There have been numerous articles attempting to discern exactly what the Republican Party will be like after its foray with the Donald. They try to figure what effects he is going to have on the candidates for the House of Representatives and the Senate as well as State races for legislatures and governorships. There are all different levels of panic to excitement. Some are excited thinking that the increased voters may mean a stronger voter turnout which will raise all candidates as these voters are most likely to vote for the party ticket rather than only voting for Donald Trump as that is the easiest path and these are lower information voters who are more likely to just pull the single lever for the Trump party rather than voting for each office individually, an occurrence the Democrat Party is more familiar with than are the Republicans. This is a new and untested ground for the Republican Party and more so than most will ever know. Has anybody actually bothered to ask the Donald if he is really willing to surrender control of all his companies and real estate interests for four or possibly eight years placing them in a trust where he will not be managing his holdings? I mean seriously now folks, can anybody see Donald Trump walking away from his wheeling dealing which is really what he lives for. Does he in the end really want to be President, or are we watching the dog caught the car by the rear wheel and now is stuck driving the car? He will be the center of attention between now and the end of his term should he actually prevail, something looking more certain as the clock ticks down to Tuesday. There is where the drama will peak and Trump will do the unthinkable and still hold the future of the Republican Party in his hands and he will play it for maximum exposure of the Donald before he makes the final fateful step which will astound most of the pundits, the media and the entirety of the Republican Party, win the day carrying the House of Representatives comfortably and give the Republicans a minimum of fifty-seven and possibly as high as 62 in the Senate. Yes, Donald Trump could be sitting in the catbird seat with a filibuster-proof Congress if the Republicans can find their way to work with him. Not to worry, they won’t.
Of course all this is pure conjecture but in one manner it would be wonderful to see a true and total Republican Congress with the same theoretical license to do whatever they can agree upon just as was the case for the Democrats for the initial two years under President Obama. Thankfully the wheels came off of that cart fairly quickly and before the world ended and the destructiveness was mostly repairable with Obamacare needing the largest repair, removal and replaced with a completely open system countrywide for all insurers with take and carry benefit for all plans. There could be options for tax breaks for companies paying percentages of employee chosen plans giving everybody total control. Returning to major medical plans with a basic plan required for any insurance that would cover Emergency Room, Trauma Center and major surgeries with rate of coverage set by a board of major hospital directors chosen every five years by the top five-hundred hospitals by some pre-set formula which would include their accepting Medicare and Medicaid pricing as set by the board and approved by Health and Human Services and the Senate also voting as if this were an actual treaty requiring a super-majority. This would guarantee bipartisan agreement. This base pricing could be used for a national defined plan which all insurers could use as their guideline for a general basic coverage plan.
The one part of such unilateral Republican control is there would no longer be the excuse by the Republican leadership of, we did not have the complete control of the House, the Senate, power to end filibusters or, their favorite, we did not have the White House. No more excuses and just let the Congress show the world what plan the Republicans really got! Turn them loose and let the legislation fly. Not to worry folks, they will hit a log jam within weeks, more likely days and even within hours or minutes. They would, in a word, choke. The main problem the Republicans suffer is the one thing Trump offers to teach them, bravado. The Republicans are afraid to lead, timid and only comfortable pointing out what is broken in their opinion and then lamenting their inability to do anything about the problems. Given total control they would continue to shuffle their feet, looking at the ground, mumbling senselessly, wandering around lost in the wilderness of their own making. They have no dynamic leadership. They did once under Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America, a plan. Imagine that, an actual plan laid out, defined and actually almost followed. Eventually the Republicans did what they do best and shot down their leader because the media picked him apart while they watched on playing the helpless damsel in distress sobbing over her miseries as their presumed White Knight was pounded into the mud by professional muckrakers. What leadership has the Republican leadership or the rank and file shown with their control of Congress as they have handed President Obama victory after victory with budgets including every item with every dollar as requested? One would have at the very least thought they might have, at the very least, demanded more money spent investing in improved care through privatization of the Veterans’ Administration’s healthcare system changing it to an insurance plan open to any and all insurers with guaranteed rates equal to Medicare system rates. This would have freed the veterans to receive care locally, virtually anywhere other than living in a log cabin in Nowhere, Montana. They might have fought to end the downward spiral in defense spending when compared with all the increases in Welfare, Food Stamps and Unemployment costs or demanded that $15.00/hr. minimum wage for military personnel and their pay scale to be based on a forty hour week plus ten hours overtime pay (trust this infantry veteran, most soldiers, especially the privates, work at least an average of well over fifty hour weeks with extra duties such as guard duty, going to the field, weapon training plus yearly qualifying, physical training plus annual testing and a myriad other additional often busy work). These would have been easy initiatives and would have placed a spotlight on some actual problem situations and not on men who claim to be women using any bathroom that fits their life-choices.
A complete Republican victory with Donald Trump as President would not necessarily be the disaster the media has painted. Remember, this is a media which has gone step-for-step with every single idea the Democrats have suggested and even initially carried the water for Obamacare and are now backing the Democrat plan of government run healthcare exactly the same that the following countries found to be impossible to afford; Britain, France, Canada, Germany, Russia and any other where the tax rate is under 80% of income with allowances for food, housing, clothing and transportation. When the government allows refunds for food, housing, clothing and transportation; they are dictating how you live and all but defining what you are permitted to spend on food, housing, clothing and transportation. Does such a system sound good to any regular-work-hard American? That is the European Plan that President Obama and a President Hillary Clinton are targeting for America and with a European level military unable to afford ammunition to train with. When we read articles reporting that NATO national military personnel are required to run around in training exercises yelling, “Bang, I shot you, you’re dead,” and that passes for training, we worry what is wrong with these countries. What is wrong is they are not responsible for their defense, the United States is responsible because as NATO defines itself it goes something like this; from each nation as they can provide, from the United States whatever is required to complete the task any NATO nation leaves hanging in the wind. Force the United States to train yelling, “bang bang, you’re dead,” will leave the Western World vulnerable to conquest using swords as swords are a superior weapon to a rifle without bullets, and any invader will have real rifles with real bullets and will not react by claiming, “you got me,” after a NATO soldier screams, “bang bang, you’re dead.” Trust us on this one, really.
The choice comes Tuesday, the counting will take the rest of the week unless the victory is definitive, the lawsuits another month or two and the appeals even longer. There is a possibility that the inauguration just might take place on the perfect Saturday, April 1, 2017, April Fool’s Day, and it will be the biggest joke, bet nobody will be laughing, they will be too darned sick and tired. Sick and tired of the wasted time, money and credibility. Sick and tired as the American Representative Constitutional Republic will have been assassinated and lying next to death’s door in desperate need of some serious reckoning. So sick and tired that it is doubtful she will receive the necessary attentions and restoration of faith in the system, the leaders, the nation any time soon. That is the saddest thing about this fiasco disguised as an election. The disgust may be made more palpable by the apparent lack of decency, competence, qualifications and general revulsion one or both candidates elicit from each member of the electorate, but they are not the source of the revulsion, just one more product of the end of America.
This was not the original target for the end of this piece, but we rarely end where we started. The disarray coming after this election will encompass both parties. They have each been laid bare for all to see the rotted core filled with the diseases of hatred for the other, distrust of all, the required demand for the lowest expectations, the lowest denominator as the norm and the lack of desire, nay, even ability to repair that which has been left to fall into disrepair. People will ask how things got here and the answer is an easy one. Just open your eyes and look around you and for all that is holy take off the rose colored glasses, the beer goggles, the fractured lensed party glasses and put down the weed, booze, drugs, sexting, or whatever consumes you that is in that little box you so feverishly share everything that amounts to the nothing that is your current life. Too many of us are lost and are too busy becoming even further lost to notice. We started down this road when our materialism surpassed our reason and replaced our faith, well, became our religion. Hashem, The Big Guy who made all of it, or so we used to believe, was put aside for just a short while as we worked harder for that new car. After the car we moved for a bigger house, then that little vacation cottage, those new computers, stood all night in the rain for that next must have gadget, the newest i-Phone, and on and on endlessly until we forgot completely about Hashem.
I was right there with many and got lost in living for the now and for the me. Sure, we all peeked up every so often, glanced around, did the traditionally right thing and then dove back in. We lost religion because we had science and a new religion, human rights, animal rights, right to anything and everything while forbidding others from deviating from our chosen things because we, our group knew better than any other group. We pressed for laws which made our cause the right, moral and now legally enforceable right. There were a few hiccups as differing views clashed. The big issues were such as but not limited to abortion, guns, marijuana, free healthcare, free college, minimum wage, military size, military weapons systems, war and peace. The eventuality due to high demand lives and higher taxes both parents worked and in some families one parent worked two jobs, had to keep up the old image, you know. Flat screen television, fifty-two inch display, 3-D, 7.1 surround sound, build on a theater room for the next party, it was never going to end and then we wondered why we had a coronary.
Meanwhile, who had time to assist with homework, providing we ever made time for having a family? Time and interest in the children’s schooling also fell by the wayside and the PTA became the teacher’s union more so than a shared parent-teacher relationship. The schools gave us what we wanted, good grades though often so inflated as to be meaningless. They left real schooling somewhere back a ways and replaced it with social programming of our youth who now knew of the evils of capitalism but were unable to define it, global climate change, racial inequality, gender inequality, LGBT life choices, and the new relativity, not Einstein’s but moral, gender and ethnic amongst others. Multiculturalism became the watchword where no single culture was preferable to any other and that included the tribes of cannibals and headhunters, communists and socialists, anything but that one dreadful, awful, despicable culture, Judeo-Christian culture, the old ways that built Western Civilization. No, we had to move beyond our little corner and our petty ways and go and try those other cultures which were all equal while all were preferable to the old way, that demanded far too much civility and culture need not be civil in order to have a civilization.
The Narrow Path
The new multicultural civilization would embrace everything different than our past, that civilization was built on faith and decency, or so it claimed. Faith was long dead; humiliated from the town square and who was it that got to define decency. Assuredly we could each define decency for ourselves, provided it was not defined in the morality based on that old book we had presumably discarded long ago. The children were prepared to forge that new world whose foundation was firmly planted in shifting sands which were so undefined and meaningless that everything was near collapse. We were approaching the cusp and beyond the cusp was a great and bottomless void. The edge had watched many a great civilization fall beyond the cusp to fall into the darkness never to return. This was how greatness of civilizations died, not from withering attacks but from withering within. They first hollowed out the principles upon which they were built and then with the inner structure destroyed, they simply collapsed from their own weight. They all died from their internal injuries, one after the other marching straight into the abyss awaiting their eventual arrival as they passed beyond the cusp. They all had lost their way and strayed from the narrow path turning right or left, it matters not as the cliffs of ruin line both sides and one can pass beyond the cusp going either way, right with dictatorial systems controlled by a single lunatic or left where a horde of self-proclaimed wise men act just as need of an asylum as the single loon and who rush beyond the cusp into the void with equal abandon. The path is as pictured above, narrow and perilous for any who lose their compass and stray from the good path, the narrow way.
Beyond the Cusp
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Beyond the Cusp 