How strange America has become. Cousin Marion in an email from Gascony, France.

The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. A statement made Senate Majority Leader McConnell in an interview in the National Journal on Oct. 23, 2010

I’ve had a problem breathing since last summer’s fires with their resultant smoke and the attempted cures have only made it worse. At first, I thought it was my heart because, with a heart valve from a cow – well, remanufactured parts of a cow’s heart sac, actually – everything, from a stubbed toe on up, is a heart problem. My heart is doing fine – considering – so the last couple of weeks have been taken up with fretting about my lungs but various Xrays and CT scans indicate that they are not the problem. I’ve now had both my shots – yeah that! – and had a much bigger reaction with the first shot so I keep trying to blame my shortness of breath and chills on them but that theory has not been as comforting as I had hoped. Meanwhile, the earth has continued to rotate and life goes on.

Except that, in way more cases than should be, life didn’t go on, it ended early. In Washington, some deranged guy drove into a couple of Capitol Police Officers, killing one. In Orange County, California, another deranged guy killed four people, another one killed ten people – this time by a guy of Arab descent – in Boulder Colorado – and still another by a white Christian guy lamenting that he liked sex which he somehow used to justify the killing of six Asian women in Georgia (the head cop said “He had a bad day.”). As the plague winds down – because of Trump’s early push to get a vaccine and Biden’s heavy lifting in actually getting the vaccine delivered – our national love of violence winds back up.

While I am worried about my health, in 42 different states, 42 different republican legislatures are hard at work trying to make voting harder for Black People. I’m sure that this – these? – will end up in court and make a lot of lawyers richer, but, so far, all that has happened is that Major League Baseball has canceled its All-Star game in Georgia. As the Earth continued to rotate, a huge container ship got stuck and unstuck in the Suez Canel and a Republican Congressmember gets caught in an underage sex scandal.

I’ve been emailed the quote at the top of the page, by Minority Leader McConnell, more times than I want to count, usually to try to scare me into sending somebody, or some organization, money or more money. Because, almost every time, the email sender claims – or infers – it was made a week after President Obama had been elected when the economy was in freefall, and it wasn’t, getting the message has annoyed me more than the message itself. My tendency has been to just delete the email, there is enough misinformation floating around so that I don’t need any more clogging up my email queue. Still, I keep thinking about it. I do want to be clear that that Speaker McConnell made this statement in 2010, almost two years after Obama took office, and while McConnell was in full campaign mode. I also want to acknowledge that Majority Speaker McConnell added that, if President Obama does a Clintonian backflip, if he’s willing to meet us halfway on some of the biggest issues, it’s not inappropriate for us to do business with him. Now, after another email, I want to acknowledge that, in my haste to hit delete, I kinda missed the point.

A couple of nights ago, when I saw the quote again, for the first time, McConnell’s audacity took my breath away. For the first time, I saw it in a completely different light. By McConnell saying that the most important thing is to make President Obama a one-term president, McConnell was implying, at the very least, that Obama failing was his main goal. Clearly, having the president fail is not a good thing for the country, but, for McConnell, according to McConnell himself, President Obama failing was a goal higher than the country succeeding.

I knew this, or I thought I knew this but it never hit me like this before. I always thought – believed may be a better word – that the Republicans voted fiscally conservatively because they thought it was better for their wealthy donors. But that’s not true, the opposite is true. The Republicans spent like drunken sailors when both Bush the Younger and Donald Trump were President. Republicans vote against things like a minimum wage because it is a Democratic idea and they know it is good for the country, if they really thought it was bad for the country, paradoxily, they would have voted for it to hurt the Democrats.

Even though that was way back in 2010, when Barrak Obama was President, and this is 2021 with Joe Biden as President, nothing has changed on the Republican side. Despite the country’s financial health being even more precarious because of Covid-19, the Republicans still don’t want the country to succeed under a Democratic Administration. If President Biden, and the Democrats not succeeding hurts the country, the Republicans seem to be willing to have the country pay that price. It’s not that the Republicans are against helping the country per see – I think – they are just against helping the country if it helps Joe Biden. When the pandemic hit the country, in March of 2020 Donald Trump was President, and Republicans voted, en masse, for the March 2020 Trump Stimulus Bill of Two trillion dollars. At that time, there were 1,382 deaths, nationwide, it was obvious that the economy was close to tanking, and the Republicans – along with all the Democrats – passed a huge relief bill by voice vote because they knew it was a political plus for President Trump who said, at the time, “I signed the single biggest economic relief package in American history. This will deliver urgently needed relief to our nation’s families, workers and businesses, and that’s what this is all about.”

 It turns out that “urgently needed relief to our nation’s families, workers and businesses” is not what “this is all about,” this time around. This time around, not one Republican voted for a slightly smaller bill even though the need is still there. Not one. Not one Republican said – or even thought, I guess – “I voted for a relief bill in the Spring because it was needed to counteract the economy tanking and the need is still there so I’ll vote for another one.” Every Republican said, in effect, “I won’t vote for this bill because it will help ‘families, workers and businesses’ and that will help the Democrats.”

That was an attitude that I didn’t want to acknowledge and just thinking about it makes me sad.