Purple Welts

 (Warning: The following is a rambling rant...Viewer tolerance requested)

Full Disclosure: I am one of those disillusioned Democrats who voted for Trump in 2016..

Actually like so many others my vote was AGAINST Hillary who to me epitomized the corrupt corporate inside the Beltway politicians who had strayed from the working class roots of FDR's Democratic Party...

Sure Trump was a wealthy morally bankrupt con man, but he effectively ran as a non politician outsider and since he was outside the political establishment I hoped he could bring a fresh perspective and maybe begin the process of bridging the divide between the perpetually warring political parties in DC...

Drain the swamp as it were...

This did not happen and instead of bridging the divide, the political wars intensified even more and the Grand Canyon like chasm widened during Trump's four years... 

Like with most wars, it takes two to tango... Trump's philosophy of "us versus them" while demonizing his opponents did not lend itself to bipartisan unity while the Dems who were shocked and pissed off that they could lose an election to such a vile creature reverted to full obstruct combat mode with the express goal of retaking their Congressional majorities in 2018 and the White House in 2020..

Full Disclosure II ... I spend way too much of my dwindling life span on Twitter...

For me Twitter was love at first site(ha ha)... I love the speed and the character limits that forced rambling me to convey my thoughts with beautiful brevity... The site rekindled my long ago extinguished passion of writing poetry which required me to utilize my atrophied brain... It also served as great therapy for an infinite variety of suppressed issues... Best of all, unlike Facebook I and the people I conversed with were anonymous blips on the screen... Nothing is more liberating and conducive to a free exchange of feelings than anonymity...  

Of course the political wars and all the combat politics seeped into and polluted many a conversation.. I have always viewed politics like I do sports in that it's all fun and games not to be taken too seriously...

As the social media political wars have escalated, so has the vitriol and personal attacks on those on the "other side"... At least on Twitter the personal bloodletting is usually between strangers, but in the real world political realm the personal shots between Democrats and Republicans are between representatives who should be working for the common good of the country...

Today the potentially lethal virus infecting the body politic today is this manically irrational obsession with placing politics over country... I believe this malady began to rear it's ugly head during the Clinton administration and has gotten progressively worse with each subsequent administration... The explosion of social media and 24/7 news (and I use that term "social" loosely) outlets has been fuel that feeds the fire daily..

What set off this rant was a post today by a Trump supporter gleefully showing off a chart which indicated that 14 of the top 15 states with the most daily new corona cases were "blue states"...One could almost hear the taunting tone of this gotcha troll sticking it to the libs in true Trumpian fashion

Of course this salvo set off numerous counter taunting posts from enraged Dems posting gleeful charts that the top 10 states with covid hospitalization and deaths were "red states"... Gotcha back fascists...

Fuck those losers who died... We are here to score political points and skewer our enemy.. 

These pointless rumbles rage daily on social media and all across Amercia... Us versus them.. Attack and counterattack... Stick it to the enemy and take no prisoners.. 

Senator Manchin a Democrat from very conservative West Virginia had justifiable(in my opinion) concerns about the high cost of the Build Back Better bundle of proposals and indicated he could not support Biden's bill... This of course unleashed a tsunami of predictable personal attacks and condemnations of the Senator from out of their minds with rage Dems.. How dare he place his personal reservations over loyalty to his tribe...

No one asks or finds it disturbing in any way that every single one of the 50 Republicans were against the bill and 49 of the 50 Democrats were all for it... Only one person from these very diverse groups even considered straying from the rubber stamped party line...

This is the tragic normal these days... Healthy debate is not tolerated... Compromise is a profanity... The party out of power does everything they can to undermine and obstruct the party in power from even a sliver of success which could benefit the country and therefore make it more difficult to unseat them...And the party in power retaliates by shutting out the other side from the decision making process...Round and round the partisan bullshit wheel spins... Us versus them... Nobody wins...

Party before country as our ship slowly sinks and we all drown together...

Thanks for playing...