EVIL

          I strongly disliked Donald Trump long before he ran for President. I always thought he was an arrogant blowhard, even back in the days when he gained fame for repairing the Wollman Skating Rink in New York. When Trump aired his “birther” beliefs, that Obama was not born in America, George F. Wills, to my delight, called him a “Bloviating Ignoramus.” When Trump declared for the presidency, I assumed he had zero chance. I believed that the American people thought of Trump as a publicity-seeking clown, and when asked what I thought of him as a candidate, I said that he was a joke.

            Like most intelligent persons, I was totally stunned when Trump won the election. I didn’t realize that there were so many uneducated, disaffected, stupid people in America. I didn’t know what to think of Trump. In my mind he was still a joke, and it was going to be a strange four years with this clown as Commander in Chief. I couldn’t imagine what kind of cabinet he would appoint or how he intended to carry-out his promise to “Make America great again.” I doubted he would greatly improve the economy, create jobs, defeat ISIS, halt illegal immigration, build his stupid wall, or repair the infrastructure of the country.

            With the exception of Steve Bannon, I was not particularly alarmed at the people he appointed to his cabinet. I should have seen Bannon as a red flag. From what I read, Bannon was a racist and alt-right-winger. But I did not look deeply into it. Some of Trump’s appointments bothered me, but I assumed that that was what you would expect of a conservative. I was not alarmed until the Charlottesville riots.

            The riots in themselves were not what alarmed me the most. I knew that those hate groups were out there and that they occasionally demonstrated, carrying automatic weapons, wearing swastika tattoos, and waving Confederate flags. I knew that their demonstrations would bring-out counter-demonstrations. What alarmed me were Trump’s statements about the riots. To him, there was wrong “on many sides.” He said that there were “fine people” on both sides. This balancing of denunciation was not just the stupidity of an incompetent chief executive. This was a statement of support for those low-life people who admire Adolph Hitler and the evil he perpetrated.

            I know that it is common for people of a political persuasion to accuse their opponents of evil, and I do not do it easily. You do not call your opponents evil for tax increases or cuts, military or domestic spending, welfare reform, or most social issues. Rather than accuse Trump and his henchmen of evil, I would prefer to accuse them of ignorance, malefaction, and mendacity. But here there is something much more serious. Here there is evil.

            I have spent my life studying the Nazis. I have found myself stunned and occasionally in tears reading about the Holocaust. I have found myself baffled by the horror of a so-called civilized nation setting out to imprison, starve, torture, murder, gas, and burn an entire race of innocent people. And yet, to my disgust, I have seen the mindset of those Nazi murderers copied and admired by some modern American people.

            I have examined the kind of people who were Nazis in World War II Germany. The major enforcers of Nazi horror, the Gestapo and the SS, were thugs and losers without education or societal respect. The anti-Semitic conservative masses went along with the Nazis. Hitler and his thugs started-out small, but gradually grew into a dangerous power.

When you look at the American hate groups you see the same kind of unrefined, crude, angry, bitter, ugly, stupid, uneducated thugs that supported Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s. I guess there are many such people all over the world. Educated, intelligent people have to work to prevent these thugs from gaining power. It will be much harder when you have someone like Trump in power. As I look at the Neo-Nazis, KKK, and White Supremacists today I see an evil that could grow into real political power if supported by people in high office.

RESPECT AND TRUMP

            When Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were president, liberal Democrats opposed them with anger and vitriol. But there never was the kind of scorn leveled against them that we now see with Donald Trump. The difference, I believe, is respect. Past Republican presidents, like Richard Nixon, came in for heated opposition from Democrats, but there was always a certain underlying respect for the office of President that even the most avid liberals felt for them. Now, all over America, in streets and in the media, one sees demonstrations with banners claiming that Trump is “Not my president.” Millions of people not only oppose Trump, they refuse to acknowledge his victory in the presidential election. They refuse to respect him. I do not remember ever seeing such opposition to a president. This is what I call “Virtual Impeachment.”

            It is not just that Trump’s approval ratings are dismally low. Other presidents have experienced very low approval ratings. But after six months, Trump’s ratings should be an embarrassment to him. His current approval rating, according to Gallup, is 34%. Other polling firms have found similarly dismal figures for Trump. The weighted average from data-centric website FiveThirtyEight—a tracker that aggregates surveys and adjusts for quality, recency, sample size and partisan lean—pegged his approval at just 37.2 percent Friday, August 25, 2017. That's just 0.6 percentage points higher than his all-time low in the tracker. Trump's disapproval, meanwhile, stood at 56.8 percent Friday, according to FiveThirtyEight. According to FiveThirtyEight's tracker, no president in the history of modern polling has had an approval rating so poor at this point in his tenure, 

            Late-night comedians have always made a living by joking about incumbent presidents. Saturday Night Live has performed some brilliant skits lampooning Jerry Ford, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and even Barack Obama. But never in living memory have the spoofs and parodies carried such scorn as they do now with President Trump. Watch the first fifteen minutes of Seth Meyers each night and you get a hilarious take-down of President Trump and his colleagues. But it is not just Seth Meyers doing the ridicule. Watch Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Trevor Noah, and James Corden, and you will get a level of derision and disrespect not seen with any other modern president.

            Trump hotly denounces the News Media. He claims that they are producing “Fake News.” The problem is that not all in the News Media are liberals. It is surprising to pick-up the paper in the morning and find Trump being criticized by Republican columnists. People like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, and Mona Charen, who are reliable conservative columnists, have been loudly criticizing Trump and his administration. Television news shows tend to highlight Trump’s many blunders, correcting his frequent misstatements and fabrications. Internet sites such as Facebook seem totally obsessed with attacks on Trump. If it were not for his blatant braggadocio, hyperbole, and mendacity, I would feel sorry for him.

            With so many people feeling that Donald Trump is not their president, it is a kind of Virtual Impeachment. Trump is experiencing a huge, tragic, lack of respect

SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH INSURANCE SYSTEM

           

With the President and most Republicans in Congress calling for repeal of Obamacare, and Republicans not able to get consensus on a new plan, we should consider the options that could easily solve our healthcare problems.

Canada and most of the countries of Europe have single-payer health insurance systems. I’m sure they are perplexed by our pretensions of being the world’s leading nation when we don’t even have a modern health insurance system. Under a single-payer system the American Government could provide health insurance for all citizens just as it does now for those on Medicare. It would also cover dental, eye, and psychiatric care.

There is another possibility. With the “Public Option,” a single-payer system would allow people who are not eligible for Medicare to purchase Medicare insurance from the government for prices far lower than they would pay under the current system. Although there was a strong effort made in Congress to include a “Public Option” when the ACA (Obamacare) was enacted, that effort was defeated by senators like Joe Lieberman from Connecticut--the insurance capital of America.

The main reason we do not have single-payer system is not that the public opposes such a change. Many polls show that Americans would prefer a universal health insurance program comparable to the system in Canada over the current system. Some 58 percent of respondents in a Gallup Poll support replacing ObamaCare with a universal healthcare system.

Nor is the reason we do not have a single-payer system that such a system would be more expensive for taxpayers and the government than the kind of private insurance system we have now. A single-payer system would actually save billions of dollars in health insurance costs. Private insurance companies in the U.S. spend about $400 billion a year on administrative costs. Under a single-payer system, in which Medicare takes-over payment of all healthcare costs, virtually all of those administrative costs would be swallowed by the Medicare department of the government. The government would simply provide Medicare for everybody, not just seniors.

 Medicare for everybody would also save billions of dollars for taxpayers. It would cost individuals only an extra 2 percent in taxes, or around $1,200 per year for someone earning $60,000 a year. That’s substantially less than most people currently have to pay for health insurance under the ACA.

The reason we do not have single-payer system is not that the quality of healthcare under a single-payer system would suffer. The truth is that our current healthcare system is very far from the best in the world. The countries with single-payer systems are doing far better than we are. The World Health Organization ranks the United States healthcare system 37^th in the World, behind Canada and all of the single-payer health care countries in Europe (We did beat-out Slovenia and Brunei).

The main reason why we do not have a single-payer system is that such a system would reduce the revenue of private insurance companies, and those companies have used their enormous power and wealth to strong-arm Republican and conservative Democratic legislators into blocking it.

A single-payer system would not put all health insurance companies out of business. They would be able to go on providing several types of health insurance, including the kind that we call “Medigap,” which is used by seniors today to pay for costs not covered by Medicare. They would also still be able go on selling Life, Property, and many other kinds of insurance.

           Right-wing demagogues will argue that a single-payer program is “socialized medicine.” That is mendacious nonsense. The same people argue that Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare are socialized medicine. A single-payer system would not do away with private doctors. Under a single-payer system, people would be able to choose their own doctors, specialists, clinics, and hospitals.

Do we want to save lives and make it possible for everybody to have quality healthcare under an inexpensive system, or do we want to preserve the profits and privileges of the private insurance industry?