As a fan of classic television, I have always enjoyed the Twilight Zone, a show created by Rod Serling that aired from 1959-1964 and famously featured characters who found themselves dealing with strange and inexplicable situations that left them feeling like they had entered an alternate or parallel universe.
At the beginning of the program in Season 4, Rod Serling introduced the show with these words, “You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas; you’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone.” One particular episode from that season was actually entitled “The Parallel.” In this story, an astronaut loses contact with command control and blacks out while orbiting the earth. Later, the astronaut awakens to find himself back on earth where the people he knows are the same, but the details of his life are confusingly different.
Lately, I find my self feeling a lot like the astronaut in that story, particularly when it comes to GOP-controlled Washington, DC.
We have a Republican president negotiating with Democrats to advance a big government agenda while promoting liberal policies in areas such as healthcare and illegal immigration.
We have a GOP-controlled Congress advancing a tax reform bill that is supported by Donald Trump but could just as easily earn the endorsement of Barack Obama. If it becomes law, it will punish the so-called rich and middle class with higher taxes in order to pay for a budget that funds many of Obama’s pet projects.
Speaking of the budget, Trump and the GOP completely abandoned any semblance of fiscal responsibility when they raised the debt ceiling in order to spend more money. According to Trump (the self-proclaimed “king of debt“), McConnell and Ryan, this betrayal was necessary to pass their “in-name-only” tax reform bill. In reality, it opened the door to discussions with Democrats to permanently eliminate the debt ceiling which will take the shackles off the GOP ahead of their upcoming spending spree.
One of the items included in their spending spree is Trump’s Obama-esque $1 trillion infrastructure plan–a plan that has no current funding mechanism. One of the ideas floating around in the head of Donald Trump is to raise prices at the pump using a 40% increase in the federal gasoline tax–an idea that would disproportionately hit lower and middle class Americans.
Raising the tax on gasoline is such a bad idea that it’s even opposed by Sen. Chuck Schumer. When Republicans are pushing a tax increase and a Democrat opposes it, you KNOW you’re in the Twilight Zone.
In the end of “The Parallel” episode, the astronaut eventually returned home to the world he knew. As a conservative trapped in a parallel universe within a Twilight Zone created by Donald Trump and the GOP, I can only hope that we get to return home before it’s too late.
David Leach is the owner of The Strident Conservative, your source for opinion that’s politically-incorrect and always “right.” His articles can also be found on RedState.com.
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