Outrageous. Furious. Obscene.
These are some of the adjectives uttered by Michiganers during Vice President Mike Pence’s visit to Mackinac Island last week. He and his entourage loaded themselves into eight gas-guzzling Chevy SUV’s for the short trip from the island’s helipad to the fancy hotel hosting the Republican Leadership Conference.
According to one observer, the motorcade was “obscene.”
Other observers were “furious.” Many were “outraged.”
Meanwhile, how many citizens of Michigan voted Trump/Pence in the year of our Lord 2016? The answer: 47.6 percent, just enough to hand their state over to them by only .3 percent, or just over 11,00 votes out of about 5 million cast.
Hey, you Michiganers, proud of your state’s natural wonders, how’s your president’s MAGA motto sounding these days?
Do the math.
A good portion of the 450 Michiganers privileged to live year-round on Mackinac Island, where automotive traffic has been banned for 121 years, were disgusted by the cavalier attitude of Trump’s little puppet (and future presidential hopeful, be sure of that) when he and his bloated “security detail” invaded their natural treasure so as to attend a right-wing political convention.
Of those 450 souls, we can assume a good many voted for Trump, considering 61.r percent of Mackinac County voters chose Trump, compared to only 34.2 percent for Hilary Clinton.
Hey Michiganers, I hate to sound unsympathetic, but who’s to blame for the pollution that Pence and company ignorantly brought to pristine Mackinac?
EPA? What EPA?
If anyone, Republican or otherwise, is looking for evidence for the argument that Mike Pence is a brain-dead fool, look no further than at the footprint he left on Mackinac Island.
And what about the rest of the country? You know, those 49 states, the District of Columbia, and a possession named Puerto Rico, all of which contain their own special natural hideaways, their own sylvan paradises that the laws of the land are designed to protect?
For an answer, just consider the level to which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has sunk since Trump swept into office with his pro-business, pro-carbon, anti-Obama, anti-environmentalist agenda, rolling back 85 environmental rules in less than three years.
He has yet to wage an all-out war on another country (although Iran is coming into focus pretty quickly); instead, he’s waging it on the country he vowed to “make great again.”
His own country.
Trump and co. do this in an era when numberless climate experts in countless scientific studies have indicated, with indisputable evidence unfolding before everyone’s eyes every day of the week, that global environmental catastrophe is approaching at breakneck speed.
The latest is the United Nation’s Climate Report just issued today, which declares in no uncertain terms that Human-caused carbon dioxide emissions are fueling monster storms, deadly heat waves, harm to coral reefs and record losses of Arctic sea ice.
This chorus of alarm merely causes the President of the United States, who claims on the basis of his superior intelligence that all this science is “fake,” to hire EPA directors who stomp on policies intended to protect the natural world. Under the “leadership” of Donald Trump, the EPA’s mission has been, contrary to sanity itself, to accelerate the nation’s self-destructive use of fossil fuels.
Karma
Trump and Pence and McConnell and Pompeo and Wheeler (head of the EPA) and Ingraham and Hannity and all the rest of the ne’er-do-wells that run the land are not only hypocritical but stupid. Not only stupid but arrogant. Not only arrogant but despicable.
They make American great again by despoiling and befouling Mackinac Island with motorcades.
To which I’m reduced to saying, Michigan, and every other red state, you get what you deserve. You reap what you sow. You get what you vote for.
Got Vision?
In 1990, the English rock band Sisters of Mercy released the song “Vision Thing,” in which they excoriated then President George H. W. Bush—another one who said one thing and did the opposite.
The band’s lead singer grunts ferociously:
“It’s a small world and it smells funny I’d buy another if it wasn’t for the money Take back what I paid For another motherfucker in a motorcade.”
When we’re talking about Republicans, nothing ever seems to change.
Final Appeal
Michiganers, your big chance is coming. Do the right thing in 2021. Try to take back what you “paid” for the Trump/Pence ticket.
Or to put it another way, don’t let any Republican motorcade disgrace Mackinac Island ever again.
If you don’t, then don’t dare breathe a word of complaint the next time this party/this pair dishonors your state’s natural bounty.