Skip to main content

Cold Comfort

By



We made it through another Christmas without too much anxiety.  Donald managed to eat most of the Christmas pudding with his attacks on Hillary, giving Fox little time to trot its usual stories of how Christmas was hijacked by the politically correct police.  We were treated to the great news that Bristol Palin gave birth to Sailor Grace.  This is her second child out of wedlock, although some think it is her third.

While we react to the "disgust" of Donald Trump and wonder if Bristol still considers herself a virgin in the eyes of the Lord, spiteful legislators managed to slip in visa restrictions on Iranian nationals into an omnibus visa bill, which Obama signed.  This has Iran screaming foul in regard to the nuclear deal they signed with the US and other countries earlier this year.  John Kerry tried to smooth things over by saying the President can bypass the law for high-ranking officials, but the whole purpose of this deal was to open Iran up to the West.  The new law also affects anyone traveling to Iran, as they could be denied access to the US if their passports carry an Iranian visa stamp.

You get the feeling that the Republicans are learning how to use Trump to their advantage.  As long as he continues to hog up the media limelight with his outrageous statements, they can slip all kinds of noxious measures through Congress and few will be the wiser for it.  It seems that Obama's earlier executive decisions are coming back to haunt him, as Congress erects one road block after another, making his last year in the White House that much more difficult to traverse.

I'm sure the President is planning his counter measures.  There is no doubt he will veto the Republicans' umpteenth attempt to repeal Obamacare, but it seems that Obama has found a strong adversary in Marco Rubio, who is bound and determined to dismantle the Affordable Care Act piece by piece.  This is some Christmas present, as an estimated 12 million persons are now enrolled in the health insurance exchanges.  Unfortunately, this is the kind of spite we have come to expect from the Republicans.

It's not just repealing health care and imposing greater visa restrictions.  Republicans at the  local, state and federal level have gone out of their way to make this season unbearable for a great number of persons.  It makes Scrooge look like a benevolent saint by comparison.  For a political party that believes so fervently in Christmas there seems to be little Christian charity, openly ignoring the Vatican's Call for Mercy this year.  Instead, all we will get this year is cold comfort from conservatives.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more