PHIL McGRAW
Phil McGraw is proof of one indisputable fact. That is that America has never met a jerk it didn’t ’t want to embrace.
Phil, also known as Dr. Phil, is another one of those Frankenstein monsters that Oprah Winfrey is responsible for foisting upon us, taking a small beer huckster and con man and elevating him into a national phenomenon, much as she did with that other huckster Dr. Oz, or Mehmet Oz, purveyor of fine dietary supplements proven to do absolutely no good other than to line his very own pockets. And for the record, Phil makes Oz look like a choirboy when it comes to the art of sleaze.
At his very core, Phi McGraw is nothing short of creepy, right down to the hand-holding exits from set that he makes with his wife, who seems to be thrilled with her own fame accrued by sliding through life on her scuzz-ball husband’s coat-tails.
This is America writ large. We’ve been begging for replacements since Jerry Springer, Morton Downey Jr., and Judge Judy went the way of the Dodo, as in dead or just plain gone. But as soon as we knock one down, another rises from the muck. Now they have one as a president, again.
At one point in my life, or I should say for most of my life, I’ve regarded America and Americans as a positive force in the world. A little pushy, yes, on the obnoxious side, sure, but for the most part the kind of people who you could count on to do the right thing. The decent thing.
I suppose to all intents and purposes, there’s still enough people like that out of a population of some 330 million people, but with each passing year it just feels like whatever that number might be, its percentage of the total population is going down. Alarmingly so.
So, just like in the Jack Johnson song “Where Did All The Good People Go?” I’m left wondering if the MAGA types are now the official face of America or just the loudest face.
Angry, vindictive, suspicious, hate-filled, repulsive, reprehensible, with no respect for anyone other than themselves and their own type. And much of it backed up with a professed fervent love of God and flag. And that’s just the women.
These are not the people of God, and by that I mean that they’re certainly not the folks who speak for Him, not that anybody really qualifies for that in the first place.
When you say the things they say, and do the things they do, that’s not God’s talk, not his message, certainly not His style, and nowhere near to approaching the teachings of Jesus Christ.
When you deny people respect, when you push them around, intimidate them, threaten them, and steal from them, how can you claim God as anything important in your life?
The devotion of their political leadership is to money, power connected to money, and little else. And yet this leadership manages to string people through the nose, people from economic backgrounds that would otherwise have no connection to the power brokers, and are in fact hurt most by the policy directions of this leadership.
A leadership that wraps itself in flags and God, but worships Mammon instead.
Phi McGraw is part of all this. A guy who shakes your hand with his right while his left lifts your wallet out of your back pocket. All of it done with a smile.
He’s a big Trump guy, a big supporter of the Charlatan in Chief, probably recognizing in Trump the top of the mountain when it comes to the Art of The Grift.
His views on immigration have become more apparent over the past several years, and while not all of them are completely out of line, or possibly out of tune, it is disconcerting that his most recent opinions echo that of the new, and once former, president. So much so that McGraw was right there in front of the cameras during an ICE —Immigration and Customs Enforcement — raid in Chicago with the head of ICE Tom Homan, something that smacked more of a gratuitous photo op, or video op, then anything else.
I mean, why exactly would a Dr. Phil type be going along on a federal ride-along arresting immigrants? And why would the guy on the ride-along be allowed to ask detainees questions during their arrest? Had the detainee been advised of his Miranda rights, or are those technicalities involved with the rule of law no longer in vogue in America?
I know longer know exactly what to think, our exactly how to feel. How do you predict the unpredictable? Who could say, ten years ago, when the Republican Party seemed dead and buried, that they’d be back in a more destructive form only a few years later, and worse, control all three levels of government in the United States? The only thing that has me maintaining any degree of hope for the future is the fact that the American system has elections every two years for senators, where one-third of senators — senators have six year terms — face the electorate in a staggered system designed as a check and balance on the very thing we’re witnessing right now.
The Republicans currently have a six seat majority in the senate, which means the Democrats only have to pick up three seats to get to a 50-50 split, but a split that would be broken by the vote of Vice-President J.D. Vance. So at least four Democrat seat gains are needed to break up the Republican government monopoly on power and decision-making.
I suppose people like McGraw are going to keep popping up the way they do, no matter what we can throw at them. They are seemingly unstoppable, and as I said before, for every one we stamp out, four appear to replace him.
It’s not simply an American thing, it’s a people thing, only that America is the most powerful nation on Earth, so when we get types like this within sniffing range of power, it can cause a lot of trouble not just in the United States, but here in Canada and around the world.
I have no playbook as to how to handle them or how to deal with them, other than to simply hope that an electorate of decent folks would eventually tire of them and rid themselves of them.
Be that as it may, as I said, count on others of their ilk to fill the vacuum, both there, and sadly, here as well.
Last night, in Ottawa, fans booed the singing of the U.S. national anthem. Normally I’d be offended by that, but last night was different, and I wasn’t.
I was actually proud.
That United States has declared an economic war on us, one in which all of us will feel the negative impacts. Currently, they are not our friends, or at the very least, not acting all that friendly. They create a system of globalization, force everyone to become part of it, then pull the rug out from everyone when they arbitrarily decide to go back into a period of economic isolation. They muse about taking territory from other nations, including our own.
They invaded us twice and thought about it a third time. And now this.
This is not my America. These are no friends of mine.