THINGS THAT ARE BOTHERING MEBy: Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, April 7, 2021 I’m bothered by a lot that is going on in America today. Here are some of them. We are to believe there was no such thing as voter fraud anywhere during the 2020 election. Now fixing the actual voter fraud problem is considered racist. Three days after the 2020 election Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a prominent Democrat Party spokesperson, called for a blacklist, entitled The Trump Accountability Project, with the objective of archiving the names of individuals who “elected, served, funded, supported, and represented President Trump.” Where was the national outcry against this? H.R.1391 – American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, aka Covid Rescue Plan. It bothers me that only 9% of the $1.9 trillion was related to actual covid relief. President Biden was selling infrastructure legislation to improve roads and bridges. But only 5% of the $2 trillion, misnamed, “American Jobs Plan” is actually for roads and bridges. It is a reasonable public policy objective to expand medical care for the elderly and disabled, but it bothers me that $400 billion for that is called infrastructure. I’m bothered that U.S. debt has now passed the value of our GDP and no Democrats seem concerned. We are printing money at a rate never envisioned. When does inflation kick in and how hard will the blow be? Most Americans cannot remember how debilitating for everyone the President Carter economy was with 14.8% inflation and interest rates at 18%. By Executive Order, President Biden has authorized US taxpayers to pay for abortions overseas, while consistent polling shows that 77% of Americans are opposed to it. We have a generation of Americans who know almost nothing of our nation’s history. But it is getting worse. Now they are learning revisionist history about what horrible people Americans have always been and are today. Workers’ rights are being demolished. The House passed the miss-named bill, “Protecting the Right to Organize Act”. Wall Street Journal said, the bill “brazenly opposes workers choices.” It would effectively repeal right-to-work laws on the books in most states which allow employees to decline union membership. The Iran-backed terrorist group Houthis took control of Yemen in 2014. With U.S. assistance, Saudi Arabia has led a coalition of nine nations against the terrorist network in Yemen. Without the Saudi effort, it is quite possible that the Houthis would have successfully transformed Yemen into a terrorist operational and training safe haven with deadly consequences for the United States and the international community. In another knee-jerk I’ll-show-you-Trump action, President Biden is removing the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists from the Global Terrorist list. To add insult to injury, Biden has put a hold on Trump-negotiated arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates worth billions of dollars. Under the guise of the $1.9 trillion Covid relief package, Biden included hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out financially mis-managed democrat-led cities and states without demanding those governors and mayors take the steps necessary to become fiscally responsible. It bothers me that the alleged offenses against Hillary Clinton, the FBI Director, intelligence leaders, et al have been swept under the rug; perhaps the most egregious actions by trusted government officials against an existing administration in the history of this nation. Pelosi’s House passed H.R. 1 which is the most sweeping change in our election laws in history. It federalizes and micromanages the election process administered by the states, imposing unconstitutional mandates and reverses decentralization of the election process. States and cities are defunding police while crime rates are rising at alarming rates. Whenever there is a “mass shooting” the Democrat leadership ramps up their arguments for massive gun control. But where is the debate about mental health screening in the US? Reality is that if you suffer from a mental illness, as most mass-shooters do, you may find a confusing and often contradictory system of doctors, clinics, institutions, home care, and drug regimens that is hardly a system at all. Biden will follow the lead of Presidents Carter, Clinton and Obama who all gutted our military forces reducing combat readiness to dangerously low levels. It’s easy to cut but it is a long hard road to get readiness back to acceptable levels when we need it. Our allies and enemies alike, carefully watch our combat readiness and act/react accordingly. Nothing deters enemy intent to do harm more than fully combat-ready U.S. forces. FBI Director Wray has testified before Congress saying, “Antifa is a real thing.” He went on to say, “We have any number of properly predicated investigations into what we would describe as violent anarchist extremists and some of those individuals self-identify with Antifa.” Contradicting that, our head-in the-sand leader calls Antifa, “an idea.”
The Biden corporate tax rate increase from 21 to 28% is what the Wall Street Journal calls “political fakery”;implying it is a tax against CEOs and rich share-holders. WSJ goes on to say, “Everyone knows corporations don’t really pay taxes, they are ultimately paid by some combination of customers in higher prices, workers in lower wages and shareholders in lower returns on investment. In other words, Biden’s corporate tax increases will hit he middle class hard in the value of their 401k, the size of their pay packets and what they pay for goods and services.” What make the corporate tax hike more onerous is that most large economies in the world are in the process of lowering their corporate tax rates thereby making it even more difficult for US corporation to compete price-wise in a global market thereby forcing more US manufacturing overseas.
I’m bothered that the minimum $15 wage will probably become the law of the land, negatively impacting small businesses and putting another 1.5 million out of work. Cost of living varies significantly from state to state. This is more big-government one-size-fits-all democrat thinking. The Black Lives Matter anti-police underpinnings are explained by totally false data with respect to police killing Black Americans. It is OK to have an abortion in the final tri-mister of a pregnancy (aka premeditated murder) conducted by taxpayer-funded Planned Parenthood. Open borders bother me a lot. What is happening on our Mexican border is inhumane, out of control, getting worse every day, expensive, expanding the covid pandemic, filled with undesirables, increasing drug tracking to new levels with no end in sight and it was all predictable with an instant return to the Obama/Biden catch-and-release policy. The Biden solution seems to be, find more beds rather than to stop incentivizing the illegals to come. North Korea has ramped up its weapons and missile testing. September, 2017, the NK foreign minister, speaking before the UN said a North Korean nuclear strike against a US city is “inevitable.” President Trump promptly set up the first one-on-one meeting with Kim Jong-un. I suspect at that meeting President Trump would have casually showed Kim a clear 8×10 close-up color photo on Kim riding his big white horse at his vacation retreat. And Mr. Trump would have said something like this, Kim, we know where you are and how to reach out to you 24/7, now let’s chat about all this testing and your plan to nuc one of my cities. Predictably, since the election, Kim has renewed a full-court-press on testing. Asked if President Biden would sit down with Mr. Kim, a White House spokesperson said, “that is not his intention.” I’m bothered a lot that Biden will abandon the most successful Middle East developments in decades; that is, after 70 years Middle East nations, led by Saud Arabia, have concluded that Israel is not their enemy. They now realize their real and imminent danger is Iran and its intent for Middle East dominance and control. Biden tells us he spent his first few days in office reaching out to our allies and other world leaders like Putin and Xi Jinping. But it took 30 days for him to call Netanyahu. The signal is clear, the US/Israeli relations will return to the Obama/Biden/Clinton/Kerry cold-shoulder policy. The Biden cabal will completely ignore these underlying economic facts: Prior to the Covid outbreak, there were 750,000 more jobs to fill than there were unemployed, and the lowest 20% of income earners were gaining income in percentage terms more quickly than the top ten percent. The United States became the first serious jurisdiction in the world that had begun to address the almost universal problem of income disparity. Obama/Biden “wealth redistribution” is and will always be an economic disaster. Six corporations control 90% of the media in America and we wonder why 93% of all reporting on the Trump administration was negative. While Biden and all democrat leaders continue preaching falsely that the Trump tax cuts only benefited the wealthy; the fact is they reduced the taxes of every American corporation and the taxes of 83% of individual American taxpayers. I’m bothered that Major league sports have gone political. We “graduate” thousands of functionally illiterate high school seniors every year and 7,000 youngsters drop out of school every day. And the democrats believe we can solve the problem by throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at it. We don’t do enough to solve the homeless problem. On a highly advertised and rare appearance by the President to explain his $2 trillion infrastructure plan, he launched into a tirade over the Georgia Legislature’s voting rights law. Not only did he totally misrepresent every facet of the new law, he then emphatically played the race card. He and his writers had obviously not read the law or just decided we are too stupid to not understand what a mess the president made of the whole subject. We could fill this page with a list of circumstances that require US citizens to show a personal ID. Voter ID is absolutely necessary to protect the sanctity of the right to cast a legal vote. Democrat arguments against Voter ID are without factual underpinnings and essentially play a false race card. A recent Gallop poll found that 80% of Americans believe voter ID is necessary. If a voter ID system would include a personal voter ID number (similar to a SSN) then every know voter fraud system could be defeated. The word “sanctuary” bothers me a lot. The Democrats, by action rather than words, have evolved a new definition. “Sanctuary cities” today are Democrat led, soft on crime, anti-ICE, degraded police force, pro-criminal prosecutors, deportation-blocking, low-to-no bail policies, out of control homelessness, drug infestedand fiscally incompetent. But if you are a drug-dealing, machete-wielding, homeless, MS13, illegal alien, this is your home sweet home. And some governors want to declare a sanctuary state. Democrat mayors have been running many of our largest cities for decades. Some stats from Robert Charles, Association of Mature American Citizens.
The top-ten American cities for homelessness are sanctuary cities. In this group are Los Angeles (55,000 homeless), Seattle (12,000), San Diego (9,000), San Jose (7,000), San Francisco (6,000), and Las Vegas (6,000).
Of the top-ten “most dangerous cities” in America all have Democratic mayors. Those cities are Detroit, St. Louis, Oakland, Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta, Baltimore, Stockton, Cleveland and Buffalo. These cities that are too deep in poverty, have a weak tax base and lack sufficient infrastructure to attract corporate investment. They lead the nation in murder, manslaughter, robbery and aggravated assault.
For the mayors to fix this is, of course, difficult but it’s not rocket science. First, stop, just stop what the hell you have been doing for years or even decades and do things like: lower taxes, less regulation, incentives for business investment, stronger law enforcement, cooperation with federal immigration officials, comprehensive anti-drug policies and attack gang violence. These actions are right out of the Trump playbook which means these mayors will likely continue with a failed system. Or why not take Trump’s ten-point plan, The New Deal for Black America With A Plan for Urban Renewal, and just use it?
The $2 trillion infrastructure bill, “The American Jobs Act”, contains hundreds of billions for “green” projects. Have we forgotten that in the 2009 Obama/Biden stimulus bill, only 15 jobs were created for every $1 million spent on green jobs? I have been bothered for a long time about Democrat economics. The Obama/Biden economy formula was TAX AND SPEND, which in modern day economics has never successfully brought any nation quickly out of a recession or caused the GDP to grow at an acceptable rate. That formula has now morphed into SPEND AND TAX and they believe it will work better? Obama/Biden economists believed cutting taxes would blow a hole in the deficit. Just the opposite is true. The Trump tax cuts caused the overall economy to grow, taxpayers and corporations made more money and as a result federal revenue hit all-time highs. Tax increases must occasionally occur, but there has never been a tax increase in American history that did not have a negative effect on the economy. Is it right that people who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took out huge loans for their degrees of real or questionable value? Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars is being earmarked in non-related bills in Congress to pay off democrat-controlled city and state debt without demanding they fix the processes that got them over their heads in debt in the first place. Consider the fact that private schools have remained open covid-free while government schools closed doing possibly irreparable damage to millions of youngsters. I am obsessively bothered that education in the United States is an unmitigated disaster. School closures during the pandemic have revealed teachers’ unions for what there are; that is, a greater part of the problem than the solution. The “demands” issued by the teacher’s unions as a condition of reopening schools tell us all we need to know about their priorities. Their demands included Medicare for all, institute an national wealth tax and a millionaire tax, defund police, housing security, paid sick leave for parents of school children, charter school moratorium and financial support for undocumented students and families. The left wing keeps telling us that “free health care is free” and they believe we are dumb enough to believe it. Earmarking in Congress was costing us millions of dollars in pork, then billions and now trillions (see covid relief and infrastructure bills). Earmarks are legislation that cannot stand scrutiny of the normal legislative process; that is, expert witness testimony during committee hearings. It bothers me a lot that our president will never be capable of holding an extemporaneous news conference. The fact that VP Harris, as the new border crisis czar, has failed to visit the border for a first-hand understanding of the problems, speaks volumes about her approach to dealing with a crisis, her leadership skills in general and her overall qualifications to be VP/president. National legalized marijuana is coming; which means it will too-easily be available to youngsters resulting in reduced mental development. Follow the science. The Keystone pipeline, when completed could have transported 800,000 barrels of oil a day with no carbon footprint. Now that oil will be carried by a combination of 500 rail tankers and 950 tanker trucks all belching carbon pollutants. We are to believe that is a “green” solution to anything? The Biden knee-jerk reduction in public land and off-shore drilling will lead us back into dependence on foreign oil, carrying with it unimaginable negative geo-political ramifications. It bothers me that I no longer hear the National Anthem played at sporting events. This summer could be more violent than last if the Floyd trial verdict does not suit BLM and Antifa. Last summer’s “mostly peaceful” burning/looting/murder were for the most part acceptable to Biden/Harris. In an interview Harris said about the riots, “This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before election day and they’re not going to stop after election day. And everyone should take a note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not”It bothers me a lot that the Democrat leadership believes it is OK to be crude, ugly, distasteful, disrespectful and downright ignorant to openly and publicly call someone or some group racists simply because they disagree with their thinking, policies, conclusions, or theories. Part of the new liberal mantra is that equity is synonymous with equality. In some states gas has gone up over $1 a gallon since the election and there is no end in sight; an unintended consequential “tax” on every business and family in America. Pelosi’s House also passed an anti-police bill that will deny “qualified immunity” to police men and women thereby placing them in jeopardy of civil liability for doing their jobs. It will be nearly impossible to recruit a quality force. I am especially bothered that the Democrat leadership continues to preach the existence of systemic racism across the nation. Their accusations are unfounded. Background: Segregation is systemic racism. To understand segregation, we need to understand how it came about. The commander of Union forces in the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant was a champion of African Americans throughout the war. President Lincoln advocated for abolition of slavery and signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st, 1863. During the final days of the Civil War, in 1865, Grant and Lincoln met frequently to discuss what “freedom” should mean for those enslaved. Their plan included the right to own property, to vote, hold office and have access to all schools, public transportation and commercial activities. Five days after Lee surrendered to Grant, President Lincoln was assassinated. The Lincoln/Grant vision for the freed slaves died with the President. During the post-war period, President Andrew Johnson, sided with the former Confederate states’ Democrats to restrict equality for freed slaves. This, and other factors, led to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, threatening the lives and livelihood of all freed slaves. One of the darkest periods in American history, the Ku Klux Klan functioned as a loosely organized group of political and social terrorists. The Klan’s goals included the political defeat of the Republican Party and the maintenance of absolute white supremacy over Black Americans. That is systemic racism. For 100 years following the Civil War segregation was a principle pillar of the Democratic party platform; segregation was pure, unadulterated, unambiguous, in-your-face systemic racism. During presidential elections in the 1960s, Democratic candidate Governor George Wallace is best remembered for his segregationist views, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made segregation illegal in all states and over the last 50 years there has been systemic progress against systemic racism. I believe we can credit Hillary Clinton for the current Democrat practice of branding large groups of Americans as racist. On September 9th, 2016 during a presidential campaign speech, Hillary stood behind a tele-prompter and read these prepared remarks, “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” In two short sentences she defamed tens of millions of Americans. The lasting impact of that insane Clinton speech was to make it OK to throw around the word “racist” with complete disregard for facts to the contrary. For example, if you supported President Trump’s policies, you are a racist. But that was not enough. Now we are being additionally lumped together as white supremacists. Outside the racist rhetoric from the Democrat leadership and their main-stream media lackies, you can hear Black American leaders from all over this country articulating the absurdity of group-racism and systemic racism. Conclusions: All of the above collectively tell a story. The rational, respected, patriotic Democrat Party we have known for decades no longer exists. The radical left thinking outlined above will not be reported on objectively by the main-stream-media. There was an era when journalists believed they could dramatically improve the world by exposing evil and corruption through the craft of writing. That profession is dead and gone, today’s Democrats are protected from evil and corruption. To my Democrat friends who voted against Republican candidates in the 2020 election, what you are getting is big government, centralized power, centralized control, identity group segregation to divide and conquer,wealth transfer leading to an intrenched welfare state with a disincentivized work force. Non-merit-based hierarchy will become the norm in business, education and government. President Trump, love him, hate him or anywhere in between, in retrospect, every policy he set forth had one overarching intent, is this what is best for the American people. By contrast, every decision, declaration, executive order, in President Biden’s first couple months, has been a low blow to We the Prople.. And by the way, the president’s impassioned 20 January pledge to us all to unify the nation, went from number one on Biden’s hit parade to nonexistent. Whatever you thought you were voting for in the 2020 elections, my “botherings” above is what you are getting. You need to give your party a new name, whatever is appropriate, but don’t call it the Democrat Party, that party is dead and gone. If you are having trouble, here is a suggestion, call it The New Regressive Party, not of the people, not by the people nor for the people, so help me God. Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, a columnist for THE PILOT, a national award-winning local newspaper in Southern Pines, NC and the author of a blog, WeThePeopleSpeaking.com.
RIP MCINTOSH
tonym7410:28 PM (2 minutes ago).png)
ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
You must be logged in to post a comment.