Independent Commentary
News, politics, and government.
Why not try anything else before simply greenlighting rich investment managers from essentially bribing government officials to hire them to manage government investments and enrich themselves further? Instead of hiring whomever seems best-qualified, government officials will be strongly incentivized to hire whoever writes them the biggest check at election time.
If the American people do not understand or value having a military that is loyal to the Constitution instead of the current president and of having top military officials who are not afraid to tell the president why what he wants to do may fail, then we do not deserve to have them.
Ostensibly, Trump renamed the lake because of its importance to America and because America takes care of it. In reality, it is a combination of spite toward Canada and low-brow patriotism.
Because most of us are too young to have experienced firsthand the scourges of diseases nearly eradicated in the 20th century, many of us seem hellbent on gaining some firsthand experience in order to understand the virtues of vaccines, even if it ends up in the death of some our children.
As usual, it seems that Trump and his top staff imagined themselves as the smartest and most qualified people for the job. They alone could see the simple solutions to solving whatever problems they perceived, and they alone possessed the iron will and fortitude to make it happen.
It is one (albeit horrible) thing to be stupid or ignorant enough to earnestly adopt prejudices and engage in bigotry against an entire group of people, particularly as a legislator with actual authority to harm them. It is another to understand what you are doing is wrong but engage in it nonetheless to further your ambition and enrich yourself.
Once we as a people accept this sort of corrupt conduct as a standard part of our political system, it will become so. As many of us as possible must remain disturbed by this sort of conduct and reject it as an unacceptable.
Unfortunately, many Democratic Socialists have shown themselves to be flawed, unserious people more focused on quixotic cultural and non-economic issues than on the economic concerns weighing on many Americans. And if Democratic Socialists keep it up, the Democratic Party will not win many consequential elections.
Perhaps Trump's most loyal supporters believe his threats convey toughness and strength, but Iran and the rest of the world do not. Americans who are not under his spell, along with the rest of the world, see a weak man in a weak position.
Perhaps some nascent sense of ethics from Pirro's time as a judge and prosecutor in the 90's and early 2000's, long since buried below tons of self-interested, partisan programming, re-activated just enough to jar her back to reality, although I would not count on it.
