Some Thoughts on Our Current Politics

Here's a sampling of the thoughts that occurred to me as I read the news over the last couple of months:

• Democrats are loath to credit President Trump's policies for the historically good economy Americans are currently enjoying and are trying to make the argument that President Obama actually created the conditions for the current economic boom. Very well, but if the economy was recovering under Obama: 1) Specifically which of his policies was responsible for the recovery, and 2) Why, when Trump undid most of Obama's policies, didn't the economy tank? Why did it instead skyrocket?


• Democrats have for years complained about "big money" in politics and have been very critical of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, but now that plutocrats Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg are spending fortunes to unseat Trump, the only Democrats complaining about big money are the candidates that are running against those billionaires in the primaries.


• Speaker Nancy Pelosi justified ripping up the president's State of the Union speech on national television by alleging that the speech was all "mistruths." What, precisely, were the inaccuracies in the speech that warranted her display of incivility and contempt for the president? I could certainly have missed it, but I've yet to hear what those alleged mistruths were.


• The New York Times printed a story that the Russians are trying to influence the 2020 election in favor of Trump, a story which, from the outset, defied common sense. Why would the Russians want a man re-elected who has imposed hurtful sanctions on them and stymied their ambitions in Ukraine and Syria rather than a man, Bernie Sanders, who is himself either a communist or the next thing to it, and who was so deeply fond of the old U.S.S.R. that he spent his honeymoon in Moscow?


• The media has made much of the fact that Hispanics in Nevada turned out big for Bernie in the primary last week, but it puzzles me as to why they would have. Many of those Hispanic voters are either immigrants themselves or children or grandchildren of immigrants. Where did they immigrate from? For the most part they fled countries which have adopted the same policies that Bernie is promising to impose on us. These people fled from failed socialist states riven by the sort of corruption and crime that typically plagues socialist countries. They fled here to escape it all, and then they vote for a guy who praises the leaders, and who passionately advocates the same economic ideology, of the states those immigrants found intolerable?
  
  This may make sense to somebody, but I confess I have a hard time wrapping my mind around it.