Life of Wry

The 115th Congress opened today. Ugly.

The fight to repeal the Affordable Care Act has begun, as predicted. Unpredicted, however, was an appalling move by house republicans–in secret the night before, no less–to gut an independent congressional ethics office. Right, let’s ditch the independent group and place oversight duties under an existing house committee… a fox in charge of the hen house scenario, if ever there was one. Today. Day One. First action.

That did not go well.

Within a couple hours, pandemonium ensued, the house reversed its course and tabled the whole thing (it’ll come back.. they’ll just wait for a moment distracted by other bigger issues). Trump tweeted something about bad timing (ya think??) and other priorities, and with that, the freak show officially began between a “republican” president and his supposed allies in congress.

Meanwhile, Trump’s out there taking credit already for bringing jobs back to the US, quoting dubious right-wing tabloids (NY Post) and blasting overstated, oversimplified self-congratulations via Twitter. Credible news sources are not running any such story because the claim is a fanciful manipulation of facts… but we can expect a LOT  more of this kind of selective twisting of details from Trump via social media. Gird yourself.

I suspect we’ll also see very little in the way of press conferences because the man is incapable of delivering cogent arguments or coherent information on any serious subject–he can barely form a sentence and can’t risk being quoted.

And our confused and overmatched mainstream media, in its quest for viewers (and sponsors) will need to find a way to provide “acceptable” coverage of Trump, lest Trump get upset, call them names and undermine their credibility (so bad for their bottom line). They’ll soften their tone, normalize him, let some of the worst stuff go (it’s all bad), lower the bar.

(That’s been happening all along, and it happened again today when the mainstream press gave him all kinds of kudos for being reasonable and focused as he denounced the first-day, self-serving antics of the clown car congress. Who WOULDN’T think that was hysterically deplorable?)

Oh, just ugh.

Like Chris, I’d like to just turn it off and tune it out. But someone’s gotta challenge this stuff. The swift outpouring of criticism and calls and posts to social media worked well today.. just four more years to go!

Here’s my new favorite poster:

That’s what we’ll fight for. A part of what we’ll fight for, anyway… apparently there will be many fights we didn’t expect to have. (Like who ditches an independent congressional ethics  watchdog?)