All This, and Summer’s Just Getting Started

More than 103,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, some 40 million more are unemployed, and riots are raging on the streets of cities across the country. If President Donald Trump doesn’t win reelection, it probably won’t be because Americans got tired of so much winning.

With so many calamities converging on the country, Trump is angrily lashing out at his critics and seeking to cast blame rather than offering solutions. He’s hoping the country can get back to normal without an increase in coronavirus infections, and that the economy will immediately rebound, but has indicated what he’ll do if that doesn’t happen. After surprising many by saying respectful and responsible that about the death of a Minneapolis black man while in police custody, he’s reverted to his habit of making threats in response to the ensuing riots. He still finds time for “tweeting” taunts at his critics, including baseless accusations of murder against a cable news host, and for threatening legal action against Twitter itself.

None of which seems likely to work. The coronavirus is immune to threats, and hope is not a cure. Threats won’t help the economy, either, and will surely require a government response that will needed to be negated with politicians Trump routinely insults in personal terms. Rioters need to know that the law will be enforced, but Trump’s belligerent threats of shooting looters on sight and unleashing “vicious dogs and awesome” are more likely to the exacerbate the outrage that is fueling the unrest. Given all that’s going on, Trump is even unlikely to distract anyone’s attention with a Twitter feud.

Angrily lashing out at critics and casting blame elsewhere is what Trump does, though, and at this point it would be hard for him to be a calm and unifying kind of president. We’ll see how how that plays out in November.

— Bud Norman

If Only Obama Knew

The scandal about the Veterans Administration grows more infuriating by the day, and we are assured by a high ranking official that the President Barack Obama is “madder than hell than about it.” Whether he is angry about the off-the-books waiting lists and substandard service that possibly cost the lives of as many as 40 people or the potential political costs of their public revelation is unclear, but in either case his anger is at least somewhat reassuring.

That “madder than hell” declaration is accompanied by the usual promises that any problems will be forthrightly addressed and quickly solved, and some high-ranking VA official or another has already resigned shortly before his long-planned retirement date, but by now it’s hard to take all that seriously. The president is still standing by the VA Secretary, who haas politely declined to upstage his boss by declaring that he is merely “mad as hell” about what was going on during his watch, and the outrage has become increasingly unconvincing with repetition. Similar outrage was expressed by the president about the Fast and Furious scandal, and he still stands by the Attorney General who was cited for contempt of Congress for stonewalling an investigation into the truth of that deadly matter. More presidential anger attended the four deaths by terrorism at the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, but the high-ranking officials are now saying “Dude, that was, like, two years ago.” The president again waxed livid about a few Cleveland-based rogue agents of the Internal Revenue Service harassing his political enemies, but when a high-ranking official invoked a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and it became apparent that the plot seeped deep into Washington he dismissed it as one of those “phony scandals.” The pattern is so obvious that even the slow-witted wags of the Republican National Committee have noticed, putting together an amusing montage of the president’s recurring wrath, and it seems unlikely that this time around will yield actual results.

Even so, it’s heartening that the VA story has sufficient legs to force yet another statement of the president’s anger. Every time Obama goes into his angry mode he sounds so very convincing that the average voters wind up wishing that he could be president so he might do something about it, and one can only hope they’ll eventually notice that he has been president for more than five years. The president’s spokesmen are disputing reports that he knew about the VA’s deadly practices back in ’08, and insist that he only learned of it by reading the latest newspapers, and even if that date sticks he’ll have the ready excuse of blaming it on the all-purpose scapegoat of the George W. Bush administration, but there’s faint hope the public won’t buy it yet again. Presidents have traditionally been expected to know more than what they read in the newspapers, and for all his faults George W. Bush can’t plausibly be blamed for what Obama hasn’t done over the past five years.

The dangerous inadequacies of the VA certainly do stretch back to the Bush years, and probably all the way back to its very beginning. Congressional Republicans are responding to the problem with a proposal to allow the VA Secretary to actually fire someone, rather than risking any political problems by calling for the firing of a former Four Star General who became a Democratic darling by criticizing Bush’s Iraq War policies, and it demonstrates the inherent problems of efficiently running a federal government bureaucracy. This should raise questions about the ability of a federal government bureaucracy to administer health care for everyone, and not just a relatively small number of veterans, and we expect the president will be angry about that. Pretty much the entire Obama agenda is based on the argument that government knows best and can be trusted, and in any case Obama deserves such trust, and the argument is not bolstered by the latest revelations about the VA.

— Bud Norman

Life Goes On

A steady stream of cute kids in scary costumes dropped by our front porch in search of candy on Thursday, a scarier-looking bunch of the hated Boston Red Sox won the World Series on Wednesday, but our beloved Wichita State University Wheatshockers basketball squad will commence a season with great expectations on Saturday. Each passing day has lately been shorter and cooler and every night longer and colder as one season gives way to another, but the neighbors will decorate the long cold nights with bright lights until the warmth and storms of spring surely come again.

Those of us who pay too much attention to economics and politics and world affairs and such will occasionally lose sight of the fact, but life goes on. The economy has been limping along on artificially low interest rates and endless money-printing that will inevitably come to an end before the high unemployment and limited opportunities do, for the time being politics has bestowed a government-run health care system so calamitous that even the press cannot pretend otherwise, and the world seems to be readying itself for a contentious and bloody post-American era that will begin with the apocalyptic suicide cult of medieval nutcases that runs Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon, but life goes on. Most people still get up and go to their jobs, or their two part-time jobs, and they come home and watch over those cute kids, and they watch sports, and the rest are still are getting their benefits or struggling along somehow. The guys on the talk radio shows and the people who call in are all plenty steamed about it, and all but most naively idealistic of the millions who have lost their insurance plans or seen them become vastly more expensive as a result of Obamacare probably feel the same, but it doesn’t seem to come up in conversation so often as the kids or the sports teams as life goes on.

Perhaps this is proof of the resilience of the American spirit and what’s left of capitalism, and we certainly hope so, but sometimes it feels more like a supine acceptance of American decline. The extraordinary number of Americans no longer bothering to even seek work goes largely unremarked, the broken promises of a conspicuously inept government are merely laughed at in the late-night monologues, and America’s diminished role in the world is little noticed and widely regarded as a welcome respite from the messy business of imposing some sort of international order. There’s an eerie lack of outrage about any of it, at least when the radio dial is tuned away from the talk shows, and a palpable sense of resignation.

Neither is there much of talk of hope and change and the fundamental transformation of America, as liberalism seems dispirited by its manifest failures and struggles to make the obligatory excuses, and it suddenly seems possible that the public’s discontent will at last express itself loudly at next year’s mid-term elections. In the meantime some of those people who are still going to a full-time job are pulling new energy out of the ground with astounding new technologies despite the government’s best efforts to stop them, and others are creating equally amazing innovations that will revolutionize other industries in ways the bureaucrats haven’t dreamed how to regulate, and many will go home from more mundane enterprises to raise cute kids who will someday come up with something even better.

Unless the country can muster a little more outrage, though, those cute kids could inherit a lot less than they deserve.

— Bud Norman