The Love Chronicles

This blog is courtesy of part of an article by Joshua Holland and Rolling Stone magazine. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/why-opposing-trump-isnt-like-the-gop-obstructing-obama-w476367

Trump is the first president in history to lack any experience in government, and he frequently makes that clear. His closest advisers include family members, who similarly lack relevant experience and are also running the business he supposedly has nothing to do with; several people who have registered as foreign agents; Sebastion Gorka, whose association with a Hungarian group with Nazi ties is even more alarming than his dubious credentials; and former Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon.

So both President Obama and Trump have serious detractors! It’s also true that Democrats and the left express real fear over Trump’s policies, just as Republicans and the right were terrified of Obama’s agenda. But any similarity ends right there.

The “Tea” in “Tea Party” stood for “Taxed Enough Already,” and almost two-thirds of Tea Partiers said that Obama had raised taxes on “most Americans” at a time when he had in fact cut them, repeatedly, for Americans at all income levels. Their top complaint was that government had grown too large, at a time when federal revenues were at their lowest point, as a share of the economy, than at any time since 1950. When asked how much the government collected in tax revenues, their answers averaged 40 percent, when in fact that is double the highest level of taxation since 1970.

More than nine out of 10 Tea Partiers told pollsters that they feared Obama’s policies were “moving the country toward socialism.” Many believed that Obama had kicked off his presidency by going on a “global apology tour,” a claim Politifact called “a persistent and false Republican talking point that we have debunked a number of times.” Many received subsidized health insurance, but hated Obamacare for its “death panels” (Politifact’s 2009 Lie of the Year) and a “government takeover of health care” (2010’s Lie of the Year). Polls found a sharp spike in the number of gun owners who thought the government was going to do away with the right to bear arms with Obama in the White House. Now they are all sobbing in their stock rooms as gun sales have fallen off dramatically. It turns out President Obama was the greatest gun salesman in history!

So far, Trump hasn’t made any effort to work across the aisle or attract moderate Democratic support for his agenda. Congressional Republicans accused Obama of the same thing. They said he’d “rammed” the Affordable Care Act “down their throats.” They claimed, repeatedly, that nobody knew what was in the bill until they voted for it. “We’ve offered to work with the president all year,” said then-House Minority Leader John Boehner in 2010. “We’ve been shut out, shut out and shut out.” But 160 Republican amendments were included in the Senate bill that would eventually become law. Multiple committees held months of hearings, and then the upper chamber debated the measure for 25 hours before passage. Plus the bill was originally written by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and hailed by Republicans. It the main reason President Obama chose it, thinking he would not get as much flack as he was using their plan. But he underestimated the GOP hatred of his presidency.

I could go on: Jade Helm, the claim that Obama was sworn in on the Koran, the conspiracy theory that Bill Ayres ghost-wrote his memoir (a favorite of Donald Trump), etc. The point is that the circumstances around these two presidencies couldn’t possibly be more different, and while both men faced fierce opposition, the resistance to Trump is to a much greater extent grounded in reality, or at least information from credible sources, rather than crackpot Internet rumors.

Yet the political press elides these differences in story after story, instinctively framing the opposition to Trump as just more partisan wrangling, rather than a principled response to an authoritarian demagogue elected by 27 percent of the eligible voting population. It’s bad journalism, and it needs to be called out! These are points I have preached on, if you will allow the phrase, countless times in the past! The original article by Mr. Holland had a whole other section on the downfalls of our current President. I have also ‘preached” on those. But I decided my main point is to try and convince you that the Internet is not a factual place! You need to learn how to fish the waters otherwise all you catch are Carp and Suckerfish! I also know, since my friends, the ones I really want to read this, will say, damn, it is just John again, and will probably not even look at it. But I go to a lot of work to fact check before I present my work to you. Yes I have a different perspective, but a lie is a lie in any language or format, and I try really hard not to lie to you! I can guarantee you your current President has no such aspirations!