Democrats plan to counter Trump’s State of the Union by claiming these aren’t normal times. Me? I’ve got a few questions about the past three decades the American people have been forced to suffer through and I would like their opinion on whether any of it was normal.
Tomorrow evening, some leading Democrats are planning to ditch President Donald Trump’s State of the Union Address for what The Hill described as “counterprogramming events near the U.S. Capitol highlighting the impact of the administration’s policies.” As they summarized the context in a blurb that could’ve been written the day President Trump took office for the second or even the first time, “Democratic lawmakers are facing growing pressure from their base to challenge the Trump administration on immigration and a host of other issues.” While they made no mention that their base has been demanding blood and seeking someone willing to get shot for the cause since at least last July, the “counterrally, dubbed the ‘People’s State of the Union,’ will be held at 8:30 p.m. on the National Mall” and will feature “everyday Americans most impacted by Trump’s dangerous agenda” according to The New York Times. “Donald Trump has made a mockery of the State of the Union speech,” declared Senator Chris Murphy without mentioning the mockery his former colleague Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi made tearing up a printed version of the speech in 2020 in a pathetically immature display of pique unprecedented in all of American history, “taking a moment that is meant to bring the country together and turning it into a campaign rally to spew hatred and division. Democrats have no obligation to reward him with an audience as he lies and attacks people who disagree with him.” “These aren’t normal times and showing up for this speech puts a veneer of legitimacy on the corruption and lawlessness that has defined his second term,” he added. Senator Chris Van Hollen echoed these sentiments, posting on X, “Next week, Trump will deliver his State of the Union address. I won’t be there. Trump is marching America towards fascism, and I refuse to normalize his shredding of our Constitution & democracy. This cannot be business as usual.”
Me? I’m busy wondering when it was ever business as usual or normal times. In fact, I’ve got a few questions for the good Senators about the past three decades the American people have been forced to suffer through and I would like their opinion on whether any of it was normal or usual. Personally, I’ve been following politics closely since President Bill Clinton faced off against Senator Bob Dole in 1996. Even back then, when normalcy was said to reign supreme, a bygone era where adults were in charge, was it normal to have a President credibly accused of rape by Juanita Broderick and sexual assault by Paula Jones, who began receiving oral sex in the Oval Office as early as 1995 and inserted a cigar into the vagina of a 22 year old intern, only to lie about it in court and ultimately be impeached? Was it normal for him to attempt to distract from this scandal by bombing an aspirin factory in Sudan that they claimed was a chemical weapons plant for Al Qaeda with no evidence? More directly related to his office rather than the deviant things which occurred inside it, President Clinton also ushered in the 1993 crime bill, the 1996 welfare reform bill, and boldly proclaimed that the United States needed a secure border. Was it normal for his own political party to decry these measures as inherently racist and a betrayal of the working class a short time later, pretending that what passed with huge majorities was a secret plan to punish black and brown people?
Less than nine months after his successor, President George W. Bush took office, the United States was hit with the deadliest attack in history on 9-11. Was that normal? Responding to these attacks, President Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, spent trillions of dollars, caused tens of thousands of deaths and countless injuries, only to have us withdraw in defeat and disgrace a decade later (Iraq) and two decades later (Afghanistan). Was that normal or business as usual? As it turned out, the invasion of Iraq in particularly was based on faulty intelligence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was therefore an imminent threat. Reputable figures like Colin Powell presented information that turned out to be false, leading to one of the biggest foreign policy blunders in the history of the country, but that abject failure did nothing to prevent the expansion of our intelligence apparatus, enlarging and empowering the very people who had failed. Was that normal? The 9-11 attack was also used as a pretext to pass the Patriot Act, which led to the government collecting the records of every cell phone call in the United States within a few years creating a surveillance state that beggared anything the Soviet Union could ever dream of and was not directly authorized by the bill or a part of the debate before the bill was passed. Was that normal? In the meantime, his opponents regularly called him a war criminal and a Nazi, demanded he and many in his Administration be tried in the International Criminal Court at the Hague, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared him a “Loser” from the floor of that hallowed chamber. Was that normal?
As George W. Bush left office, the United States economy went into freefall as mortgage backed securities, an investment type few outside of the industry had ever heard of and yet were apparently so widespread they threatened the liquidity of the entire banking sector, bringing on the Great Recession. To stabilize the system, President Bush and incoming President Barack Obama both endorsed a plan known as TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program. According to proponents, the US government was the only organization large enough to hold these mortgage backed securities long enough for them to appreciate in value. Therefore, the government would buy these troubled assets from the current holders, then sit on them until the economy recovered and they were worth more than the paper they were printed on. Though there was reason to be skeptical, it sounded reasonable enough: The government wouldn’t simply hand out checks and hope to be paid back, nor would it dole out money based on who was most connected to the government itself. Instead, it would own the asset, then sell it later. Suddenly, however, the story changed shortly after passage of the bill. Rather than buying assets, the government would just hand out cash to some of the richest, most powerful banks in the world, making many of the institutions that had caused the crisis larger than ever. Was this normal, to have a debate about one thing, and then after that thing is signed into law, declare you would do something else, essentially offering free unrestricted loans to the very people that had crashed the economy in the first place? Was it normal that no one was really investigated much less charged with anything despite massive evidence of incredibly risky behaviors that at the very least push right up to the edge of the law?
Also as President Bush left office, Russia seized Georgia, an event that led directly to the current War in Ukraine, but one that prompted both President Bush and Obama to do precisely nothing in response. Indeed, President Obama blamed his predecessor for Russia’s aggression, and claimed he would reset the relationship as if the invasion of Georgia never happened. Was that normal? After taking office President Obama did nothing about Russia, but would assert an unfettered ability to execute even American citizens by drone strike whenever his vast knowledge of terrorist and military operations deemed it necessary and he would do so in secret. Was that normal? He would propose that we “lead from behind” in Libya, leaving the country in shambles, send billions of dollars in cash to Iran, and withdraw from Iraq for no reason, leading directly to the rise of ISIS. Was that normal? On the domestic front, he would pass an almost trillion dollar stimulus plan to fund “shovel ready” jobs as a means to jumpstart the economy from the Great Recession only to joke years later that those jobs didn’t exist and never had existed, leading to the money essentially disappearing without a trace. Totally normal, right? He would also use a rare 60 vote majority to pass the Affordable Care Act on entirely party lines, promising that if you liked your doctor, you can keep your doctor, and that healthcare premiums would be reduced by $2,500 per year for the average family. In reality, he gamed the system when Democrats lost their 60th vote in the Senate, largely as a massive negative reaction to the plan itself even in a Democrat state like Massachusetts, passed it with a bare minimum of votes, was said to have told the lie of the year about keeping your doctor, proceeded to botch the website launch for the entire plan despite spending $2 billion on a relatively simple piece of technology, and when enrollments did not match expectations even years later, Democrats would massively expand the subsidies, only to insist that without spending far more than planned, the entire healthcare system would collapse. Was that normal? Simultaneously, he would allow his Internal Revenue Service to leverage the power of the state to silence conservative non profit groups, a fact he admitted to, then pretended to claim didn’t happen. Was that normal? Business as usual?
During his reelection campaign, Russia would come up again as a major topic when his opponent, Governor Mitt Romney claimed that the former Soviet Union was our great geopolitical adversary. President Obama would mock him on the debate stage, jesting that the 1980s called and they wanted their foreign policy back, but barely a year into his second term, Russia would annex the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Was that normal? At the time, he would do little to defend Ukraine, refusing to send weapons and instead focusing on humanitarian aid, but as he was preparing to leave office, Russia was suddenly the biggest threat imaginable, capable of rigging US elections. In his final year, President Obama authorized an unprecedented investigation into false ties of Russia collusion against his would-be successor’s political opponent, then conspired with other leaders in his Administration to rework an intelligence report that supported the false claim. Was that normal? When his would-be successor, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, lost unexpectedly to Donald Trump, establishment insiders at the FBI continued the investigation without informing him, mounted false investigations into his potential cabinet, and soon openly declared that there was a resistance within the federal government to the lawfully elected leader of the federal government. Was that business as usual? After Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives two years into President Trump’s turn, they launched into an impeachment proceeding that had been planned since before he took office, ultimately impeaching him not once, but twice. Was that normal? During his tenure, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tore up her copy of the State of the Union Address on national television as mentioned earlier, standing right behind the President himself. Was that normal?
Early in an election year, the world was hit by a global pandemic, prompting public health professionals to recommend draconian lockdown measures including forced closure of business, schools, and churches, forced masking, and forced social distancing, unprecedented responses based on a high school science project, but when George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, the story suddenly changed. Massive public gatherings in the form of protests that had essentially been banned, were now good and necessary. For some reason, however, people still couldn’t vote they way they used to, meaning they could gather shoulder to shoulder by the thousands yet not enter a booth by themselves, and so they ushered in the largest change in voting patterns in a hundred years to the point where Time Magazine described it as a conspiracy to “fortify” the election. Was that normal? Throughout the campaign, the candidate who ultimately prevailed, President Joe Biden remained mostly in his basement, running for President via video conference, claiming the pandemic was the reason even as thousands of his future constituents were taking to the streets and the underlying promise of his potential Presidency was, rather ironically, a return to normalcy. Was that normal? Once President Biden got into office, he issued a sweeping vaccine mandate that forced tens of thousands of people from their jobs, many without unemployment, only to be overturned by the Supreme Court. He also attempted to implement an endless moratorium of evictions and cancel student loans by executive order, only to be overturned in both cases. Was that normal? Simultaneously, he pursued a spending plan that poured trillions of dollars into the economy causing massive inflation that he lied about and claimed was transitory, and he dismantled most security measures at the southern border, leading to an influx of some 20 million migrants while he insisted the border was still secure. Was that normal?
Shortly after taking office, President Biden presided over our defeat in Afghanistan at the hands of the same people that harbored the terrorists who attacked us on 9-11, followed by the Russian invasion of all of Ukraine, an invasion he was powerless to stop, followed by Iran funding the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, when Hamas launched an attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Was that normal? While the world was quite literally burning around us, President Biden’s Justice Department chose to raid a former President’s residence for the first time ever to secure classified documents though President Biden had documents in his own residence dating back to his days in the Senate. The raid was followed by two sets of charges at the federal level, one at the state, and one at the local, the former President being arrested and having his mugshot taken, almost 100 indictments in total that could’ve resulted in hundreds of years of jail time. Was that normal? Incredibly, President Biden’s own challenges with classified documents made him the subject of his own investigation, which prompted his own Justice Department to rule that he was unfit to stand trial because he was the equivalent of a senile old man. In response, Democrats and the media rallied around him, claimed the report was a political hit job as though the charges against President Trump weren’t somehow, only to completely change their opinion after President Biden melted down on the debate stage, claiming there were signs all along he was losing it, forget everything we said before. Was that normal? After the President was forced to leave the race, the Democrat leadership handpicked Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee without a single vote, upon which the media promptly bestowed enough joy and vibes for her to prevail in the general election, pretending a candidate who had to withdraw from the 2020 primary and who was not well liked as VP was a superstar. Was that normal?
Of course not, none of it was, nor has ever been. The adults have never been in charge, whatever they say, and the world did not begin on January 20, 2025.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 