Obamacare, insanity and auto-fellation

Why bother to write a blog critical of the Trump administration? The Trump administration is doing a superb job of criticizing the Trump administration, making my humble efforts unnecessary.

The Mooch was clearly wrong about Steve Bannon. Bannon does not suck; he bites. In fact, he has the look of a man who bit it clean off years ago.

I know that this question has been asked many times, many ways -- but can you imagine the right-wing reaction if any Democratic spokesperson had used that terminology?

Obamacare repeal: Good news! Or is it? John McCain voted against the "Skinny" Obamacare repeal. Bless his name.

And yet...

Part of me is starting to wonder if Dems might not be better served if we let let the hard rightists have their way. At this time, the Trumpers are completely hypnotized by Alex Jones, Breitbart and Limbaugh. But if health insurance premiums had shot up and 16 million people had lost their insurance, a few mesmerized Trumpers might have snapped out of their trances.

To illustrate my point, consider the history of American support for the Iraq war. Republicans believed that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Ann Coulter convinced much of the country that Dems who opposed the war were traitors who were probably on Saddam's payroll. Rightwingers had entered a state of trance straight out of The Manchurian Candidate.

So what eventually snapped 'em out of it? Body bags and vets with missing limbs -- not to mention the war's price tag.

When the full scope of the disaster set in, the red staters finally decided that the Iraq invasion was a bad idea -- for which Hillary Clinton bears full responsibility.

(Coulter now supports Trump, who now likes to pretend that he was always against the Iraq invasion. Thus, in order to be consistent, we must conclude that Coulter is supporting a traitor who took money from Saddam Hussein.)

I mention all of that history to illustrate a larger point. A decade ago, Democrats did not succeed; Bush failed. Today it's the same story. Maybe we should hope that the most disastrous, murderous and expensive form of O-care reform does pass. The turkeys who keep voting for Thanksgiving will reconsider their views only when they see the hatchet.

The sentiment expressed in the preceding paragraph conflicts with what I've said in many previous posts. Heretofore, I've always expressed my contempt for those on the far left who argue that the worse things get, the better things will be in the long run. (Why? Because revolution.) I'm still not comfortable with that view, for two reasons:

1. As Keynes said: In the long run, we are all dead.

2. The kind of revolution likeliest to beset this country is not one that would make your average hipster BernieBro happy. History teaches us that revolutions have a tendency to go very, very wrong.

That's why I've always thumbed my nose at those Alt Left ninnies who keep telling us that we need things to get a lot worse before they can get better. Yet it's starting to look as though we have no choice. The Trumpers are a robot army, and nothing short of a total disaster can break their programming.

Trump is insane. I'm hardly the first to say those words, but the signs of psychosis are becoming ever more apparent. Not long ago, he spoke to a Boy Scout jamboree, addressing the kids as though they were grown-up voters. He genuinely seemed to be under the impression that he was at a campaign rally. Then he bragged about a rich friend's orgies. To boy scouts.

Yesterday, he tweeted the announcement of a ban on transgendered people in the military -- a ban which he now refuses to enforce. (A tweet is not an order.) This, from a man who literally waved the rainbow flag during the campaign. What was the point of this bizarre exercise?

In Youngstown, Ohio, he favored us with a riff that even Mike Godwin himself would probably describe as "Hitleresque."

The predators and criminal aliens who poison our communities with drugs and prey on innocent young people. These beautiful, beautiful innocent young people. Will find no safe haven anywhere in our country. And you’ve seen the stories about some of these animals. They don’t want to use guns because it’s too fast and it’s not painful enough. So they’ll take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15. And others. And they slice ‘em and dice ‘em with a knife. Because they want them to go through excruciating pain before they die. And these are the animals that we’ve been protecting for so long. Well, they’re not being protected any longer, folks.

Is there an actual case behind that slice-n-dice image? No. Welcome to Trump's brain.

Speaking as a liberal, I would have no problem if the 25th amendment were invoked to rid us of a Democratic president who showed similarly clear indications that he had gone off the deep end. Some things are more important than party loyalty or ideology -- and one of those things is the need for a president who is sane. Why can't the Republicans understand this?

Added note: My old art teacher, Nancy Ohanian, has allowed me to use some of her marvelous illustrations. You've gotta check out her "Donald Deck."