by Gerard Renfro, Montpelier
“You deserve the king you get” — Thomas Jefferson
As much as I dislike Trump as a public official, I cannot agree with the rash of hysteria and doomsday prophecies such as those printed in the Jan. 5 Bridge. Has no one noticed that this hysteria is exactly what happened with Obama’s first election? Yet, nothing in our international policy (of constant warfare) nor anything of our domestic policy (of economic decline) has changed.
Trump and his supporters may have very well tampered with the election and spread false information with the help of pro-Russian supporters, but what is new about misinformation or favoritism? George Jr. won his first election by electoral fraud. When a group of petitioners asked the Senate to investigate, not one Senator supported them, not even Vermont’s heroic Jeffords or Leahy. Sanders got his start as a Progressive in Burlington, but then abandoned the Progressives. When Pollina ran for governor, Sanders ignored him. Now Sanders has his following and his “revolution,” but what he is doing is copying the behavior of Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader, who ran against Bush. During his campaign, both the Democrats and the media almost completely ignored Nader. Ironically, in this last campaign, I would not have even known that the Green party had a candidate except for a WGDR radio re-broadcast of an interview of Jill Stein (who correctly predicted Sanders would be used as a vote-getter before being dumped). This interview originally came from … Russia.
It is true that Trump is making some strange cabinet appointments, but Bush Jr. did the same thing, only worse. His appointments were not really his, there were pre-chosen from a cabal of neoconservatives and war mongers that included some degenerates from the days of Nixon and Reagan and the Iran-Contra scandal. Almost all of them had some conflict of interest due to their connections to big business.
Trump is a turd-master to be sure. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church has been protecting its child molester priests for decades. When the Vatican defended them in the U.S., it claimed that our government had no right to prosecute, and Obama accepted this. About a year later, Obama ‘resolved his differences’ with the church in time for his re-election. Trump is a warmonger, but Obama has ordered far more drone strikes than Bush ever did and the war with Syria is causing great suffering, including migration problems that the U.S. would rather ignore.
Trump is a racist, but our entire phenomenon of white flight and urban growth, which contributed to inner-city decay, which in turn led to ‘the war on drugs,’ which in turn justified the prison industrial system, is racist. Almost every president since Nixon, while ignoring inner city decay, has used some excuse to put minorities in prison where slave labor is hidden behind the pretence of ‘prison reform.’
The liberals seem to be unable to accept the fact that many people are sick of the inbred two-party system. Trumpites may be completely misled in how modern problems are perceived or fixed, but liberals have done nothing to correct the perception or the source of those problems. Trump is a reflection of our problems, not the cause. It seems that it is fashionable to complain about his many failures because he offends our politically correct sensibilities, but such complaining masks our past failures to advance meaningful reform.
The author would like to thank WGDR, the Savoy Theater, the Kellogg-Hubbard Library and Bear Pond books for their alternative media, excellent documentaries, and numerous book sales.
