No Ideas for the Future? Focus on the Past!

USA Today reports that Benghazi will be "the focus of one of the nights at next week's (Republican) convention."

It has struck me the past two weeks that although the focus of the nation's attention has been on bloodshed in our streets, the focus of the Congress has been on Benghazi and Clinton's emails. Even granting that these are important issues, they are in fact in the past, and nothing can undo them. We can learn from them, of course; but it is clear to everyone that the constant attention to them is not driven by what can be learned from them but by who might be ruined by them. The Republican leadership, lacking ideas about how to solve current problems, concentrates on selectively-chosen past mistakes.

The fact that the RNC will spend one whole evening of its air time on Benghazi is further proof of the lack of ideas in the Trump camp or in the leadership of the Republican party. It's disgusting.

Independence

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Walt Whitman; Preface to 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass