HOW?
Dr. Common Good asks…
How is it possible that we have an American president whose “speech” today before the UN was just a blowhard rant filled with braggadocio, completely baseless and egotistical claims about his “peacemaking,” whining that he has not received a Nobel prize, bragging that the US is the unchallenged “hottest” country in the world, lecturing the UN on its uselessness, spewing out a racist demagogue’s blanket condemnation of migration as the reason countries are “going to hell” and losing their heritage, and issuing a flagrantly ignorant denunciation of green energy and climate change science as perpetrated by “stupid people” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
How? How did we get here? Yet Trump’s repulsive word-sewer is seen as coming from the United States, a key founder of this very United Nations.
And just a day earlier, a fumbling president who could not even pronounce the word “acetaminophen” stood before the US and proclaimed “Tylenol” as the cause of autism, following the “conclusions” of his depraved and ignorant HHS Secretary RFK Jr. The world laughed, and the scientific experts stood flatfooted with mouths agape.
How?
Right now the United States is seen by most of the world as an idiotic, pathetic caricature of its former self, a country to be ignored, a country giving away many of its greatest assets, and a country to be taken advantage of because of its self-destructive and colossally stupid leadership and policies – which can’t help but raise this question in the minds of many: “How? How did this once thriving, admired country, defender of democracy (at least part of the time), purported “leader of the free world,” fall so quickly off a cliff into a turgid morass of myopic, ill-informed, moronic, mindless and just plain psychotic swill? How? Weren’t we just the country that did a better job than most of the world in addressing and recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic? Weren’t we just the country that was expanding healthcare to cover more people who could not afford it? Weren’t we just the country that, through USAID-funded programs, supported so many efforts to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, starvation, and infectious disease? Weren’t we just the country that harnessed the sometimes-erratic relationships between NATO countries into a galvanized and coordinated opposition to Russia’s cold-blooded invasion of Ukraine? Weren’t we at least beginning to rejuvenate our leadership in the global fight against climate change? Weren’t we? Huh?
So, I ask again, how has it come to this? What this appalling imposter of a president and his servile, unqualified, self-dealing administration has done should be way over the line, beyond the pale, for Americans of every political stripe. Yet here we are.
You – and I mean all Americans — should seriously be asking yourself, how? And you should be thinking about some answers. Now. It’s past Paul Revere time.