Sunday, July 30, 2017

THE SENATE ROGUES GALLERY

By Robert P. Bomboy

JULY 9, 2017

            It's time to place the blame.

I've been reading a book called the Moonstone by the nineteenth century author Wilkie Collins, who was a contemporary of Charles Dickens. How many times have you said - or heard someone say- "I'm at a loss for words!" People a hundred or two hundred year ago were never at a loss for words. They called a spade a spade; for instance, in Wilkie Collins' classic, a woman cries out: "You coward! You mean, miserable, heartless, coward!"

That's what I want to say to the Republicans in Congress: "Shame on you! You cowards! You mean, miserable, heartless, cowards!"

            Those awful words might have been tailor-made and cut-to-fit the Republicans in the House of Representatives who created their "mean" Unaffordable Care Act ("mean," that's what President Trump called it) and the Republican senators who are now doing their darnedest to repeal Obamacare, savagely cut Medicaid, and leave 23 million Americans like you and me without health insurance for their families and children.

How many of us, from our childhoods, have admired Robin Hood, the knight of Sherwood Forest who opposed tyranny by robbing from the rich to give to the poor? These senators are no Robin Hoods. They are the opposite: rich men and women - two thirds of them, including our Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey, are millionaires - who are robbing from the poor and the middle class to put nearly a trillion dollars into their own pockets and the pockets of other millionaires and billionaires.

            Do you know that a trillion dollars is a thousand billions?

            They fudge it over by calling the money "tax cuts," but it's real money they're taking for themselves. The "tax cuts" are for the rich: if all 52 Republican senators can stomach it, they and their millionaire friends will be nearly a trillion dollars richer.
            Beyond that, they will have made millions and millions of Americans worse off, poorer, sicker, seeing their children, their wives, and their families desperately ill.
            So what do you call people who are willing to do this? If it were Bernie Madoff or other criminals we wouldn't hesitate a moment to say that they were unprincipled scoundrels, heartless wretches, crooks, cheats, thieves, rogues of the worst kind.
          When it comes to this heartless bill to repeal Obamacare, the Republican Senate is a Rogues Gallery. Picture the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Pat Toomey, and the other Republican millionaires lounging poolside at the mansions of their gated communities over this past Fourth of July holiday, as Bernie Madoff once did. Picture them scheming to grab the 51 or 52 votes they need to pass their ugly Frankenstein out of the Senate so it can join the "mean" House bill on the way to the president and another glorious Rose Garden celebration with all the laughter and back-slapping at out-foxing and cheating the American people once again.
It will take only three good Republicans to turn the tables on them, three heroes willing to put the good of the people above the dishonest and unprincipled desires of their party in the Senate.

Pray God that three heroes will stand up.

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