SICK AND TIRED OF BEING SICK AND TIRED? - YA, ME TOO!

By Edwin Cooney

I think it was Fannie Lou Hamer, the lady who led the Freedom Democrat’s challenge to the all-white Mississippi delegation to the1964 Democratic National Convention, who once proclaimed, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired!”

That’s precisely how I feel about President Trump and his conduct with regard to both our domestic and international affairs. I’m more than happy to concede that I’d oppose almost any Republican or Conservative administration, but the problem runs deeper than ideology. Even worse, it actually defies ideology. I further concede that by winning the election, the GOP is entitled to lower taxes, increase the national debt (which they only think is dangerous when Democrats run up the tally) and even play nuclear “stick ‘em up” with North Korea. They have earned that right by achieving their executive and legislative majorities. If traditional Conservatism were their only sin, my opposition would be accompanied by my traditional respect for both the office and the person of the President of the United States.

President Trump is the sixth president I’ve opposed since I became an adult voter in 1968. Each of these presidents I found annoying and even offensive from time to time. However, with the exception of President Nixon, I wouldn’t have even considered any one of them a candidate for impeachment.

In 1980, I bitterly resented the national favor of Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter and, in 1988, I resented George Bush and his campaign managers Lee Atwater and Jim Baker’s campaign against Michael Dukakis. In 2000, the Supreme Court’s election of George W.  Bush over Al Gore could be called — at the least — “extra legal” and it was certainly hard to swallow. However, “Shrub” as some called Bush, conducted himself in office for the most part like a gentleman worthy of his dad George Herbert Walker Bush and his granddad, Prescott Bush, Senator from Connecticut.

Unfortunately, President Trump has lowered the quality of communication coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to an unheard of adolescent level. Can you imagine President Reagan referring to even his worst critic as an “untruthful slime ball” as President Trump did to the deposed FBI Director James Comey last Thursday? 

To make things even more ridiculous, it’s being reported that a major GOP strategy to fire up the Trumpian base this fall is to warn Trump voters to re-elect a Republican House in order to prevent sure impeachment proceedings against President Trump. (Perhaps these GOP strategists know more about the president’s vulnerability than we do!) Can you imagine the 1982 National Senate or House Democratic Campaign Committees even considering such a strategy against President Reagan?

Of course, part of the explanation for 21st Century political squalor has to do with the advent of professional Liberalism and Conservatism. Voters and office holders used to be either liberal or conservative-minded. Today, too many Americans are utter slaves to political ideology. Political ideology used to be a guideline of principled application for viewing the answers to political problem areas. Today, they tend to master our thoughts and beliefs rather than being mere tools for the consideration and potential solving of national and even international issues. This all precedes Donald J. Trump’s ascendancy to national prominence, but Mr. Trump has cleverly utilized the tools of divide and conquer to the point that not even ideological Conservatives in both the House and Senate can comfortably apply their dearest principles to national and international problem solving. Thus is it any wonder that House Speaker Paul Ryan decided last week to become the 19th Republican incumbent to pack up his bat and ball and go home?

As for whether or not it would be wise to impeach President Trump if the Democrats were to achieve sufficient majorities in both houses of Congress, the answer to that will depend on the outcome of the Mueller investigation and the degree of the president’s involvement in the questionable activities of his private attorney Michael Cohen, just to name two areas of concern. As of now, I believe that it is more than likely that President Trump will serve his full 1,461 days as President of the United States of America.

The truth of the matter is that since 1968 both Liberals and Conservatives have been tearing at the fabric of our national social and political structure. Until that time, the differences between Republicans and Democrats had more to do with principled application to problem solving than it did with the moral significance of political and social issues. It was the divisive issue of life versus death during the Vietnam War and the morality of our traditional treatment of minorities that transformed political issues   from matters of politics to matters of personal and national morality. This is exactly what worried George Washington in 1796 when he warned the young nation against the advent of political parties. What he either forgot to do or simply was incapable of doing was to suggest another method of selecting candidates for high public office.

So, it has come to this point where an increasingly large proportion of American voters are simply “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” The question is can we afford to indulge this understandable status of political pique by merely staying away from the polls next November?

I think not. It was former Democratic Governor Alfred E. Smith, the first Democrat and Roman Catholic to seek the presidency, who once observed, “All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.” We can afford to be neither paralyzed by our righteous disgust nor can we ignore the legitimacy of President Trump’s right to be where he is in the absence of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

In other words, we can’t afford merely to be “sick and tired of being sick and tired!”

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY