The problem here, of course, is that the typical Trump supporter is never going to come across this, and if they did, they would conclude that James Madison must have been some sort of liberal commie.
Sadly, we’re just not as well educated as we used to be.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds the antics of Republican congressman George Santos to be amusing. On one hand, one can say that there’s nothing amusing about having a pathological liar and serial felon in a position to make laws that affect every single American. On the other, however, we have to admit that every word that comes out of his mouth has a certain comedic value.
The latest is his letter to House Speaker Keven McCarthy explaining that he wishes to recuse himself from committee assignments “until matters are cleared up.” As if these hundreds of lies and crimes are going to miraculously vanish when these subjects receive more scrutiny.
What is happening is that Santos is going to prison.
Of course, Trump supporters don’t care. In their view, Trump is “making America great again,” and if our country is reviled by the rest of the world, that’s tough.
Here’s a reminder of another intractable problem facing American society: our fondness for weapons designed to kill as many people as possible, in the shortest possible amount of time.
The gun lobby sends enormous fortunes to lawmakers who, in turn, thwart our efforts to prevent ourselves and our children from being shot to bits.
While Americans were reckoning with sky-high gas prices at the pump last year, ExxonMobil reported on Tuesday that it made $56 billion in profits in 2022. That’s the most a Western oil company has ever earned and averages out to around $6.3 million an hour over the course of the year.
It’s not just Exxon. Other major oil companies such as Chevron and Shell are expected to report similar results in the coming weeks, pushing their combined profits to around $200 billion, according to the financial markets data firm Refinitiv.
The challenge facing human civilization when it comes to mitigating climate change is that baking this planet is insanely profitable. Just as we’re finding how difficult it is to remove the drug cartels from Mexico, $56 billion carries a level of political power that is hard to describe.
It’s one thing to be anti-abortion and another to be just plain stupid.
When we learn that a woman is pregnant, do we congratulate her on her baby? If this is to be her first child, do we think of her as a parent?
I sure don’t, because I understand the concept of a miscarriage, and, more generally, the difference between something that has already happened vs. some future event.
If we ask a young person what she wants to do when she enters the work force and she says “a veterinarian,” we might say “Oh, that’s great,” but it would be inappropriate to congratulate her for something that may or may not happen in the future.
If you think there is no chance of another insurrection, one that may be orders of magnitude larger than January 6th, ask yourself what certain congresspeople are trying to communicate by wearing AR-15 pins on their lapels.
It comes as no surprise that the cable news channel Newsmax, far to the right of Fox News in terms of its spreading pure disinformation, is apoplectic about AT&T’s and its subsidiary’s Direct TV’s dropping them when they continued to support Trump after he took on the role as one the world’s most notorious criminals.
We can almost hear the discussion in the boardroom: “We can continue to be America’s phone company, or we can support this sociopath. We can either draw the line or slowly fade into becoming part of a criminal enterprise. I believe that the American people have a limited appetite for treason. Who’s with me?”
In terms of political ideology, it could be that DeSantis is worse than Trump himself.
If he represents an improvement over the former president, it’s possible that he’s not a criminal sociopath. I use the word “possible” because, at this point, we don’t know if he’s capable of committing any of the wide array of felonies that Trump did, including attempting to overthrow the United States federal government.