Public Comment

Fact-starved Republicans - An American Tragedy

Glen Kohler
Friday January 18, 2019 - 04:29:00 PM

NPR reports that in 2017, data collected by the Department of Homeland Security showed the majority of illegal residents in this country did not enter from our Southern border. The Republican-created agency said that two-thirds of known illegal immigrants entered this country legally, then remained after their visas had expired. Only a third of known illegal foreign visitors were apprehended down South. 

This fact scuttles the claims of those who would use immigration as a smokescreen for the calumnies in Washington. Therre is no real-world requirement for this super-sized monument to all that ails our nation. Honest observers know ‘the wall’ is both excuse and tool for the little man in the Oval Office to gratify Mitch McConnell, and his good friend, Vladimir Putin, who has long dreamed of disabling the government of the United States. The little man dreams of everyone paying attention to him, and are we ever. 

This isn't rocket science. Any competent middle manager committed to the continuity of an institution would say the same, if his bosses and the workforce were sent packing for an indefinte period by a known associate of the competitiion. 

If you ask why Republicans in Washington, and Republican trolls and spoilers on the Internet, are squawking about a border wall, you aren’t paying the right kind of attention. If you suppose that a real smart man—allegedly obsessed with illegal immigration to the exclusion of all else—might ask other smart people to identify the major factor behind illegal immigration ... you’re not supporting the President! Why would you even care about his vanishingly brief attention span, limited to short, simple slogans, such as ‘’infrastructure’, 'the wall’, and ‘Mexico will pay’? 

No. You must dedicate yourself to preventing that rich, spoiled, man from looking foolish. That’s a full-time job that brooks no slacking. To make the inconvenient facts fly away to Capistrano, or wherever sanity goes when lunacy prevails, just say anything. Anything at all, to distract and mis-lead people who want a clear view of events. You don’t want to know, so why should they? What you say doesn’t have to be true. Effectiveness is what matters, and in this case, accuracy only weakens the diversions. A simple theme, free of context, repeated over and over, is the key to maintaining right-wing dominance. 

Properly conditioned Americans know that only heartless progressives would expect the proud man in the White House to stop holding this nation hostage to his juvenile ego—and the prompting of behind-the-scenes handlers. If that is what you are thinking, shame….on….you! Shame on all of us, probably, because to tell the truth (the left’s main failing) millions of Americans and 800,000 government employees are thinking exactly that. 

‘Extreme’ leftists, devoid of compassion for Republicans’ constant lying, should remember the late George H. W. Bush, who repeatedly insisted that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Ironically, many of them do remember: heartless liberals tactlessly point out that, as the former head of the C.I.A., Bush surely knew that Saddam had no such thing. He maintained that fiction (Democratic voters say ‘kept on lying’) to start a war. G.O.P. factotums mumbled Bush’s lie while Americans were heroically killed and injured supporting the President—if not the country. The U.S. treasury was drained by the vast military expenditure. But the left would only have frittered the money away on medicine, education, maintenance of bridges, disaster relief, foreign aid, and the arts. 

The Iraqis who died … don’t count. Let’s keep the focus where it belongs: on the plight of the wealthy. Bush’s image survived the revelation that he was lying from day one, among Republicans anyway. But surely there were evenings when, after the filet mignon, the single-malt whiskey was hard-pressed to do its job. 

Lefties thinking to disparage the Grand Oil … that is, the Grand Old Party, should think of poor Richard Nixon, who became physically ill while denying that Republicans, including himself, perpetrated the break-in at Democratic Party Headquarters in the Watergate complex. Oh! The suffering … this poor man endured, at the hands of callous reporters! The shock and disillusionment of the nation hardly outweighed the tragedy of a cruelly-maligned top office-holder, relegated to a sumptuous private estate and surrounded by his rich friends, while his lawyers and cronies bent backwards to keep him out of prison. How did this nation coldly dash Nixon’s hopes of being exonerated? Now, in the place of eternal warmth, his spirit muses that we don’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more. 

Republican inanity is not confined to Washington. Here in Berkeley some Republicans reflexively, without examination of contents, parrot lies emitted from the White House. And Florida. Local outbreaks of falsehoods follow a pattern: when the guy under the orange rug burps up a lie, thousands of graduates of the Leadership Institute and hordes of party small-fry repeat it in social media. 

The mental deterioration of so many citizens exacts a huge toll upon our society: inhumane public policies; rampant tax evasion by the rich; millions of Americans unable to obtain medical services; homelessness stemming from exporting American jobs overseas, while inflation swallows all but the highest salaries. The editorial objective at Fox ‘news’ is mass stupefaction; and at CNN—which has entered the 2020 race early by proclaiming that Elizabeth Warren cannot get elected. (She scares the hell out of the banksters.) 

All of this ... to afford millionaires and billionaires the luxuries, the prestige, and the limitless power they feel unquestioningly entitled to. 

At this rate, a tiny, exclusive core of ultra-rich Republican oligarchs will have everyone else’s food and rent money, and nothing at all in their heads and their hearts. The awful, final denouement is the night of the very rich, living dead.