Hoping I’m coming out of the fog a bit and will be able to resume regular posting soon. In my absence the news has been more or less steady on a couple of big ticket matters. The President’s budget is one of them. The left has been howling in pain over cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, PBS, the EPA, foreign aid, and a multitude of other alphabet agencies soaking up taxpayers’ money while everyone who voted for President Trump is jumping up and down for joy. We’ve wanted these things killed for decades. We’re getting the usual nonsense from not just the left but the GOP establishment about how all this stuff just costs the average taxpayer three and a half cents so what’s the big deal, and of course we’re hearing that there isn’t an ounce of fat in the federal budget that can be trimmed away without starving children or firing teachers or leaving firemen to die in burning buildings because goshdarnitall there just wasn’t money in the budget for water. It’s all baloney. I’m not saying at the end of the day we’re guaranteed to get every last thing we want, that’s up in the air, but I am more hopeful than I have been in a long time that we have someone in Washington who is going to go to the mat for the people who elected him. He is a businessman after all.
Same with what I will call “RepubliCare,” the repeal and (grumble) replace plan for WhatshisnameCare. I have many, many reservations about this plan. I don’t like the complexity of the repeal process, I think front-loading the hard parts is insane, I am not in favor of doing anything really unless and until the repeal part happens either first or simultaneously. But the thing is, I’m not alone on that. For the moment, I still trust President Trump to heed the concerns of his voters, including and especially those being voiced by the “Freedom Caucus” (i.e. the Tea Party) in the House, and I know this is a work in progress. I frankly don’t care what Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell have to say. President Trump is both the manager and the pitchman for this project and he knows the customer base that he needs to satisfy. I also don’t believe that if the Freedom Caucus kills the bill in the House that it spells doom for the Republican Party, and in fact if the Freedom Caucus gives the bill the big thumbs-down, then it needs to die and be re-engineered. I do agree with a sentiment expressed by Dr. Charles Krauthammer, that the very best thing the Republicans can do right now is go for broke, load up the bill with everything they want that will make the left scream, send it to the Senate and let Chuck Schumer kill it, then run on that in 2018.
Of course I also think the filibuster should just be done away with entirely since we know the Democrats will do that immediately upon retaking the Senate, but I’m not getting my hopes up for that.
In other news, Neil Gorsuch is absolutely owning in his confirmation hearings and looking better with each passing “gotcha” question. James Comey continues to demonstrate that the rumors of his sterling integrity are greatly exaggerated, as the left and the zombie NeverTrumpers swoon with joy over the idea that there has been an investigation into connections between President Trump and the Russians during the election–yes, retards, we knew that. Care to explain why the last president thought it was any of his business to listen in on a presidential candidate he didn’t like? Or why it wasn’t a big deal when Her In-Her-Fevered-Dreams Inevitableness was “going to win?” Or why you got “special permission” to reveal this tidbit when you can’t tell us what’s going on with the Clinton Foundation investigation? I could do this all day.
Wanderer's Way 