Question of the Day: When the dining room is serving two-bean soup and the two people ahead of you each get a bean does this mean your soup is only water?
Buckle your seatbelt: The political roller coaster train left the station on November 8 and has been slowly climbing to the highest peak where on January 20th the brakes will release and America will begin a rocking and rolling four-year ride the likes of which have never been experienced in this country. The era of Trumpism will have begun. We will all be screaming our lungs out before it is over.
Celebrating the centenary of the Russian Revolution: Most of the old Bolsheviks of the last century are long gone (good riddance). Nevertheless, next year will note the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution and it will be interesting to see to whom homage is paid. Lenin is hardly mentioned these days; Stalin continues to have some mileage, but all those who came after him are minor leaguers. Khrushchev almost started a world-ending nuclear war but that’s a negative even diehard old Soviets are likely to ignore. Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote in the Diary (London Review of Books, Dec. 1, 2016) that in the early days of Communism passive peasants listened and agreed to everything proposed to them at village meetings until at the last moment someone yelled “fire” and the whole crowd vanished before signing. Something similar probably awaits all the hoopla Putin will throw at the Russian people (and the rest of the world) for whom the Revolution is an “outright embarrassment.”
54 Million Will Die Cursing: Congressional Republicans want to shrink the size of government and lower taxes. There is talk of “privatizing” Medicare or issuing “vouchers,” but a better topic would be increasing mental health services for anyone who votes to take Medicare away from 54 million people, most of whom are seniors. Seniors may have a reputation for not being able to remember what they had for breakfast but take away a benefit like Medicare and their final words will be a life long curse on those who voted to do so. Tip O”Neill said it best decades ago: “Medicare is the third rail of politics, touch it and you’re dead.”
