A house divided
“Ahouse divided against itself cannot stand.” Abraham Lincoln famously said this in an 1858 debate when discussing the division between North and South regarding slavery. One hundred and sixty years later, Lincoln’s statement is uncomfortably apt.
Unless you’ve recently emerged from a coma, you know that Donald Trump has spent a good deal of his precious presidential time attacking the Department of Justice. On March 16, he had FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe fired two days before McCabe would have been able to retire — thus jeopardizing McCabe’s ability to collect his pension.
McCabe — a lifetime FBI employee — spent half of his career investigating Russian street crime in New York City. Ironically, this experience no doubt made him an ideal choice for investigating possible Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.
Republican lawmakers have been noticeably silent on McCabe’s sudden firing. It’s astonishing and disappointing how they have backed off setting right a host of pressing issues such as gun safety, sexual harassment, immigration, etc. The party that once prided itself on being the party of family values now stands by and watches as Americans’ rights and personal safety are being violated.
One bright spot is that last month, Pennsylvania Democrat Conor Lamb was voted into Congress in a special election. He beat a Republican in the race to replace Tim Murphy, a vocal opponent of abortion, who resigned after it was discovered that he had had an extramarital affair and urged his mistress to terminate her pregnancy. Trump won this district by a 20 percent margin in 2016. Perhaps voters in more districts like this one will get rid of the more corrupt and hypocritical leaders in power.
I certainly hope this is the case. As it stands, I am sickened by the daily turmoil at the highest levels of our government and within our country at large. Where is common sense? How can we bring our government together to solve the overwhelming problems we face (i.e., gun violence, global climate change, sexual harassment, immigration, racial inequality, etc.)? I don’t see that happening with our current leadership, which is attacking its own arms of government. These people must be replaced — the sooner the better. Perhaps then we could truly “drain the swamp.”