A toxic love

August recess has commenced. Lost a few days for rushed, failed votes on three health care repeal bills, as president, pen in hand, waited.

Salaried at about $175,000 per year, lawmakers are off for another month. Two months of “recess” so far this year. No ideas, no infrastructure, no budget. Republicans will spend the time avoiding constituents.

The unglued president has spent 59 of his first 210 days golfing at his resorts. The rest of the time has been spent bullying Congress and the media, shouting at cable news on TV, introducing new words and grammatical constructs into the lexicon, imagining phone calls from the Boy Scouts and lying about everything else in insipid tweets at 4 a.m.

He is off to West Virginia to renew the love, despite the fact that Republicans have traditionally blown the tops off their mountains, polluted their air and water, poisoned their children with PCBs (Fayette County), decimated mine safety regulations, and, in January, by Trump’s own monkey-pen, allowed coal companies to resume dumping toxic waste into West Virginia’s rivers and streams. The man they love, who promised them jobs and gold-star health care for all, this week sat poised to sign one of three bills to end health care for millions.

There are 184,000 West Virginians on the ACA and the state will lose 53 rural health care clinics, 16,000 jobs, and $14 billion for Medicaid and CHIP.

He will revel in their love … even if it kills them.

This story was originally published August 5, 2017 at 8:47 PM with the headline "A toxic love."