise at an ever-increasing rate, but for 19 years there hasn’t been an increase in the global temperature, which is a bit of a problem for Gore.
It proves the vast power of the mainstream media. The whole global warming – later changed to climate change – theory is based on a paper Gore wrote at Yale. Fortunately for all of us, most government policies are not based on college papers, but this one is.
The first time Gore gave his global warming speech in Washington, it was a cold winter day and nobody paid any attention. But Gore wasn’t done. He picked what was traditionally the hottest day of the summer in Washington for his next global warming speech, and it was a sweltering day. After that speech he got great press and he’s been on a roll ever since, having made hundreds of millions of dollars on climate change.
My senior paper was on the epistemology of existential writers and I’ve never made a dime on it.
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Another government crisis is coming up in September, when the debt ceiling once again has to be raised.
Reading articles in the mainstream media about it, you would think that this had never happened before, but it happens all the time. The debt ceiling has to be raised and, to get the votes to raise it, concessions have to be made. Obama was ready to shut the government down if the Republicans didn’t agree to raising the debt ceiling on his terms.
It’s nothing new and it’s hard to see how it’s a big crisis. So far the government has been through this about 90 times since 1917. Sometimes it comes closer to the wire than others, and sometimes the government technically shuts down, but in the end the federal government continues to borrow money like a teenager with an unlimited credit card and the American people continue to pay the debts.
Soon the federal debt will be over $20 trillion, which seems like a lot of money to pay back someday, but the people in Congress seem to be convinced that the day to pay it back will only come after they have left office.
Raising the debt ceiling proves that it is not really a question of Democrats and Republicans in Washington. It is a question of those in Washington spending the money and those of us in the rest of the country sending them the money to spend.
It’s one of the things that the Democrats and Republicans couldn’t understand about Trump. A lot of Trump supporters voted for him because he didn’t have any constituency in Washington and he said he was going to drain the swamp.
It appears that Trump would like to drain the swamp, but it is far more difficult than it might seem.
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The funding was pulled from the $1.4 billion Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters that is slated to be built in Maryland.
It’s a 2.1-million-square-foot building, but the price – which no one seems to have a problem with – is high even for the federal government.
According to average building costs for offices, building a 2.1 million-square-foot office in New York would cost about $500 million. To build the same building in Winston-Salem would cost about $300 million. But for the federal government to build it in Maryland is estimated to be $1.4 billion.
One of the reasons for building the new structure is that it would cost an estimated $80 million to repair the current FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. The current headquarters, the Hoover Building, is also not large enough for all the FBI offices to be under one roof.
But considering the current use of electronic communications, is it worth $1.4 billion to get everybody under one roof? In a building of 2.1 million square feet it is certainly possible that it would be quicker for someone to walk a couple blocks to the headquarters for a meeting than to navigate their way through the building for a meeting.
The cost of building in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which is the most likely location, should actually be closer to the cost of building in Winston-Salem than New York. But even giving them the New York cost and adding $100 million for labs, another $100 million for security systems and another $100 million for communications, you’d only get to $800 million, which still leaves $600 million of costs that evidently are due to the fact that the federal government is doing the building.
Plus, when have you ever heard of a federal project coming in on or under budget? Even if the increase is only 10 percent, which is a big if, that raises the price to $1.54 billion, which is a full $1 billion over the cost of building the building for the private sector in New York.
It’s no wonder the federal government is nearly $20 trillion in debt.
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Trump has been in office six months and already the mainstream media are writing about how he has not kept his campaign promises. A presidential term is four years. Particularly in a situation where the president has never held elective office and has a lot to learn about how politics in general and Washington in particular works, you might think they would give Trump time to get his feet wet before labeling his presidency as a failure.
My favorite broken promise is that he hasn’t built the wall yet. Some of these people doing the reporting know how long it takes to get a road built, and roads are built all the time. Simply the design of a road takes years. Trump’s opponents act like Trump was supposed to be sworn into office on Jan. 20 and a wall all along the border with Mexico would be completed by the end of the month.
More reasonable reports are that the wall is progressing. Not that it is being built, but it is being engineered and planned.
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Congress has not repealed Obamacare. With McConnell leading the Senate and Speaker Paul Ryan in the House, it will be amazing if they pass anything of note. It is the most moribund Congress in decades, if not ever.
Unless Republicans find some leaders in Congress and put them in the leadership positions, it isn’t likely anything is going to get accomplished.
When Trump talked about draining the swamp, it appears McConnell would be right at the top of the list to go down the drain.
McConnell is the type of politician who gives Washington a bad name. It is baffling to most of us outside the Beltway that McConnell is considered some great leader. It appears that McConnell’s main claim to fame is that he manages to keep getting elected.
What is it about this man that the Republicans decided to make him one of the most powerful men in Washington? From the outside it doesn’t make any sense. All the evidence is that McConnell can’t do his job, which is to pass legislation, so why don’t the Republicans in the Senate get rid of him and get some senator who wants to give it a try?
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The difference between the Republicans in Washington and the Republicans in Raleigh is startling. The Republicans won majorities in the state House and Senate and immediately started passing conservative bills.
In the beginning, because there was a Democratic governor and the Republicans didn’t have veto-proof majorities, they had to temper their bills. But they didn’t sit back and say, “We can’t do anything because the Democrat governor is going to veto our bills.” They passed what they could.
When a Republican governor was elected in 2012, the Republicans picked up the pace on reducing taxes and spending, as well as abolishing needless regulations, and the result has been an economic rebound for the state.
While other states are struggling to make payroll, North Carolina has paid off most of the massive debts run up by the Democrats and money is rolling in because the economy continues to improve.
In Washington, DC, the people elected Republicans who only seem to know how to sit on their hands and complain. In six months of having control of both Houses of Congress and the White House, the only notable achievement has been appointing a conservative Supreme Court justice.
If in six months that’s all they can do, then the people who elected Trump president need to get out and defeat the current crop of Republicans in the primaries and send some folks to Washington who want to bring much-needed reform to the government.
That seems about as likely as a billionaire with no political experience getting elected president, so maybe it will happen.
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At one point it appeared that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie would be vice president. Then it seemed that he would have a major position in the Trump administration. Recently he auditioned for a job as a radio talk show host for when he leaves office next year.
His recent day at a beach closed to the public because of a government shutdown appeared to be political suicide. Is it possible that Christie didn’t know how bad that was going to look?
Trump, despite what people say about him, has been willing to let bygones be bygones and move on. But considering where Christie is in the polls these days, even Trump would be hard pressed to appoint him to any position of power.
Maybe Christie decided that he was done with politics and wanted to make sure he wouldn’t be tempted to get back in the ring.
