Things vs. People; Lies Are Everywhere; How is Biden Doing?

This is a 3-part post, and I worry that the title may not fit on the page.

Biden After 100 Days
I saw a lot of Biden's--distanced--address to Congress.  There was not a lot of surprises, but maybe I missed something.

He did take credit for the improved COVID picture.  What he did differently from Trump was more about the tone he adopted, rather than concrete steps he took, but--let's face it--he did throw a heck of a lot of money at the vaccine problem.  This is what I tried to say so many times (and never succeeded): a predatory real-estate mogul, such as Trump sets himself up to be, does not have the training to handle a national emergency.  Businessmen generally aren't going to do well at anything except business.

He described his plans as having been drawn up with "forgotten" people in mind.  These are the people who feel that they (A) do not have the training for good jobs.  He sold his program as providing good new jobs; he mentioned the word 'jobs' numerous times, so much that Stephen Colbert mocked him for it!

He elaborated on his plan to make the $3000 cash allowance per child, for raising kids, at least through 2025, and possibly permanently.

He said that responsible gun owners weren't upset at restrictions on military-style assault weapons.  ("You think deer are wearing Kevlar vests?")

There was also reference to Republican efforts to make voting more difficult for (B) the elderly, those without a lot of mobility, and those who had to take time off from work in order to vote.

Roads and Bridges, or Daycare and Education?
The Republicans seem firm in their preference for things such as roads and bridges and schools and airports, over people, and services, e.g. childcare, schools, education, elder care, etc.  They feel, I suppose, that that sort of investment will be directed more towards the sort of people that Democrats have tended to support: Blacks, Hispanics, women and minorities, etc, rather than the traditional Republican base of business owners.

Here's what I think.  There is already a certain amount of money for roads and bridges; it just needs to be deployed.  If roads and bridges take more money than Biden has budgeted, there is no chance at all that more money cannot be voted for it, because, as I said before, the Republicans love roads and bridges, because perhaps they use them more heavily than Democrats do!  But the Republicans will balk at 'wasting' money on free education from PreSchool to Community College, as Biden wants to do.  But in the 21^st century, most ordinary jobs require more than a high-school education, supervised poorly by rich land-owners in each school district.  In bygone days, the school boards could keep kids simply learning whatever they needed to work in the small businesses that these landowners owned.  These days, though, to work even in a Best Buy, the salespeople need to know the inside story on a lot of technology, for which just a high-school education is not enough.

Furthermore, a lot of women are forced to stay at home looking after aged parents, or tiny infants, keeping some very promising workers out of the labor force.  The picture of labor that Trump and his cronies have is more suited to the early days of the 20^th century.  Today, it is a different time.  The Chinese educate their workers.  If we want back our jobs, we would need to educate our workers too.

Lies are Everywhere
There are a lot of theories as to why the Republicans believe, and / or spread such huge lies.  Why the GOP leaders spread these lies is because it works; their rank and file believe them.  There are complex theories about wish-fulfillment and solidarity and so on, but once they started the lies, they quickly discovered that it was a strategy that worked with the particular demographic that they wanted to attract and control.

The problem with using disinformation as a tool is that it only useful for deceiving voters.  It can be used for winning an election, for instance.  ("So much winning.")  Once the election is won, though, it is almost impossible to put a Republican (whose mind comes ready-packed with the lies you yourself have spread) to work on a real problem.  Part of the difficulty Trump had with his administration is all the fairy tales that these jokers believed, which made them useless as workers.  Steve Miller, the immigration guy, and Betsy de Vos, the education lady, both hauled around a great weight of misinformation, which prevented them from doing anything worthwhile.

How is Biden Doing?
Some historians were asked to assess Biden, on his 100^th day in office.  Now, historians, as you could guess, are all about looking for patterns.  You could look up a lot of these fanciful comparisons yourself; you can't avoid them.

But one of these fellows (Meacham?) said something interesting.

He said that, when Jimmy Carter was elected, he proposed all sorts of legislation that was new.  He began environmental reforms.  He began recycling initiatives.  He presided over the asbestos mitigation efforts, and so on.  But of course, the Iranian Revolution, and the Oil Crisis brought him down.  And the Oil Companies hated his guts.

Ronald Reagan found it easy to defeat him, and with supreme confidence, began to dismantle the welfare programs that the Democrats had put in place, lower taxes (temporarily; in fact, Reagan quietly increased taxes in the end), and generally turn public opinion against welfare programs in general.

Fast-forward 40 years, to Donald Trump.  People would be surprised to compare Donald Trump to Jimmy Carter, but Trump did for the GOP what Carter did for the Dems, moved the policies way to the right.  But like the Iran Crisis, Trump has the COVID crisis, and he loses the election.

Biden did not find it easy to defeat him, and Trump fought him tooth and nail, but not with political arguments, but merely lies.  With supreme confidence, Biden takes up the task of dismantling the American First in The World, and Business First in America structure, Biden says: let's work together; let's earn the right to claim to be the best.

Some Suggestions about Attitude Adjustment

I did not have the courage to put on the post title exactly what I wanted to write about, which is: the attitude of 'Liberals' towards 'Conservatives', or more specifically, the attitudes of Democrats towards Republicans.  Remember that within 50 years or so, not only will we all be pushing up the daisies, the characters of the two parties may be totally transformed, so this post should be deleted by me very soon.

Many of us despise the Republicans, and with some justification.  (In the Bible, we read that Jonah despised the people of Niniveh in much the same way, but evidently God advised him to be moderate.  We atheists do not believe that God does this kind of thing; if there had been such a person as Jonah, he must have taken time to reconsider, but written, in his autobiography, that God spoke to him.  The voices of their consciences were, to these people, the voice of God.)

Despising Republicans--or conservatives, generally--is a losing strategy.  Those people are what they are for numerous, numerous quite different reasons; in this era, in particular, they are a highly diverse and philosophically fragmented lot.

The Republican leadership, I concede, are an opportunistic and amoral bunch.  At the best of times, politicians are obsessed with being re-elected.  These days, the Republican leadership lives in fear that Donald Trump may turn against them, leading to lost elections.  We see these people playing all sorts of verbal games, on Fox TV, and on other conservative media, trying to walk back their criticism of Donald Trump.  It is rather pathetic, but not all of them are wealthy enough to be able to handle being out of a job, so the poorer ones act like MAGA monkeys, while those who have been in politics long enough to have saved up for a rainy day are able to act the statesman, and be firm about disapproving of Trump.  Liz Cheyney strikes me as one of the latter, and so does Mitch McConnell.  (McConnell has to be careful, because Trump and his family must be watching him closely; if he influences too many senators and congressmen and women away from Trump, there could be a vicious backlash.  There was one, in fact; Trump called McConnel all sorts of names.)

The rank-and-file Republicans, as I have written about before, are Republicans for various reasons: religion, abortion, guns, racism, taxes, fossil fuels, hatred of Hillary Clinton, fear of Socialism, feeble-mindedness, etc, etc.  But not all of them may be concerned with all of these issues.  (In the same way, not all Democrats are concerned with government help in emergencies, fighting COVID, marriage equality, minority rights, gender equality, poverty, the environment and pollution, native rights, and so on.)  Moderate Republicans are--effectively-- being abused by their leaders, to go along with silly principles like saying that the election was stolen, or that the vaccines are unsafe, etc, etc.

Once we stop shooting from the hip when we see a Republican, we can begin to adjust our own mental stances, because we need Republicans in government.  Left to itself, there is the danger that the Democratic Party will take on so many social programs with so much enthusiasm that we could be up to our necks in taxes.  How much foreign aid is too much?  Is it possible to open up the Mexican border too much?  Is the volume of immigration proportional to how much support the poor get from Federal social programs?  Republicans keep a close eye on these issues, whereas Democrats are eager to create enormous safety-nets for everyone.  Arguably these safety-nets are good things, but if they imply very heavy taxation, in a year or two Democrats will lose heavily at the polls.

The New York Times opinion columns seem to think that Biden might be among the best Democrat presidents since Roosevelt.  It has been hardly four months since Biden took office, but so far things are going well.  News of these blood-clots is worrying, but the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines do not have any side-effects that are cause for anxiety.  Many states have opened up the vaccine for everybody, and we can only hope that soon everyone will try to get one.  So far, 40% of the US population has gotten at least one shot, and that includes 75% of seniors, who are, as we know, most likely to get a bad case of COVID.  Once they were protected, those who caught the virus are less likely to be badly sick, and less likely to die.  So COVID deaths are on a seriously downward trend.

Unfortunately, a larger proportion of more affluent (rich) people have gotten shots, and a larger proportion of Republicans are refusing to get shots, and Blacks are said to be understandably less comfortable about getting shots, because historically they have been used as test populations for medical trials.

Watching the antics of the most ludicrous members of the Republicans in government can easily lead us to be more convinced of our stance of despising the whole party.  I do not watch the details of the Matt Gaetz affair, nor do I pay attention to what Marjorie Greene says, nor the various strange people who consider that their forced entrance into the chambers of Congress gives them a media platform for personal aggrandizement.  But many things are moving in the right direction.

Here is a chart provided by NPR, accurate as of April 15th.

My home state, Pennsylvania, is indicated as having unchecked community spread.  Not a good thing.  A.S. American Samoa has less than 1 person per 100,000 getting infected.

Arch

What's Happening in Politics?

First off, in Minnesota they had brought the policeman who was responsible for George Floyd's death to trial.  I don't know how that is going, but I will leave that to Minnesota to deal with.  There's no point getting upset over something that is still going on.

In Georgia, the state house, heavily Republican, has succeeded in passing laws that make it much more inconvenient for blacks to vote.  There are picture ID requirements; they've cut down the number of days within which a mail-in ballot can be requested; they've reduced the hours in which polling places will remain open; they've made it a felony for an organized political group to interfere with voters waiting in line, including providing food or water.  That last matter has been exaggerated by Democrats, but it is possible that rabid Republicans watching the line of voters might stretch the conditions of the new law, and attempt to have the entire polling place discarded, claiming illegal voting, or whatever.  We have to realize that we have honestly been spoiled by the convenience of doing anything; from pre-partially-cooked food in the supermarkets to drive through drug stores.  Nothing in the new Georgia laws actually prevent anybody from voting.  It just means that it will take a lot more effort to vote.  Which means that if those who are not willing to put in the effort, among Democrats, just do not vote, then the election could go to the Republicans.  But poor Republicans must realize that Democrats are fighting for what could help the Republicans, too.  If all the Republicans were rich, and all the Democrats were poor, then there isn't much to agree upon.  But that is not the case.

It is so sad that Donald Trump is still claiming that the election was stolen from him.  Well, many moderate Republicans agree that Trump is lying, and has been lying for years.  But Republicans seem to be OK with Lying for Political Reasons.  They consider it a special kind of election rhetoric.  Many Republicans, within Congress and the Senate, as well as outside government, are furious at how Trump has hijacked the party, but Trump is raising lots of money from small (Republican) donors, and the Republicans can't ignore that.  Until Trump does or says something that spoils things badly for the GOP leadership, they have to bite their tongue and let Trump keep raising the cash.  A problem is that Trump puts the money in a fund controlled by him, rather than the main Republican fund.  Hmm.

Liz Cheney, a Congresswoman who opposed Trump's mad ideas about the stolen election, has spoken against Trump.  But she's one of the few thoughtful members of the GOP, a woman of principle.  John Boehner, the former speaker of the House, has also come out against Trump.  Mitch McConnell opposed Trump right after the election, but came around afterwards, though he went through with counting the Electoral College votes, which Trump did not want them to do.  Recently, Trump thoroughly insulted Mitch, calling him an idiot.  It's hard to tell how it will go; the Republicans are so desperate to have enough power in Washington to block what Biden is trying to do, so that they may close ranks, though they hate each other.  The Republican Party is now shown to be a collection of thoroughly disreputable people.

Beto O'Rourke has been trying to encourage his fellow-Texans to come to the Democrat party.  While the storms were shutting down the Texas grid, and Ted Cruz was making up his mind whether to vacation in Cancun or stay and help his constituents, Beto O'Rourke was driving up from El Paso with water and supplies to help those who were stuck without drinking water.

Governor Abbott of Texas was telling Texans that it was the Democrats who caused their electric grid to fail.  Texas is the center of the Oil Industry, and they hate anything that might be a hindrance to fossil fuels.

In Michigan, they're running out of vaccine doses.  Why is this?  I get so frustrated, worrying that the shortage is deliberate.  Meanwhile, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan is reluctant to call for a shutdown, because she has called for so many of them (shutdowns) that Michiganders are losing patience with the poor woman.

Of course you've heard that Tiger Woods was speeding when he had his accident.  And more women have come out against Governor Andrew Cuomo, saying he had been obnoxious, and used suggestive language with them.  So Democrats are not immune from the tendency to sexually harass women.  Many families have a family culture that allows a certain amount of bad behavior by men against women.  It has been on the wane for decades, but I have no doubt that men fight against the pressure that modern society exerts to reduce this behavior.

We can't be perfect.  But we need to be a lot better than we are.

Arch

Uma's Podcast!

Well, guess what.

My daughter, who lives in Tucson, AZ, has decided to have a Podcast.  The easiest way to do this is to set it up in our Archie's Archives Blog, and provide links to the mp3 files which contain her blog.

Uma's genius is telling stories.  So she's going to tell her stories over the phone, and the first few podcasts will be joint exercises with me, after which she will probably get into her groove, and run with it.

I have no idea what the topic is going to be, so I'll have to fill that in later!

Arch