Your money or your life, or both; health care in America

The murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson has ignited a whole lot of debate everywhere. I had some driving to do today, and I generally keep the CBC on the car radio. Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s half hour show “Commotion” came on. The producers have upped their game since that program debuted. I found the first few episodes way woke and too Toronto-centric. Today, Elamin had top-shelf writers on, from Vox and Rolling Stone, and they had some insightful observations about media response to Luigi’s first shot in the new class war. They danced around the conundrum all writers in mainstream media are facing. The internet is saturated with thumbs-up emojis on the matter, yet nobody on any mainstream platform is gonna go there. Getting a slot on CBC or Rolling Stone or Vox is way too big a prize. Nobody’s going to screw up their career by being honest about how they really feel about Luigi and Brian. They did mange to foreground a salient point in spite of that; if health insurance is such a major issue for Americans, why was it almost totally absent from the recent election campaign? They know why, they just can’t talk about it. Kamala had over 80 billionaire donors behind her campaign. Trump had about 50. Billionaires in America enjoy gold-plated health care. It’s not an issue for them. Therefore, it’s not an election issue. That’s the way the cookie crumbles when you’ve sold your democracy to the highest bidder.

United States of Empathy decides families belong together

Not all families of course. If you're a young American man from Compton looking at life in prison on a three-strikes count, nobody is suggesting you be allowed to keep your family together. And quite frankly, nobody in the media or across the punditocracy much gives a shit.

If, on the other hand, you're a young woman from Honduras arrested for entering the US illegally, Americans will rise up in their hundreds of thousands to march for your right to keep your family together.

What gives? A whole lot of politicking, that's what.

The anti-Trump media are ecstatic to have discovered a fresh beatin' stick with which to pummel the Orange Ogre. Yup, Trump's ICE goons are tearing families apart... the barbarity, the horror!!!

The humanitarian prerogative of keeping families together is a very recent discovery on the part of America's opinion makers. It's a rather selective empathy. It doesn't apply to those millions of marginalized Americans ensnared in the prison-happy judicial system, nor does it apply retroactively to anything that may have happened in the Before Trump era. Here's a recent story at VOX (hardly a pro-Trump media outlet) comparing immigration policy today with the Obama era, when Americans of good conscience neither knew nor cared about what happened at the border.

And let's never forget former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's profoundly compassionate insights into the deaths of half a million Iraqi children back in the Clinton era. I suppose that's different; those children have long been reunited with their families in Paradise.

Speaking of Albright, here's her acceptance speech at the Atlantic Council's 2018 Freedom Awards 
gala last week, where she was honoured for her lifetime achievements for "liberal democracy" and Empire. Truly an inspirational porridge of sanctimony and bafflegab!

But it does prove that a few thousand, or a few hundred thousand children are no big whoop one way or the other in the over-arching sweep of American Exceptionalism.


Unless of course their narrative can be harnessed in the cause of "the resistance."

Donald and Hillary; a match made in... error?

I see where the erstwhile liberals at the VOX website have finally seen fit to suggest that maybe the Donald and Hillary show is just that, a show.

The think tank here at Falling Downs has been kicking that concept around for awhile now. Nice to see the mainstream folks catching up!

After all, anybody who looks at the two candidates squarely and fairly will realize that Donald is the liberal and Hillary is way off to his right wing.

Would Donald the semi-successful condo developer agree to run interference for these up-starts from Arkansas?

I don't see why he wouldn't. We know Donald is a rank opportunist, and being the muse behind the Queen of Chaos would have to qualify as a virulently rank opportunity, if nothing else.

Maybe the original plan has been outpaced by circumstances. I mean, no serious person in America every imagined that Trump would actually clinch the GOP nomination. I would guess that both Hillary and Donald would be included in that "no serious person in America" conglomeration.

So Donald J. Trump agreed with his pals, the Clintons, that he'd take a run at the GOP nomination, just to stir up shit and make things complicated. In the course of so doing, Trump accidentally hit the mother-lode of anti-establishment venom.

That mother-lode has proved to be deeper and more venomous than either  Donald or the Clintons could have imagined. Now the imperial couple have a problem; Donald loves the Clintons, he really has no interest whatsoever in being president, but he's got a huge swath of America that's bought into his schtick and wants to make him POTUS.

That's quite a mind-fuck, is it not?