Now that Donald Trump is gone and almost forgotten, and the ‘fake news’ media has nothing better to do, they have started bloviating about the alleged ‘civil war’ going on in the ranks of the GOP. They tried this one for months both before and after Joe got the Democratic nomination and there was this so-called ‘split’ between the ‘progressive’ and ‘mainstream’ Democratic Party wings.
It’s the GOP’s turn to be the subject of the same nonsense by the fake news.
In particular, there seems to be an idea floating around that the MAGA will become a third party and will drain electoral strength away from the GOP. This version of unreality gets some traction because none of the pundits who are considered to be experts on politics know anything about what political parties and what they do.
Ask the average person to define a political party and he’ll tell you that it’s basically a line on the ballot which contains the names of the candidates who support that party’s ideas. In other words, political parties are believed to exist simply as an electoral mechanism and nothing else.
In fact, what political parties really do is organize and manage the public services which creates a life style which we not only take for granted, but which we couldn’t do without. Know what’s the biggest, single employment category in California? School bus driver. God forbid the little darlings would have to walk to school.
Know who plows streets which are then clear enough so that you an get to work? Know who cleans up the town park after a weekend when everyone does a bar-b-que and leaves litter all over the place? Know who shows up to pick up all the crap that’s left in the street after those NASCAR tailgate parties outside the track?
These jobs are all given out by whichever political party controls a particular city, a county, or a state. Think you pay high taxes now? Know what your tax burden would be if you also were paying for all this work to get done?
I was Public Information Officer of the New York State Assembly from 1981 to 1983, reporting to the Speaker of the Assembly who was a Democrat because the Dems had a two-to-one majority in the Assembly back then. The only way they would have lost the majority would have been if half the Democratic caucus had gotten arrested, convicted, and thrown in jail. In which case, I would have been out of a job.
I was responsible for communicating with every organization and business which had an interest in any bill that might or might not get debated in the Assembly that year. So, for example, the State regularly revised the laws covering insurance, which meant that I had to alert every insurance company in New York whenever there might be a change.
I wasn’t a civil service employee because the State Constitution had no mention of a Public Information Officer. But what I did was important to the functioning of state government, so I was paid from money in what was known as the ‘Confidential-Personal’ payroll controlled by the Speaker and the other members of the majority leadership.
Where did the money come from to fund this payroll? It came from ‘contributions’ sent to Albany by Democratic county organizations throughout the state. How did these organizations get their hands on that dough? Someone went around to every business in that particular county and said okay, time to ante up.
This is the same money which pays all those school-bus drivers, all those school crossing guards, all those guys who clean up the parks, all the people who do all the jobs that we all want to have done.
I’d like to see the MAGA Party or take charge of plowing the streets around my house. Better yet, I’d like to see one ‘fake news’ pundit actually even acknowledge the role and importance of the two major parties’ in this respect.
Yea – right.