Thoughts On The Last Day Of May, 2019

So much news flashing in my eyes
 - Randy Rainbow

      Yes, to quote the modern-day musical Jeremiah Randy Rainbow, who cries out - or rather sings out - like a voice in the wilderness, there is so much news flashing in one's eyes and zipping along the conduits to one's brain that sometimes one wishes there was such a thing as an SPF to prevent brain burn.
        But there's not, and so the only thing we can do is either block it all out and be happy as mushrooms growing in the dark, or take it all in and try to sort through,  make some sense of, and decide what we think about things.
        To that end, here are a few of my brain stormings  - by that I mean the storms going on in my brain - over a few of the big news events that have been flashing in all our eyes:

   1.  The Mueller Reports

   “If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

     The above was Special Counsel Robert Mueller's synopsis which he gave in a brief public statement this past Wednesday of his team's investigation into whether Donald Trump committed a crime contiguous to Russia's interference in our 2016 elections.
​         Robert Mueller is like Pythia, known as the Oracle of Delphi, who was the highest of priestesses in the ancient Greek world, purported to be filled with the spirit and wisdom of the gods in her dispensing of judgement and prophecy.

    The only problem was that in general the Oracle's words were so enigmatic that nobody was one hundred percent sure what the she really meant, and so her statements could be interpreted however one wished to interpret them.
            Like Robert Mueller's statement the other day.

    In fact, the whole Mueller Report is like the Bible, from which people can pick, choose, and interpret however they want to prove their own beliefs, whatever those beliefs might be. People claim as truth whatever they want to claim as truth and state that it's in the Bible. Or the Mueller Report.  Even if they've never read the Bible. Or the Mueller Report.

   2. On Impeaching Donald Trump

    Impeach:  To charge someone with doing something wrong, specifically a high government official, such as the U.S. president, a senator, or a federal judge. Fortunately, very few presidents have had the dishonor of being impeached. Impeach comes from the Latin impedicare, meaning "catch, entangle." 
- Vocabulary.com.
       The House Democrats keep on talking about impeaching Donald Trump.
       Now, it is the job and duty of the United States House of Representatives to oversee the actions of the President, thereby upholding our Constitution and protecting our democracy and the well-being of our country.
         So if Donald Trump, aka the President of the United States, has committed wrongdoing that calls for impeachment, the House must uphold its responsibility and bring formal charges against him for specific acts and lay these acts and charges out plainly and clearly to the public.
            If Donald Trump has committed an impeachable act or acts the members of the House should not sit back and wait to determine whether or not  impeachment will score political points for their party,or worry that Mitch McConnell and  his Senate Republicans will circle the wagons around Trump and kill the impeachment proceedings,

    If McConnell and his minions did that the wrongdoing would be on them. But the fact that they just might do it is no reason for the members of the House not to do their duty and the right thing, which would be to write up articles of impeachment against Donald Trump.
       If  his actions honestly justify impeachment.
       If, on the other hand, he has not committed offenses that unequivocally call for impeachment, then the Democrats should stop talking about impeachment and quit running the idea up the flagpole to see who salutes.

...and quit running the idea up the flagpole to see who salutes.

​     In other words, either impeach or get off the soapbox.

    3. The Abortion Bans
     In the past few months one conservative state after another has passed laws criminalizing abortion. These bans have ignited debate and dissension between pro-life and pro-choice groups, but I feel like there's a huge  and critical point of agreement  that's being totally ignored in  the discussion and it's this: that in truth everybody is pro-life. Nobody is really pro-aborting a baby, and though we talk about women's bodies and women's right to choose, no woman who believed she had any other choice would choose an abortion. The problem is that sometimes women really don't have any other choice.
      And I think that if the mission of right-to-life groups in this country were really to end abortion they'd lobby for affordable health care, especially prenatal and maternal health care, as well as for other social safety nets to make sure that no woman or family ever has to fear for how they'll care for, feed, clothe, and educate a child.  Because that fear is a factor that drives women to abortion.
      If the mission of pro-life groups were really to end abortion they'd lobby for sex education and free contraception - why not make it free, if that would be a way of preventing abortions?
     And if all babies are precious and have a right to be born, why would pro-life groups not work to make ours a society which truly does welcome and celebrate and care about every child born, totally judgement-free of the circumstances of the mother?
      And why would they not work to ease the circumstances of every expectant mother in our society, whatever those circumstances might be, so that no pregnant woman would ever fear moral censure or find herself so alone and in such desperate straits that she would have to consider an abortion?
     Why do right-to-life groups not lobby for women's civil and economic rights and hold men as the equally responsible parties that they are in every pregnancy?
      If saving the lives of the unborn is really the mission, why not address the underlying problems that cause women to have abortions?
        Because in truth simply making abortion illegal isn't the answer.      

References:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/william-barr-robert-mueller-donald-trump-obstruction-of-justice-russia-investigation