Sunday, June 21, 2020

Bolton’s book deserves our attention, not our money



If you haven’t already bought former National Security advisor John Bolton’s book that reveals a President caught up in his self-serving actions that jeopardizes our national security - don’t.  Save your money for necessities or at least to help fund Biden’s campaign to oust what’s likely the most incompetent person to head the Executive branch of our government.

Though the details Bolton shares show a president who calculates his every action on enhancing his own re-election outcome or improving his personal wealth, it comes as no surprise to most of us who have watched this Trump train wreck for the last three and half years.  Not because we have some special insight or personal intelligence but simply from viewing and listening to the president’s own distortion of reality via news sources and his own Twitter account.

Bolton doesn’t deserve any financial reward from holding back this pertinent information that could have served the Democrat’s impeachment hearings earlier this year.  He made everyone aware then that he had damning evidence that would have made people of conscience demand Trump’s ouster.  But as we are all aware, such conscience doesn’t exist within the souls Congressional Republicans. 

Though Bolton’s testimony during those hearings might have persuaded two or three more Senate Republicans to do the right thing, we’ll never know because Bolton chose to hold back for a more lucrative outcome with his book’s expose’.

Bolton is part of the Republican microcosm that puts monetary interests above social responsibility and dare I say, patriotism.  He is instead a profiteer of the worst kind because what he hopes to benefit from is something that comes at a cost to the American public and our democratic principles.  He may be a wacko as Trump has referred to him but that makes him dangerous, not necessarily a liar. 

Many of the Trump’s chickens like Bolton have started to come home to roost but none can be considered heroes or patriots for their procrastination.  Their willingness to save their own positions of power and economic opportunities instead of acting in a more timly manner in serving the Constitution portrays them as weak and even cowardly. 

 It the very essence of selfishness when such people choose to withhold that which can benefit society before they attempt to profit from it.

Outside of Mitt Romney's stance with Democrtas to remove Trump, the one glowing exception to this has thus far been Mary Elizabeth Taylor, the “senior State Department official who has served in the Trump administration since its first day [who resigned] over President Donald Trump's recent handling of racial tensions across the county - saying that the president's actions "cut sharply against my core values and convictions." 

It’s conceivable that no number of people exposing Trump’s threat to democracy would have prevented his election or resulted in his dismissal from office following the impeachment trial  Many did in 2016, including some of his current avid supporters like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio.  So did former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and Trump's former Russia expert, Fiona Hill, during the impeachment hearings

But the deniers and misinformed who make up Trump’s base turned a deaf ear then and will do so this November.  Trump won in 2016, not because he had a plurality of voters, but because  this nation still abides by the archaic electoral college system and because many who voted in 2012 for Obama simply didn’t show up at the polls in 2016.

It is the failure of procrastinators like General James Mattis and profiteers like Bolton along with those who ignore their civic duty to vote that helps put scoundrels in office and sustains them with their silence and inaction. 

We can only hope that the current outrage towards the systemic racism in this country and our awareness of this administration’s poor handling of the coronavirus pandemic will drive voters to the polls this November and effect the change in leadership that has been propped up by the Boltons and Trump sycophants over the last few years.