It isn’t a pretty picture.
One coast is burning. The other is under water. In
between, anti-abortion vigilantes may soon rampage across gunslinging
territory.
اضافة اعلان
What has happened to this country?
America is reeling backward, strangled by the past,
nasty and uncaring, with everyone at one another’s throats.
Post-Trump, we let ourselves hope that the new
president could heal and soothe, restore a sense of rationality, decency, and
sanity. But the light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be just a firefly.
We feel the return of dread: We’re rattled by the
catastrophic exit from Afghanistan; the coming abortion war sparked by Texas;
the Trumpian Supreme Court dragging us into the past; the confounding nature of
this plague; the way Mother Nature is throttling us, leaving New Yorkers to
drown in their basements. And now comes Donald Trump, tromping toward another
presidential run.
It feels as if nothing can be overcome. Everything
is being relitigated.
We’re choking on enlightened climate proposals but
the disparity between the disasters we see, and what’s being done in
Washington, makes it feel as if nothing is happening except climate change.
We’re so far from getting a handle on the problem, the discussions around it
seem almost theoretical.
Senator Joe Manchin, tied to the energy industry,
balks at climate change provisions in the reconciliation bill. He should be
looking for ways to get West Virginia in touch with reality rather than living
in the past.
“Manchin’s claim that climate pollution would be
worsened by the elimination of fossil fuels — or by the resolution’s actual,
more incremental climate provisions — is highly dubious, if not outright
false,” The Intercept reported, noting that the truth is that Manchin’s
personal wealth would “be impacted.” Since he joined the Senate, The Intercept
said, he has grossed some $4.5 million from coal companies he founded.
With its new abortion law, sending women back to the
back alley and encouraging Stasi-like participation from the citizenry, Texas
now becomes the capital of American unreason. The law “essentially delegated
enforcement of that prohibition to the populace at large,” wrote Chief Justice
John Roberts.
There were medieval fiefs more enlightened than the
Lone Star GOP.
Between putting women in danger by pushing that law
and putting children in danger by imposing his anti-mask mania on school
districts that want to mask up, Governor Greg Abbott, of Texas, has become a
scourge of the first rank.
A cynical slice of the Republican Party — and this
includes Trump — privately denigrates anti-abortion activists as wackos, but
publicly moves in lock-step with them in order to cling to that base and keep
power.
But the anti-abortion forces were somehow clever
enough to hijack the Supreme Court and Republicans will have to contend with
the backlash when the court tosses Roe vs Wade aside.
As botched as the withdrawal from Afghanistan was,
at least Joe Biden was trying to move into the future and do triage on one of
America’s worst mistakes.
And unlike other presidents — JFK with the Bay of
Pigs, LBJ with the Vietnam War, and Barack Obama with the Afghanistan surge —
Biden did not allow himself to be suckered by the generals, the overweening Ivy
Leaguers and the Blob, the expense account monsters who keep this town whirring
and always have a seat at the table, no matter how wrong they were, and are.
The Afghanistan tragedy, as James Risen wrote in The
Intercept, was just two decades of Americans lying to one another, and it
“brought out in Americans the same imperial arrogance that doomed the US
involvement in Vietnam.”
Unlike his three predecessors, Biden risked Saudi
ire by directing the Justice Department and other agencies on Friday to review
and declassify documents related to the FBI’s investigation into September 11.
Families of September 11 victims had been pushing for the release of the secret
files to learn more about the role the Saudis played in the attacks.
The enablers of our misbegotten occupations of
Afghanistan and Iraq have been shrieking like banshees at Biden, trying to
manacle him to their own past mistakes as he attempts to lift off.
With peerless chutzpah, Tony Blair called Biden’s
decision to depart cynical and driven by an “imbecilic political slogan about
ending ‘the forever wars.’”
But Biden knew enough not to spend more lives and
treasure to prop up a kleptocracy. He oversaw some bad weeks in Afghanistan,
but George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld should be blamed for 20
bad years.
Remarkably, as Jon Allsop pointed out in The
Columbia Journalism Review, the word “Bush” was not mentioned once on any of
the Sunday news shows the weekend Kabul was falling.
“He looks like the Babe Ruth of presidents when you
compare him to Trump,” Harry Reid, the former Democratic Senate majority
leader, told The Washington Post’s Ben Terris, for a story this past week on
Bush nostalgia.
With a memory like a goldfish, America circles its
bowl, returning to where we have been, unable to move forward, condemned to
repeat a past we should escape.
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Opinion and Analysis
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