As early as December 12, 2000, I’ve felt like I’m a minor character in a Harry Turtledove story.
Turtledove writes books of alternate history, exploring a world where, for instance, the Confederacy won the Civil War, or my favorite, the Worldwar series where WW II is interrupted by an alien invasion.
The way I interpret recent history, in 1992 Bill Clinton took over a less-than-optimum economy from George H. W. Bush and, through his (mostly) moderately liberal policies ended his term with a budget surplus.
Not to say I think that Clinton was a perfect president.
First off, I think someone in that office should be able to keep is pants zipped. Whether or not he should be impeached over infidelity is another matter.
Also, in retrospect, the 1994 crime bill was a mistake. The effect was to put many, many more people in jail, mostly people of color. However, it did include an assault weapons ban that had the effect of decreasing firearm crime for 10 years before it was allowed to expire.
Then came George W. Bush, who, despite losing the popular vote was coronated as President by the US Supreme Court on December 12th, 2000 in the Bush v Gore case.
It’s possible, even likely, that if the vote recount in Florida had been allowed to proceed Bush would still have won. But we’ll never know.
Also, there’s no way to know if a Gore administration may have anticipated the 9/11 attack and blocked it.
But one thing I’m certain about is that a Gore administration would not have involved our military in two disastrous wars in the Middle-East.
One of Bush’s wars was completely unnecessary. Iran had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. Iraq is a Sunni Islam nation and the attack was carried out by Al Queda, a Shiite group led by a Saudi, Osama Bin Laden, working mostly out of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Sunnis and Shiites don’t get along.
This is not to say Saddam Hussein wasn’t a tyrant, my point is that he had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and that at that time he led the only secular government in the Middle East. Attacking Iraq cost our country trillions of dollars (so far) and about 4,500 American deaths. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died in this totally unnecessary war.
We will never know, but if a Gore admiration failed to detect and stop the 9/11 attacks I like to think that our country’s reaction would have been to use diplomatic and intelligence assets to hunt down and bring Osama bin Laden and his followers to justice, rather than attempt regime change in Afghanistan. And try them in the US instead of creating the still ongoing disaster of Guantanamo Bay.
Not to mention that the ISIS terrorist group would probably never been formed, saving everyone a lot of trouble.
The upshot is that, having been handed a budget surplus in 2000, over his eight years in office George W. Bush managed to completely trash the US economy, and by extension the world economy, with unfunded tax cuts, an unfunded Medicare Prescription benefit and two incredibly costly wars, causing the Great Recession of 2008, (which incidentally cut Debbie’s and my retirement savings in half. But I’m not bitter.)
So, we went from 12 years of a GOP presidency (Reagan and Bush the 1st) which left a moribund economy for a Democratic administration, Clinton, who turned things around and handed a surplus to Bush the 2nd, who trashed the entire world’s economy in just eight years.
Barack Obama was elected in 2008, and in the course of his eight years made major improvements in healthcare in the US (although there’s lots more to do to make it more equitable and universal) and also presided over a near miraculous recovery of the economy.
I was not thrilled by a lot of things President Obama did. For the ACA I thought he should have taken a full British NHC-style single-payer plan to the Republican controlled Congress and started negotiating from there. Instead he tried to come up with a plan, basically Bob Dole’s and Mitt Romney’s healthcare plan, that would be acceptable to the GOP.
But, true to form, the GOP didn’t want to allow a Democratic President to get ANYTHING accomplished, so they balked. There was just something about President Obama, (nobody knows what it was), that rubbed them the wrong way.
(Am I being too subtle?)
I found the ACA, as eventually passed, disappointing. It was basically a give-away to for-profit “Healthcare” companies, who are much more interested in padding the bottom line, creating “shareholder value” and boosting C-Suite salaries than they are in actually, you know, providing healthcare.
The ban on using pre-existing conditions to deny coverage, the extension of Medicaid to states that don’t treat their poor citizens as sub-humans unworthy of healthcare and the coverage of children into their mid-twenties were major accomplishments. But I think President Obama could have done more in the two years he had a Democratic House and Senate.
Then came Donald Trump. It appeared to me from footage broadcast on election night 2016 that he had not planned on winning. He almost looked panicked that night.
My suspicion is that he wanted to create a Trump TV cable network so he could complain about how the election was stolen from him to his Faux News addled base. If only that were so.
Instead, he started violating his oath of office before he ever took his hand off the Bible.
By refusing to put is business into a blind trust (handing it over to Don Jr. and Eric doesn’t count) he immediately violated both the Domestic and Foreign Emoluments clauses.
He should have immediately been impeached.
Then, the very next day, his insistence that his Inauguration crowd was the largest in history, in spite of clear photographic evidence that it wasn’t, should have been the basis of a 25th Amendment Section four declaration of his incompetence to be President and booted out.
Instead, he was allowed to serve his full term.
One of his major accomplishment was to pass a disastrous, unfunded tax cut that made minor cuts to the taxes of the middle class while making major cuts to the taxes paid by the super rich and multinational corporations.
The idea was that cutting taxes for the rich and corporations would free up capital for R&D and new product development, creating jobs for the middle class. I.e. trickle-down economics. It didn’t work under Reagan/Bush the first, it didn’t work under Bush the second, and, surprise! It didn’t work this time. It’ll never work.
What it did do was allow the super rich to keep more of their money and allow large corporations to buy back their own stock to make their stockholders (mostly the super rich) happy. It also blew a major hole in the budget, causing the deficit to skyrocket.
Oh, and it did allow many corporations (including Disney, where I worked at the time) to give their employees a one-time $1,000 bonus. Big whoop. That’s not even one months house payment for us, and we have a very small house payment.
It was predicted then, and it came to pass, that the increasing deficit would eventually be blamed on “spending” by the GOP. See any speech by Chip Roy (R-TX).
The other major accomplishment was the opportunity to choose three super conservative Supreme Court justices.
The first one, Neil Gorsuch, should have been Obama’s pick, but Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, illegally and unconstitutionally (in my view), refused to even meet with Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, for more than a year, until after the presidential election.
Then, with the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, Brett Kavanaugh was approved by the Senate in 2018 in a very contentious confirmation hearing that, in my opinion, showed that he is completely unqualified to be on the Supreme Court.
Do you like beer?
Finally, Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away less than two months before the 2020 presidential election and McConnell and the GOP Senators, showing their complete disregard for their own made-up rules, rushed through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, nailing down a six to three conservative majority for the foreseeable future.
The new Supreme Court justices proved that they lied through their teeth during Confirmation by striking down Roe v Wade at the first opportunity.
And, of course, Trump, who apparently has the attitude that you’ve only lost if you quit, and is so insecure he can’t bear the thought of losing, created a constitutional crisis by attempting to stay in office, even when it was clear that he had lost the election, by like, a lot!
He likes to say that he got more votes than any sitting president in history, which is actually true. Possibly the one true thing he ever said.
The thing is, Biden got about seven million more votes than Trump, and won in the Electoral College. Game over.
Now, today, Trump is on trial for falsifying business records to cover up a conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 election. This is the least of his worries.
He’s also up on charges of
election interference in the 2020 election in Georgia,
stealing and refusing to return classified documents in Florida,
and conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding (counting the electoral votes) in DC.
I hope he looks good in an orange jumpsuit.
It’s very likely that your view of history over the last thirty years or so doesn’t match mine. I’d like to hear any input you have in the comments. I’ll open them up to everyone for this one column. Be nice.
As usual, this isn’t what I started out to write.
I wanted to write about how to be a good citizen and an empathetic human being.
I was going start with this video of Illinois Governor Pritzker speaking at last years Northwestern University commencement, plus a column by Steven Beschloss that I wish I’d written:
I’m going to end with a clip of Patton Oswalt on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert from a few weeks ago. He said something pretty inspiring (at least to me) starting at about 2:55 through about 4:30:
THAT’s what I originally planned to write about. But I kinda like what I wrote anyway.
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