Every year I play in an online pool to predict the outcome of the NCAA basketball tournament, aka March Madness. It’s made up of longtime friends who are scattered all over the country and who communicate for the most part via social media. It’s become a rite of spring for a lot of us, with good-natured smack talk being the main attraction.
We use a CBS Sports platform, and for some of us the hardest part is remembering our password every 12 months. Well, that and trying to guess who’s going to take that pivotal first-round game between, say, Siena and Northeast Idaho. And for me, there’s also the dilemma of predicting how far the Memphis Tigers will go — a delicate balancing act that pits my hometown rooting interest against years of painful experience. A Penny (Hardaway) for my thoughts.
The tournament is a particularly timely distraction this year. That’s because the daily news is just delivering one plop-load of angst after another. I went online Sunday morning and read the following headlines: “Arlington Cemetery Website Scrubs Links About Black and Female Veterans”; “Trump’s FCC Chief Orders Investigation into NPR and PBS Sponsorships”; “Trump Signs Order to Gut Staff at Voice of America and Other U.S.-funded Media Organizations”; “Trump’s NIH Cuts Threaten Scientific and Medical Research at U.S. Universities.”
So yeah, just let me ponder that crucial West Bracket matchup between Maryland and Grand Canyon for a while. Maryland’s pretty good, but Grand Canyon is deep, heh, and it’s tough to beat a national park. Or it used to be until they got defunded. Sorry, I’m just trying not to go crazy thinking about the frightening idiocracy that’s now dismantling our government piece by piece.
This administration’s credo appears to be “Knowledge Is the Enemy of the People.” Or maybe it’s “They Can’t Handle the Truth.” In many areas of the world, Voice of America is the only news that isn’t controlled by autocratic governments. NPR and PBS news services have long been considered the gold standard for fact-based, in-depth reporting. The U.S. government shouldn’t be in the business of suppressing its own media. The First Amendment still means something. Or at least, it did until a month ago, when this administration decided that it would begin hand-selecting the reporters allowed in the press pool to ask questions of the president.
If knowledge is power, then power is being taken away from us at an alarming pace. And, let’s be blunt, we’re all being put in danger by the reductions in funding and personnel at agencies that provide air traffic control, weather prognostication and warnings, and medical and scientific research. Not to mention the emotional stress being imposed on millions of Americans who depend on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and their 401(k) funds.
It’s important to understand that all of these decisions are being made by executive orders that are mostly being carried out by an unsupervised, unrestrained, and unelected creep with billions of dollars in conflicts of interest between his own businesses and federal subsidies. It’s unconstitutional, and none of it is being opposed by Congress, which is constitutionally designated to restrain the excesses of the executive branch.
It goes without saying that the Republicans in Washington are all in the tank for Trump, but the fact that the Democrats are so numbingly compliant is really troubling. They appear to be as vested in accommodating this autocratic insanity as the Vichy French collaborators were in World War II. It makes you wonder just how much kompromat Putin has. Is everyone in Washington compromised except Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Liz Cheney? Where is the damn anger?
I’m no James Carville, but I play one in this column and I have a message for the Democratic Party: Get your shit together. My suggestion would be to set up a daily evening press conference in which a rotating cast of the party’s stalwarts (not Schumer, Jeffries, or Pelosi) addresses the news of the day, takes on the latest lunacy enacted by the White House, explains the real-life consequences of it for everyday Americans, and yes, expresses the outrage that millions of us are feeling right now. It’s time for the opposing party to get in the game — and take some shots.