“We cannot escape history,” as Abraham Lincoln said. But we can learn a lot from it, like how Neville Chamberlain was cruelly underrated. Alternatively, there’s Churchill, that grouchy blowhard. Recent experience shows us how backbones and principles are, like Winston, so overrated. The Republican Party has proven that you can get along perfectly fine without them, as we saw at Cliff Bentz’s recent Pendleton town hall.

Government can indeed be streamlined — do we really need three separate branches, when we can easily get along with just two, or even one? That pesky constitutional “three-branches” thing — those are just some words on a piece of paper, right? Jesus also had some nice-sounding pronouncements, from mountains and everything, but weren’t they really just a lot of hot air? As Andrew Jackson, said, “Now let him enforce it.”

Some (like Mr. Bentz, apparently) may think that the only “check-and-balance” on the president is the Supreme Court (provided it’s a Federalist Society-stacked, billionaire-funded one, I guess). Anyone could have missed civics class that day when all the congressional oversight, “advice-and-consent” stuff was discussed.

Even I must have missed the day when they explained the First Amendment only applies to people and the press when they say nice things about the leaders in charge. And corporations, those saintly beacons of democracy and profits, are people, too. They also have feelings, after all, which must be protected — and expressed, with bottomless oceans of dark money, like all the rest of us also have so readily available.

Carl Merkle

Pendleton