Letters

Today is January 6, the anniversary of the break-in of our Capitol Building by supporters of Donald Trump who foolishly were led to believe they had the right to undo an election by disrupting the process of certifying its results.

Some of these fools were bad actors. These malcontents had criminal intentions resulting in the criminal behavior that is rightfully being investigated now. Any conservative that attempts to diminish the crime and the embarrassment of the government of the United States being attacked successfully on worldwide TV screens needs to re-calibrate their respect for the Constitution and the freedom we represent to the world.

The bigger crime may really have been the damage to our national prestige as a country of free institutions and laws that has served to distinguish itself from the largely authoritarian world in which we exist. Democrats have the duty to prosecute these crimes as the party in control. We will see if they can resist their political instinct to make this into a bigger embarrassment. The opportunity to set another harpoon into their white whale, Donald Trump, will be irresistible and perhaps even justified.

Whatever this becomes however, it will not undo the damage done in this first year of the Biden presidency. In electing the “anyone but Trump candidate,” Americans on the left are discovering what real incompetence in the executive branch can cost: the absence of any Southern border integrity, the cowardly withdrawal from Afghanistan , and the confusing and inadequate COVID response are enough to cripple any administration, but it goes on and on. The overplaying by Democrats of their legislative hand in the Congress has exposed the puppet strings of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the leadership of the new Socialist Democrat Party that is willing to spend as much as it can borrow to fund the redistribution of America’s wealth to their constituency.

If a Joe Manchin didn’t find these machinations unsupportable, the tipping point of limited government would have given way to a leviathan, an insurmountable growth of government intrusion in our everyday lives to implement their Socialism. It is said, you get the government you deserve. Maybe it is true, but we have begun a new election year and this will be a fresh chance for Americans to reset their leadership. Unfortunately, the presidency is not scheduled for replacement and I have grave doubts about this administration’s ability to not do more harm, igniting our tribal nature to undermine more our civil society. It may seem safe here in our bucolic world on the East End, but it worries me. And this pandemic is complicating an already complicated world.

Stay tuned.

Ed Surgan

Westhampton