WTF 2/7/2024

Taylor and Travis and my point of view… 

This is going to be my one and only expressed opinion on the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce relationship and why in general the mostly white American population seems to have lost their media obsessed minds because two successful and wealthy people are having obvious fun being in that relationship… possibly in real unmitigated love that could lead to (gasp) marriage.

The two people involved are the stuff of fairy tales… a world unimaginable to we the common folk… kind of a modern day Marilyn Monroe/Joe DiMaggio love fest reimagined for today’s modernized techno immediate existence, but somehow it doesn’t sync up with what all too many of we the common folk want our idealized couple to be…

At first glance what appears to be a match made in heaven meeting of two wildly successful and popular relatively young people finding some sort of bliss together it would appear to be the idealized couple of what we the common folk of America wants to see in our fantasized world of the rich and famous.

A beautiful blond female who identifies as Christian falling head over heels for a strong and athletic dragon slaying (figurately speaking) good looking, masculine male who in the best capitalist traditions has turned his physical attributes into a multimillion dollar lifestyle in a way that is truly and uniquely very red-blooded, apple pie and mom American. 

Only It’s not.

It isn’t even a Cinderella story or Sleeping Beauty meets Prince Charming story or even a Wendy and Peter Pan fantasy… not at all.   

Its turns out the beautiful damsel in this modern American love story is an exceedingly successful and very rich woman… a billionaire whose riches far exceeds the male involved and who without prompting willingly shares her riches with others… whose wealth and fame is self-made (as much as anyone can be a self-made anything in this world) through her own talent and efforts and who has no intentions or desire to be America’s poster child to be the idealized American sweetheart falling for the idealized red-blooded, All-American guy.

As much as we like to pretend we the people in America have been freed from the shackles of our past male thinking… patriarchal… society for the most part many of we the people in America are not. The truth is all too many of us are still far more closely related to the Archie Bunker way of thinking than the viewpoints of Mike the liberated and sensitive working class hero who understands a woman’s need… demand… to be freed from the dictates of a male dominated society.

Many of we the people are a lot more conservative than are willing to admit than are liberal and in general don’t want the beautiful blonde in the story to be pro-choice, and pro-LGBTQ rights or anything that even hints at being liberated from anything whatsoever that threatens those conservative values. Nor do those folks want Taylor’s self-professed political views… which she claims to be based on real and authentic Christian ideals… to be the model for what their beliefs… their Christianity… should be. Nor should she be out and about encouraging her fans to go out and register to vote and then to actually go to the polls in elections and vote for candidates who align closely with what they believe America should become.

Nor do they the desire the All-American man involved to be a pro-Covid vaccine advocate, in fact a Pfizer spokesman, encouraging Americans to get boosted for both coronavirus and the flu, calling it “the right thing to do.” Nor are they in general overly pleased that Travis is content to drop everything at a moment’s notice and be more than happy to fly his ass down Argentina so that he can be the one in the bleachers, being there for his immensely successful girlfriend.

The reality is that instead of being happy for two people to have found happiness being in the company of each other… maybe actually falling in love… a fair number of we the people are envious to the point of being resentful of their new found notoriety and for what they represent to America… especially a young and voting age America… at large.

Taylor and Travis are a threat to their way of life and who they are.  

And that scares the hell out of them.  

Me?

Not that it matters much to how I live my life at all but I’m hoping they keep on keeping on being happy together and it never fades away.

Now back to the real world and political shit that can, and probably will, affect our lives whether we want it to or not…

Senate border security bill scuttled by House GOP leaders… 

This past Sunday what the Washington Post labeled as a  hard-won, bipartisan Senate deal dropped that contained within it a multitude of items on the Republicans border-policy must do list, including many issues that confirmed sex offender and insurrectionist Donald Trump had demanded from Congress when he was the country’s president.   

Among those items were…

• Beefing up border security as a condition for giving any more aid to Ukraine.
• A tougher and faster asylum-processing system so that those who don’t meet asylum criteria cannot stay and work for years while their cases crawl through the courts.
• Hiring more personnel for Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (1,500 and 1,200, respectively).
• Huge investments in fentanyl detection technologies and other anti-trafficking enforcement.
• Reviving something like Title 42 restrictions, wherein the president can “shut down” most of the asylum system (though this version doesn’t require a public health pretext and has more severe consequences for border-crossers.)

And as it made it way before the House of Representatives with the assumption that the Republican led chamber would after some inevitable debate vote and pass the bill to send to President Biden to sign into law a not so funny but absurd circumstance took place…

The Republican House leadership ruled out letting their chamber vote on any of it.

Speaker Mike Johnson said he had “… seen enough,” and and that the Senate bill was “DEAD on arrival in the House.”

He later added that the Senate bill was “a waste of time.”

There are a number of ways to interpret why the GOP leaders would refuse to let the House vote on the bill or why Speaker Johnson would say what he says regarding the bill but they simply would all be a waste of time to consider when the truth of the matter is that the Republican leadership is just stepping in lockstep to adhere to the wishes of the GOP’s de facto leader in Donald Trump.

Simply put, Trump, the party’s likely presidential nominee, has said, even bragged about it, that he is the reason the bill won’t even see the light of day on the House floor forget about being brought up for a vote. The reasoning being that he has no desire to see anything that has even a tint of the Democrats’ influence being passed that would grant anything that the Republicans, as well as Trump himself, have been demanding for border security for what has now been for years in the asking.

Why?

Because if a bill is passed that does anything to fix the myriad and complex issues surrounding immigration and border security then he loses that issue in his run for the presidency that he alone is the person who can fix those border problems.

Along with the House Republicans bullshit attempt to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for supposedly neglecting to secure the southern border. Which just b very recently failed to pass by a narrow vote when three Republicans voted with the Democrats to refuse to impeach.

All of this is nothing more than politically motivated grandstanding to obfuscate and screw up the political process and refuse to act in a responsible manner to bring together reasonable and sensible debate to forge bipartisan bills that can be passed into laws for the good of the country. The sole purpose of their actions being to try to reelect Trump as the country’s president as well possibly gain control of both Congressional chambers.

Democrat Representative Jamie Raskin said it was a miracle that the Senate had been able to come to an agreement on immigration that was acceptable to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) as well as dozens of GOP senators.

And yet, House Republicans would not consider it.

Simply due to the fact, as Raskin so adroitly phrased it… “Because Donald Trump doesn’t want a border solution. He wants a border problem. (He has) Nothing else to run on.”

Another thousand words…