Dear Fellow Republicans, Trump Supporters, And Patriots On Both Sides,

I'm a fairly loyal Republican, but if the president's assertion, "Mission accomplished," means that nothing was accomplished except to make Russia and Iran angrier and maybe set the next chemical weapons attack back, say... a few weeks, then sadly, I agree. Mission accomplished... I get why the attack wasn't more comprehensive and didn't hit specifically Russian or Iranian targets in the region (assuming there are any worth hitting), and if nothing else, Syria is of interest to the U.S. because it borders Israel, our most reliable Middle Eastern ally. However, Israel is no pushover and, as we've actually seen recently, is pretty capable of defending itself as it has more or less been fending off its more aggressive Muslim neighbors for decades - both with and without help. Furthermore, based on what I and most of us armchair pundits THINK we know, nothing is likely to change for the better in Syria or with Russian and Iranian relations short of a total Syrian regime change, which Obama officially helped make all but impossible short of Assad's death and which we probably can't seriously initiate now without blatantly breaking international law (and our own, probably), risking yet another violent and - this time - more globally consequential war.

Of even greater concern is this action's potential effects on our situation with North Korea, with whose own murderous dictator I think Trump too quickly agreed to meet next month. Shortly after that acceptance, Kim Jong Un made an unexpected trip (and very rare for Kim) to China to meet with its General Secretary and President Xi Jinping, whose limited cooperation in putting pressure on North Korea over its nuclear weapons program was then arguably put into jeopardy by Trump's ill timed and uneven application of trade tariffs. China, by the way, is not only a neighbor bordering Russia (and a pretty powerful one, too), but one that is known to vote with and/or in solidarity with Russia. While Russia's military might may be a little exaggerated, as I've heard some say, a military partnership with China would be greatly significant and not unexpected if keeps acting so provocatively without a solid, long term plan. Given his direct involvement in its planning and care taken to limit or avoid collateral damage and civilian casualties, I even find it difficult to believe that a man of General Mattis' experience and reputation would've even agreed to do this if SOME kind of response wasn't warranted and if he thought he could get Trump to wait or consider an alternative. Like all the others, I'd bet good money, if I had it, that the year won't be much more than half over before we hear something like this along with rumors that Mattis plans to leave... just like all the rest.

A few minutes ago, I watched a report on Barbara Bush, who appears to be dying even though that wasn't specifically said, and it reminded me of the raw deal that Former President George H.W. Bush got in 1992 for cooperating with the U.N. and, in that case, wisely choosing not to try to forcibly remove Saddam Hussein - later done by his son and, in hindsight, at great long term cost, which too few of us predicted at the time... myself included. Many say that Trump's election and policies are a threat to our democracy, but I disagree. If anything, it's a symptom of the REAL threat, which I think started growing slowly after Vietnam and matured suddenly as of 9/11. That threat is US - the voters - and the stance most of us have taken on both sides of the aisle from which we are demanding purer and purer versions of our parties' general policies and refusing to accept imperfect, yet comparably solid solutions to problems and issues simply because they may come from the other side. The Affordable Care Act is a mistake that was all but totally unsustainable unless the Democrats stayed in charge of at least one branch of government after Obama and could influence more states with regards to their Medicare and Medicaid programs. Neither side wanted it except as a potential political tool that Republicans could fight with and Democrats could use as leverage and credibility if it failed to finally force through socialized medicine as the only option left. However, it was based on an idea by the conservative Heritage Foundation and probably not the total disaster it was described as on the campaign trails. It could have easily and more successfully been fixed or modified... even with minimal Democrat participation and approval... but that's not what our party promised voters, and so, in the end, its "repeal and replace" wound up being a massive embarrassment. All that was accomplished was the repeal of the mandate forcing people to buy insurance or pay a "tax" that would, unless I'm too much mistaken, conceivably go towards some of the government subsidies of still private insurers on the exchange. Now, if too much of the ACA stays in place without suitable funding, the situation could actually get worse without.

It may seem like I'm inadvertently slamming political competition and therefore contradicting myself, but when competitions such as our elections really depend as much or more on how many vote in what places as on the way those people vote, the integrity of that competition is in trouble. Just as Democrats probably did when pushing the ACA through unilaterally, too few of us on the right thought about those potential consequences. Instead of putting more thought into them and taking some responsibility for the potential impacts of our goals and how we try to accomplish them, we ALL are way too beholden to our parties and increasingly simplistic and inflexible ideologies. If (on both sides) we're not instinctively making too many broad demands of and blaming government for failing to give us what we want while we're lazily "waiting on the world to change," we're taking more and more of our frustrations out on our parties' more knowledgeable and experienced incumbents and replacing them with dogmatic and BLINDLY patriotic morons who probably can't even spell the word compromise, let alone fathom why - without it - our democracy is USELESS.  But as often as Democrats and Republicans, alike, claim to love America and superficially strengthen their arguments by trying to claim that the other side's agenda immediately puts democracy, itself, at stake, we voters are hacking away at it faster than anyone else could with our own extremism. We may as well choose which side we want our new benign American dictatorship to come from now because, judging by the behavior and rhetoric I too often see from others and have occasionally been guilty of, myself, all we ever do is vote the same way for the same things, over and over. Instead of acknowledge all the changes around us and look for ways to adapt, we look for people to blame for that change while looking for others we think can put things back the way they were.

Politics is like history. It's cyclical, so something like this has happened before. Unlike something like the formation of the Bull Moose Party, for example, I think it's been a longer time coming, the specifics are different, it seems to be succeeding, and with social media comes what seems like its never-ending perpetuation because absolutely NOBODY can truly be silenced or denied a larger-than-ever bullhorn. The reason Trump is a consequence of this is that, like the popularity of Bernie Sanders, in some ways (some of whose Midwestern supporters voted for Trump), his election represents the fact that having felt let down by our own parties, we're just doubling down and turning to more extreme candidates offering more extreme and less nuanced versions of the same general "solutions" we expect our parties to offer and implement in reaction to each and every issue. It didn't even matter in 2016 that, if you really listened to Trump, he wasn't and still isn't all that conservative. Ultra-liberal Elizabeth Warren, herself, got on Fox News recently to PRAISE Trump's tariffs and say only that they didn't go far enough and were not evenly applied. Even where Trump seems to be ultra-conservative on issues like immigration and deregulation, it doesn't seem to have dawned on anyone that - because he prides himself on being a deal maker - Trump may ultimately care more about bringing home "a deal" than whether it's really what he promised everyone, which certainly seems to be the case with this latest budget agreement. This is also relevant to my opinion that, were he not so egotistical, he'd realize that while the press IS biased and waging an unusually intense war on him, personally as well as politically, it's not one he can truly win. His reactions only fan the flames and his expectations of holding them more accountable are every bit as or more unconstitutional as any new gun regulation.

What mattered then and seems to matter most even now to Trump's base (which, in some cases, don't even call themselves Republicans anymore) is that he's a tough businessman with no prior political experience, so to them, that equates to near-total transparency when it comes to his intent, a different way of taking action because he's supposedly not bound to the Beltway's rules, and an all-but-ironclad guarantee that he will, in fact, DO something. Shortly before the election, I listened to a few supporters on the radio admit that while they had no idea if Trump would really succeed as a president or accomplish what he claimed, they were voting for him, anyway, largely based upon the fact that he wasn't the sort of entrenched "politician" that had talked down to them for years while never making anything significantly better AND wasn't afraid to say that, as President, he would represent the interests of America and of those that voted for him first and foremost. I became concerned because Trump's platform didn't really seem to go deeper or feature more than the broad strokes of a nationalist conservative agenda - a concern that I think the GOP's failure under Trump to repeal and replace, among other things, has since validated. Yet as far as I can tell, not only does it NOT matter to most of Trump's ardent supporters, but they are now prone to labeling anyone to whom it does matter a traitorous, intellectual "elitist," "RINO," or - most bizarrely - a "swamp" creature. 

As I see it, the bottom line is just that we're wasting a lot of time and money trying to discover and prevent further Russian "meddling" in our elections on behalf of our democracy because, in the end, I think we will have issued the final coup de gras all by ourselves!