A contributor to the April 15 Viewpoints section rightfully takes umbrage with Trump’s demand for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget. Not that such a request is at all surprising, as the current administration is catering to wealth and power for the ultra-elites in the USA. It’s an exclusive club. Billionaires, many of whom benefit from our military-industrial complex, account for about 0.29% of the US population.
1.5 trillion dollars to support our perpetual war machine while proposing to or having cut programs that benefit working-class Americans, including SNAP, Medicaid, housing assistance, assistance to women, children and infants, Social Security, educational and health-care affordability is loathsomely reprehensible. It’s the bah-humbug administration and it deserves being denounced.
How did we get here? How can we find a way out?
The letter writer said polls show a large majority of people oppose the attack on Iran and the associated demand for that 1.5 trillion-dollar military budget boost. Right he is. But his blame is placed squarely on Republican majorities in Congress and their need to grow spine. Really? It’s solely the GOP to blame for this situation? The Democratic Party does not share in our current descent into dystopia?
Fact: The previous Democratic administration failed to hold the Insurrectionist to account. Wait, to say they “failed” is to imply that they tried. They did not try. In spite of the indisputable evidence that connected Trump to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, he was never arrested, charged or tried for that seditious incitement. That should have started the day that Joe Biden was sworn in. The rule of law, anyone?
He tried to overthrow the U.S. government! Right, but try to beat a red light ticket.
So, as we approach the mid-terms in less than seven months, the Democrats are going to rescue us, is that it? Even though they virtually escorted the convicted felon and convicted sexual assaulter (among other legal transgressions) back into the White House while supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Never you mind, it’s either Red or Blue, deja vu, all over again?
In my opinion, as I have stated many times on various media platforms, we need more choices than a Duopoly that has brought us this national nightmare. But the generational propaganda against third-party options is alive and well: it’s a wasted vote. It takes vote away from …
The electorate clings to the USS Duopoly, and especially the Democrats’ flimsy oppositional part in it, even though that ship is floundering. Cling away! Given it has been sinking for the past 45 years, expecting it to stay afloat is now most illogical.
Logical reasoning, however, apparently is now a superpower.
Joseph Harrington
Oak Park