I see that Mitch McConnell is saying that his mission in life is to prevent co-operation between the GOP and the Biden Administration.* This, obviously, harkens back to his famous pronouncement that his job during the Obama years was to make certain that the President was a one-term failure.
McConnell’s attitude is, I think, instructive. It shows that the Republican Party continues to see its mission in life as obstruction. Or, rather, that its only goal is to gain power and keep it, by any means necessary.
Moscow Mitch Seeks Total Victory his war...against Democrats
Which is a problem because, right now, our nation faces a number of serious problems. In fact, call them what they are. They’re existential crises. Period.
Let’s list just a few of them. We are exiting the Covid crisis, but that a pandemic happened once is proof that another one, maybe a worse one, could happen again. There might even be, frankly, a touch of biological warfare in our future. Yet, Covid proved that neither our medical infrastructure nor our social responses to diseases (“Covid is a hoax,”) are prepared to deal with a really serious plague, whether natural or from a lab.
Shall we turn now to human rather than viral enemies? We’ve got a bunch of those. Jihadists have openly declared war on the West in general and the USA in particular. Russia, under Putin, is proving a relentless and ruthless foe. The Chinese leadership seems eager to get into a war with us, and it would be a war that they might well win given the fact that our economic elites so helpfully shipped much of our industry across the Pacific.
Then, of course, there’s the environment, which certain people spend so much time denying is a problem. Yet, the inescapable fact is that global warming is very real, and dangerous, as evidenced by the recurrent droughts and famines across the world. Even if we assumed that climate change isn’t the result of human activity (which it almost certainly is), then it is still changing…and for the worse—note, for example, that Texas now seems to be having “once in a lifetime” storms roughly every ten years or so.
And, finally, there’s our own social instability. Again, face it, a combination of factors ranging from off-shoring, to automation, to the demise of traditional retail, to…well, any number of other things, has resulted in an unbridgeable gap between the very rich and the rest of us. The middle class shrinks, the poor grower poorer, and the wealthy …don’t seem to care.
Any of these, by themselves, are serious threats. Put them altogether, and they spell what could be the end of us. We need some kind of joint effort in Congress. This doesn’t mean automatic conformity, of course. There is always room for vigorous debate. But we desperately need to work together to solve our more pressing problems.
But that’s not what McConnell and the GOP seem to believe. They seem to feel that they have the luxury of concerning themselves only with their domestic rivals, and of holding out for total victory in their strife.
Ah, but there’s the rub. If the nation is bankrupt, if the Chinese navy drives us from the Pacific, if Russian cyberattacks make elections impossible, if the economy collapses, if there are riots in the streets, if children are hungry or worse…
Well, victory under those conditions would be more than Pyrrhic. In fact, it would be suicidal.
*
Until next time…
Onward and Upward.
~mjt
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Copyright©2021 Michael Jay Tucker
Source:
*Mitch McConnell is saying that his mission in life is to prevent co-operation between the GOP and the Biden Administration” - “McConnell says he's '100 percent' focused on 'stopping' Biden's administration,” by Allan Smith, NBC News, May 5, 2021, 4:04 PM CDT, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/mcconnell-says-he-s-100-percent-focused-stopping-biden-s-n1266443