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Celerity

(54,404 posts) Fri Aug 6, 2021, 09:42 AM Aug 2021

Democratic Presidents: Cleaning Up Republican Catastrophes Since 1976

How often will this endless cycle continue before American voters wise the fuck up about it?

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/democratic-presidents-cleaning-up

WASHINGTON, DC -- This week, we learned that economic growth under Donald Trump was the worst it’s been since the Great Depression. Naturally, this metric includes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which some people say, including Trump himself, that it’s not his fault because there’s no way the president can control whether there’s an outbreak of that scale. My truth-o-meter ruling places that particular assessment -- that the pandemic wasn’t his fault -- in the “mostly false” category. No, Trump didn’t travel to the Wuhan wet market where he was bitten by an infected bat. In that regard, yes, he’s innocent. However, study after study has proved that his incompetence and corruption vastly worsened the pandemic on a scale of hundreds of thousands of American lives and livelihoods. Trump failed to abide by the paint-by-numbers routine established for preventing a pandemic within our borders and elsewhere. With his attention singularly focused on winning the 2020 election by any means, he refused to take the critically substantive steps toward containing the spread. He failed to act early enough, and then he encouraged Red Hat protesters to force an end to the lockdowns and mask mandates at the worst possible time, just as the infection rate was spiking. Not only that, but according to a new book by Carol Leonnig and Phil Rucker, Trump refused to wear a mask in public out of fear it’d make him look weak. (As though the combover, clown makeup, shoe lifts, his tippy-toe baby steps down the ramp, etc, didn’t make him look weak already.)

The list of trespasses goes on and on, and instead of acting like a responsible leader, he presided over the uncontrolled spread of a deadly plague, and in addition to all the death, the economy took a severe beating. Incidentally, prior to any of us even knowing the word “COVID,” the manufacturing sector experienced a recession on Trump’s watch. Now, here come the Democrats to clean up a Republican president’s mess. Again. It’s not the first time this happened, either. Jimmy Carter was faced with a series of political and economic nightmares as a consequence of Richard Nixon’s shenanigans. In 1992, Bill Clinton stepped up to resolve yet another economic mess after 12 years of Reagan/Bush supply-side, trickle-down chicanery. We’re all abundantly familiar with the Great Recession and how none of the Republicans, least of all George W. Bush and John McCain, had any clue how best to keep the economy from completely melting down. So, in came Barack Obama to rescue the economy. And now, post-Trump, Joe Biden’s faced with the same dilemma. Worse yet, once the Democrats arrive to fix all the things, they’re immediately confronted by bug-eyed, screeching opposition to every solution: namely the solutions that later turn out to work anyway, despite the screeching. See also the Tea Party.

In the case of Barack Obama, the Republicans (and some progressives) screeched about the 2009 stimulus, which, by the way, went on to prevent another Depression -- it stopped the hemorrhaging, sparking record job creation and steady economic growth, even though cable news and the entire conservative entertainment complex swore with seething rage that it was the arrival of American communism. It wasn’t. Same went for the Affordable Care Act, which has successfully provided 31 million Americans with health coverage they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to purchase. After eight years of zero personal scandals, zero indictments, and a successful legislative record, American voters were duped en-masse into voting for a sloppy dingus who had no business touring the White House, much less occupying it as president. We tried to warn people. We knew exactly what would happen with a Trump presidency, and most of our forecasts came true, with catastrophic results. We knew that when faced with a serious national crisis, Trump would make all the wrong moves, that he would bungle and botch his way through the job, too undisciplined, too Dunning-Kruger, too fucking pigheaded for the gig. Businessmen who bankrupt casinos make terrible presidents, especially businessmen who scam their way into severe debt while propping it up with conflicts of interest that eventually endanger national security and foreign policy.

There was never any chance his presidency would be a successful one, with or without the pandemic. Don’t forget, before COVID and before his insurrection against Congress, Trump had already been impeached for trying to cheat in the 2020 election. He had already been probed by a special prosecutor who found significant instances of obstruction of justice and cheating in the 2016 election. And his final year in office was a nightmare by literally every metric. So, in comes Joe Biden to pooper-scooper the random piles of dung left in the streets following the parade of all-shitting grifters and weirdos. How often will this endless cycle continue before American voters wise the fuck up about it? How many more times will low-information doofuses step into voting booths and pull all the wrong levers for Republicans, knowing the GOP’s national record of unmitigated failure? I mean, name one Republican legislative initiative since 1960 that actually stuck the landing with the same results as Social Security, Medicare, the Voting and Civil Rights Acts, the ACA, the 2009 stimulus, the American Rescue Plan, the child tax credit, and so on. Good luck. At some point, you’d think American voters would grow tired of paddling their way out of the latest Republican tsunami, reaching desperately for a Democratic lifeboat only to elect another painfully unqualified Republican eight years later, before it dawns on them how all this works.

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