Index

The Grand Old Disaster Party

Ever since I have been paying attention to politics, the so-called Republican party has done two things dependably: Lie a lot about everything, and push fascist policies. Any time the GOP has been allowed to govern, the results have varied from bad to disastrous for the citizenry, so after the collapse of the electric grid in most of Texas, I decided to look at a few examples of the results of GOP’s horrible governance to make the pattern obvious. These examples are in time order, oldest to most recent, and some are still ongoing.

The first disaster I am going to talk about is health care. The United States could at one time claim to have some of the best health care in the world, but we long ago gave up on even trying to keep up with the rest. Increasingly since Nixon, for-profit health care has increasingly been the only medical care available here, and that has directly lead to a massive gap between what we need in this country and what is available. We are now right down with the worst of the third world in availability of health care for the poor, and poor children are at the bottom of THAT stack.

While this is an ongoing problem, it is arguably the oldest of the group I am talking about today. While the rest of the world used some form of socialized medical care to control the costs of the care, the vast amount of money spent on politics by the extremely profitable medical insurance companies prevented America from going this way, and the companies also successfully lobbied against any and all attempts to control medical costs to the consumer.

I have written about this in Medical Musings For a Gloomy Friday. The current medical business model discourages curing diseases, especially those that lead to substantial medical bills, like heart trouble and cancer. It often appears that the system is only there to make sure that we all die in debt so that the medical companies can stick their paws in the pockets of our otherwise healthy kids.

Today, American medical care has decayed to the point where a phrase from my childhood can completely characterize it. At one time, we would play cops and robbers, and the robberies always started with “Your money or your life.” Any visit to a medical provider starts that way, even if they don’t quite phrase it the same.

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed Kansas Senate Bill Substitute HB 2117 into law in May 2012, claiming it would be a “shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy.” It was anything but. Five years later, the GOP-controlled legislature rolled back all of the changes and then immediately overrode Brownback’s veto of the rollback.

This was not a pleasant five years for Kansas. In the spring of 2014, state revenue had already fallen drastically, and the state’s economy was lagging those of its neighbors. “conservatives” were still happy, though. Reaganomics predicted great things for Kansas, and they believed in it. Unfortunately, reality didn’t buy it.

The state cut budgets, and cut budgets, and cut budgets. Roads stopped being built. Education lost funding. Social services closed up shop. Brownback’s approval rating dropped to 27%. Trump had to save him by appointing him “U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom,” and the GOP Senate required Mike Pence’s intervention to finally get it approved.

In the election for Brownback’s replacement as Kansas governor, another conservative named Kris Kobach promised to “try to roll back the tax hikes” of the 2017 legislative session and lost to a Democrat. Even some red-state true believers can see the obvious when their noses are rubbed in it.

While the orange idiot and his “administration” - I use the term loosely - had so many incredibly bad failures thanks to their complete and total incompetence and their total disinterest in actually solving problems for the citizenry, the insane approach to the Covid plague and the resulting half-million (and climbing) deaths have to be the biggest example of horrid governance in US history.

While the fascists are known for ignoring science when it has inconvenient messages - see the US government’s history with global warming under GOP administrations for plenty more examples - this time that refusal to face reality has killed hundreds of thousands, and we are finally starting to slow it down. We can only hope that we haven’t given it so much time that it mutates out from under our current vaccines, a constantly increasing probability thanks to the refusal of the orange lunatic’s administration to act.

So now we come the latest disaster in Texas. Most of Texas is on its own little power grid, and that grid is not subject to federal regulation. That regulation includes requirements that the utilities be prepared for winter weather. It is also not connected to either of the other two U. S. regulated grids, so when it has trouble, the citizens of that part of Texas are out of luck - they can’t buy power from anyone else.

The part of Texas that contains El Paso is part of the western U. S. (federally regulated) grid, so their power systems have to be properly winterized. During the current storms, El Paso only suffered a short power interruption and came back on. The rest of Texas can’t count on anything right now, and the officials in charge there have no clue when they will get power back. The best guess we can get is “when the weather improves.”

The GOP - most recently the fascist or Nazi party as the orange cult leader made things even worse - has had a horrid track record over at least the last half century, and I am not even including the one-man wrecking crew that was Nixon. It really is time to eliminate these destroyers from our political system and rejoin the rest of the civilized planet in making this world livable for our children and grandchildren.