Democrats work hard to get things done, and don't do enough to brag about it
Drunk on contributions from fossil fuel funded dark money groups, the other guys spend all their time bragging, but don't even bother to accomplish anything serious
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If a Republican President led the country out of a pandemic, delivered the strongest economic recovery on the planet, tamed inflationary pressures set free by pandemic disruptions to the supply chain, brought unemployment to record lows, increased wages, lowered drug prices, launched a full scale rebuilding of our infrastructure, extended broadband to rural counties, and rebuilt American manufacturing, there would be loud calls for that President to win the Nobel Prize for economics.
If a Republican President brought a fractured world together to successfully fight the illegal and murderous effort of a dictator to redraw the map of Europe by military force, flag waving Americans would call him a hero.
Why then, are some wringing their hands now that a Democratic President has done all these things? Are we so spoiled that we refuse to acknowledge the successes we have had simply because there is more to do? Are we so afraid that pride in our accomplishments somehow signals a lack of empathy for those still left behind? If so, get over it.
President Joe Biden with first lady Jill Biden to board Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on July 14, 2023. | Stephanie Scarbrough/AP Photo
Every day, by peaceful and democratic ways, Democrats are working to improve the lives of Americans. We are met, at every turn, by dangerous lies, by threats and intimidation, and by fossil-fuel funded attacks. And every day we have further evidence of what the other guys want to do if they get the chance. They promise to end the independence of the justice department, just as they have already ended the independence of the Supreme Court. They promise a nation-wide end to reproductive choice, and to use government to stop private investors from even thinking about climate change. They promise to organize gun owning Americans into additional armies to support their politics and to treat the rest of us, not as dissenters but as enemies.
These are habits of the Republican mind now, and not subject to reason. Take, for example the fossil fuel industry. When prices were down a few years ago they pledged to reduce oil production and cut emissions. But now that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has raised prices those promises are forgotten. According to the Guardian, Exxon Mobil walked away from its promise to fund efforts to create a low-carbon fuel from algae. Shell is, apparently, taking a year off from new investments in renewables. Shell further claims to have met its production cut goals because it sold some of its production capacity to another company who is, guess what? producing oil. The GOP, dripping with cash from record oil company profits, claims we should increase production because fossil fuels extracted in America are produced more cleanly than those extracted in much of the rest of the world. Bulletin: climate doesn’t care where the fuel comes from.
This week we hit new heat records. People are literally dying in the cabs of their trucks. Again, the oil companies and their spokespeople, the GOP, say that the world still needs fossil fuels, and that we have to produce them during the transition. Then they do everything possible to delay any transition. They lie and pretend we do not have the technology we need. We do, what we lack is the will.
It is not that Americans lack will generally. On the contrary we are quite capable of hard work and amazing accomplishments. But people are confused by the lies. Chalk that up to John Roberts and his gang. In their zeal to tell us what to do, they have built walled off government from our will by tapping vast hidden reserves, not of oil, but of cash from companies that put profit ahead of you, ahead of me, ahead of our democracy, ahead, even, of the planet itself.
That cash, and the lies it funds that produced today’s Republican Congress, a body so useless all it does it play with itself. Literally arguing over nothing for no purpose other than their own tiny egotistic agendas. The fate of the Republic hardly hinges upon whether the Freedom caucus likes Marjorie Taylor Green today or not. The world is actually on fire, but they want to hear from a guy who thinks COVID doesn’t kill Jews like it kills [real] white people? This is their pornography; it gets them excited. And it has nothing to do with the challenges or the opportunities ordinary Americans face every day.
Meanwhile, Democrats are living in the real world. We are fighting and succeeding to make it a better one. On second thought, that Nobel Prize isn’t such a bad idea.