The mystery that is history

George Santayana once said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  This is basically a plug for knowing history.  And as I watch the whole world unravel, due to some Bannonian edict to deconstruct the administrative state, watch the dismantling of the social safety net put in place by those progressive dreamers following the "Great Depression", I am reminded of Santayana's words.  I is a history major as an undergraduate (minors in religious studies and English) and in my distant past done work towards a doctorate which I managed to destroy with a little too much graduate school libations.  Not that I have any special insight to the debacle we are witnessing but maybe I do.  Who know?  But then I am the Authority Czarina and maybe I can be of assistance.   I cite Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Yes, we are in the desert of  Trumplandia.  And when our history is writ large we shall see what we allowed to be created and how it tumbled and decayed.


If we have learned nothing from the last week is that the party in dominance is feckless.  Eight years they had to repeal and replace (or just repeal) the ACA and the came up empty.  Seems given time to acclimate to the concept of health care as a "entitlement" most people seem to have cozied up to the notion.  Now try to take it away and the hue and cry has gone up.  Sure the ACA could be better, like a single payer option, but most people, many of the Trumpets, have warmed to the idea. Now don't you dare take their Kodachrome away.

And that the Republicans who salivated like a junk yard dog over a contested bone tried to eviscerate the ACA the people fought back.  Still the fact that they really had no plan at all and that it was rushed through the process without a hearing, well, I am sure that had something to do with it as well.

So Ryan looks like a loser, and Trump, ever the narcissist, tries to blame the Dems for the failure and refuses to take any personal responsibility  The fact is this country cannot be run on a business model and the president's lack of political acumen and his thin skinned self demonstrates this all too well.  He has not drained the swamp, only made it swampier.  He is a puppet of the Republicans who thought he was malleable and could bend to their will.

And speaking of puppets, the Russian connection through this whole ugly ordeal...why are we all not shouting TREASON.  The Republicans wanted power so much they compromised the democracy to attain it.  TREASON.  Call it what is it. .  The whole rat pack of them GUILTY.  They are traitors to this country and owe allegiance only to power and whomever can put them there.

This is the history we are living.