A Good Article By Thomas Friedman (?!)

I'm not a Thomas Friedman fan. However, his article in the October 13 issue of The New York Times made some points I agree with. I chuckled at his opening: "If only our national election had been pay-per-view for the rest of the world, we could have wiped out the national debt." Then he asks if America is going to get effective government as a result of this election; I fear the answer is no.

If we will have indulged in almost two years of electoral entertainment and pathos just to end up back where we were, only worse, with even more venomous gridlock in Washington, it won't just be emotionally depressing, we'll really start to decline as a nation.

I'm sad to say that that may indeed be the outcome.

For starters, this version of the Republican Party has to die.

Well, well -- maybe Friedman gets it! The toxic state of affairs in Washington today is not a both-sides-do-it, 50:50 proposition, where both Republicans and Democrats are to blame: The Republican party is the problem. In the words of political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, in their 2012 book "It's Even Worse Than it Looks":

The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier -- ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Friedman says:

We have known that ever since the G.O.P. speaker of the House John Boehner quit, not because he couldn't work with President Obama but because roughly a quarter of House Republicans, the so-called Freedom Caucus, were simply not interested in governing and had made his job impossible.

That's a true statement; Boehner was forced out by a recalcitrant mob of bomb-throwers in his caucus. His relationship with "the so-called Freedom Caucus" was fraught from the beginning, when the bomb-throwers were elected in the Republican wave election of 2014. The problems came to a boil over the extremists' determination to defund Planned Parenthood on the issue of horrific -- and fraudulent -- anti-abortion videos; the result was likely to be yet another fruitless Republican-engineered shutdown of the government. Paul Ryan became Speaker and was able to mollify the "Freedom Caucus" and get them to drop their demands. However, the phrase "not because he couldn't work with President Obama" air-brushes the fact that Boehner couldn't -- or rather wouldn't -- work with President Obama. From the evening of Obama's inauguration, the Republicans saw obstruction to be their most effective strategy against the new president. They proceeded to attempt to thwart Obama's every move; some members even voted against bills they themselves had introduced, simply because Obama expressed approval for them. Friedman continues (and I must express my approval):

For the sake of the country, this version of the Republican Party has to be fractured with the extreme far right going off with the likes of Donald Trump, the Tea Party, Ted Cruz -- along with all the right-wing TV and radio gasbags who thrive on chaos -- leaving behind a moderate center-right bloc, which, one hopes, one day would become the new G.O.P.

To Friedman's list, I would add David Duke and his buddies in the KKK, the neo-Nazi/white supremacist/white nationalist/Pepe the Frog alt-right -- might one call them a "basket of deplorables"? Friedman goes on to stress that for the good of the country, it is imperative that Clinton win in a landslide, along with majorities in the Senate and the House. Trumpism must be completely and utterly crushed, so that its sad, malicious, anti-American proponents are conclusively shown to be outside the American mainstream. I'd love to see a Clinton presidency with a Democratic majority in the House and a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate; then a lot of good things could be accomplished. As Friedman puts it:

... putting in place common-sense gun laws, like restoring the Assault Weapons Ban, requiring universal background checks [eliminating the gun-show and Internet loopholes] and making it illegal for anyone on the terrorist watch list to buy a gun; borrowing money at near-zero interest rates to rebuild our infrastructure; replacing some income and corporate taxes with a revenue-neutral carbon tax to stimulate more clean-energy production; fixing Obamacare [which can't be done under present circumstances, since Republicans have no interest whatever in improving Obamacare; they do not want to see it succeed]; and implementing sensible immigration reform and responsible tax and entitlement reforms [like lifting the $106,000 Social Security Wage Base limit].

Friedman again:

The nightmare scenario -- ruling out, God forbid, a Trump victory -- is that Clinton wins with a slim majority and the G.O.P. holds the House and the Senate. The Democratic left would have a stranglehold on Clinton [?] while Trump, who would start his own TV network and movement, would keep the Republican base in a state of permanent anger, intimidating every Republican lawmaker who contemplated compromise [in other words, the status quo for the past seven years]. If that happens, America will be adrift.

In his final paragraphs, Friedman covers the strange and unsettling Trump/Putin bromance and the apparent Russian attempts to manipulate the election in Trump's favor. Good work, Tom.