Bad news makes grand return

I don’t know what I was thinking last week when I wrote that I was done writing about the negative news that affects South Texas. Instead, or so I thought at the time, I was going to focus on just the positive, human-interest stories.

“Good news only” would be my mantra moving forward.

Clearly delusional, that lasted all of one day.

“Bad News” Wendorf is back at the keyboard.

I can’t keep the writing monster chained and in check. Probably why no one has ever compared me to Pollyanna.

Every day I wake up, it’s something new. Most of which I find insane. And after watching American politics pass me by since I first started taking an interest in national affairs during Watergate, that’s a lot of years of stored-up insanity for any one brain to process.

It’s Saturday Day Night…

Fifty years ago, on Saturday Night Live, its first season, 1975, Chevy Chase was doing impressions of President Gerald Ford tripping as he came down a flight of chairs, or hitting another drive off the first tee into the crowd, knocking out another spectator, and we could all laugh, and that was before John Belushi or Gilda Radner took the stage.

Now, none of the political theater is funny, but it really is if you consider what some people are willing to believe.

“These boats are ferrying fentanyl to the U.S.”

No, actually, almost all of the fentanyl is being trafficked through Mexico after a new shipment of the drug’s precursors from China arrives and goes to the lab.

But why confuse the body politic with the facts?

The president says he’s against drug traffickers, and then hands a pardon to one of the biggest traffickers in modern times, convicted, now pardoned, Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras.

You can’t make up this stuff.

It’s the RGV, though, for which I have the most empathy and compassion. An area cloaked in poverty, no matter how much we grow. The poor can never keep up. It’s especially hard for the single moms who must now raise four kids since dad just took off with the bar maid.

Now, thanks to this current administration, with its lapdogs in the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. Supreme Court, so many of the social safety nets for the poorest of the poor, the marginalized, are being stripped from them, while the president holds extravagant parties at his private party land in Florida, Mar-a-Lago.

His supporters, however, remain loyal, no matter how badly the economy tanks.

“Biggest layoff numbers since the Great Recession of 2008.”

FAKE NEWS. Sure.

Politics and Religion

Meanwhile, at least nine to 11 U.S. Navy warships, including the USS Gerald R. Ford, guided-missile destroyers, and amphibious assault ships, plus heavy bombers and fighter jets are stationed near Venezuela.

How much this is costing taxpayers, who knows, but it ain’t cheap.

From the Republicans in Congress, we hear nothing about launching an invasion of a country that poses no threat to us.

It might not be so bad if not for the hypocrisy. “We’re all going to church on Sunday, and then we should bomb them next week, shoot another one of these drug boats out of the water, praise Jesus.”

Mixing politics and religion, never a good idea, but it helps win elections.

And that’s something the GOP has done better than the Democrats. Tie elections to scripture, candidates to Jesus.

The Dems, most of them, don’t walk around with a Bible, either imprinted on their forehead or held in hand as they walk to the strip bar. They admit they’re sinners.

We are indeed living in interesting times; like none other in my lifetime. Can’t quit writing about it, especially as it affects the Rio Grande Valley.

Now, on to the story about the presidential pardon handed to Henry Cuellar, and a story about dysfunctional Donna politics (see front page).

More bad news to follow.