It’s hard to get much perspective on the current political
scene. The anti-Trump half of the country, including much of the media, just
can’t stop being perpetually and noisily and tiresomely outraged by him. And
just as in the primaries and the election, he is stoking the fires deliberately
and effectively with his Twitter comments, thereby dominating the news cycle
and sucking all the oxygen out of his opposition. How long has it been since
any Democrat or any liberal proposed a new policy that made the news? I can’t
think of one case since the election. If there was a case, it was swamped in
the news cycle by the constant clamor of liberal outrage.
Mostly liberals are just reacting with knee-jerk outrage to
anything Trump proposes, even if it was something they themselves supported
under Obama, like building a border wall (Obama already built 700 miles of it)
or negotiating better relations with Russia (remember the Obama-Clinton Russian
reset attempt?). I keep waiting for Democrats to catch on to how they are being
played every day by him, but it doesn’t seem to have happened yet.
For the media, of course, this continuous outrage drives
great ratings, so it is great for business if not for the nation. CNBC and the New York Times are having a field day. And
for reporters, reporting the next big anti-Trump scoop, whether true or not, is
good for job security and perhaps for promotions and pay raises.
But what this distraction does seem to be doing is keeping Democrats
from getting real about their perilous political situation, and doing some hard
thinking about how to regain some political power. It’s bad enough that half
the Democratic party is off chasing Bernie Sander’s economically unrealistic socialist
policies. Now they think Opry Winfrey ought to run for president, just because
she gave a good speech last week. Why
they think either of those strategies will recover the essential blue collar
voter base that they so disdainfully ignored in the last election is beyond me.
Meanwhile there are really serious issues that threaten our
national security and ought to be getting more discussion and more press –
chief among these is the obvious dysfunction of our whole government and
political process. Congress hasn’t passed a budget on time in the past 9 years,
and we are running a half-trillion dollar deficit every year, and health care
costs continue to rise so fast that even without Bernie Sander’s “free” health
care proposal it will bankrupt the nation, and many citizens, in a few decades.
If Democrats would just stop noisily obsessing about Trump
and put some serious thought to issues like these they might be able to cobble
together a future for the party, which would be a good thing. But I don’t see
any signs of it yet.
Meanwhile the nonstop outrage is getting pretty tiresome.
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