Rant 606: America Can’t Afford an Apprentice Anymore

It’s crunch time. The day is finally arriving when we can put this 4-year nightmare of naked cruelty, 25,000+ lies (you can look it up), dangerous incompetence, and reckless disregard for the laws and soul of America behind us. 

The greatest leadership collapse in American history, resulting in the avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens. A ravaged healthcare system strained to the breaking point. Abominable, boorish  behavior degenerating into childish name-calling. An expected role model whose every TV appearance requires hustling the children out of the room. Institutions fundamental to democracy and the rule of law in peril. Disengagement from the world at the very time that a multilateral approach to transborder issues demands engagement. Allies made into enemies; enemies made into allies. Promoting crazy conspiracy theories drowning out fact and truth. Hostility to science and experts. Self-dealing of mythic proportions, manipulating government for personal enrichment. Corruption on a scale that takes your breath away. His list of abuses is endless.
Examine any aspect of what made America great and he has trashed it:

• Repealing more than 100 environmental regulations designed to protect health and save lives. Their repeal will kill more Americans than Covid-19, but not as many as his denying and doing nothing about climate change, the greatest threat to human existence in this century.
• Decimating legal immigration in a nation built and sustained by immigrants. We have benefited immeasurably by the steady influx of fresh blood eager to contribute to economic growth. Instead, he has gone in the other direction to the point where the best and brightest foreigners no longer view the U.S. as the land of opportunity. Hundreds of thousands of foreign students who flocked here now go to Canada, China, Australia and elsewhere. 
• Ripping babies from their mothers’ arms, caging them in squalid conditions and disdaining any effort to reunite them with their parents.
• Going to court to take emergency food aid away from the neediest Americans.
• Expressing contempt for our armed forces, labeling soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines as “suckers” and “losers” while calling military leaders “idiots.” This from a draft dodger.
• Inciting violence by white supremacists at the same time that he declares war on peaceful protesters.
• Perverting the instruments of justice and law to serve his own ends rather than those of the country, abetted by a sycophantic attorney general who has abandoned all pretense of serving the nation.
• Diverting funds appropriated for essential needs--military base housing, for example--to a vanity project border wall that contributes nothing to deterring illegal immigration.
• Calling the essential Fourth Estate--the media--”the enemy of the people”--language coined by Joseph Stalin.
• Appointing abject mediocrities to a cabinet that is an embarrassment even when compared to the Harding administration’s rogues’ gallery.
• Displaying a sociopathic absence of empathy, rendering him unable to understand or mourn the hundreds of thousands of deaths for which he is responsible or even to express concern for a state governor whose life was endangered by his militia supporters.\Slashing research and development funds that have a lengthy track record of contributing to the creation of new industries and millions of good-paying jobs.
• Opening up public lands to commercial use.

His inability to put on the shoes of a competent national leader hardly needs any further elaboration. The indictment is drawn. The bill of particulars is documented. All that now remains is to rid us of this stain on the nation. On to November 3.

Dick Hermann
October 29, 2020

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