It’s no secret to the yous and mes that Donald Trump would not be where he is but for the hoard of Republican enablers who have helped the biggest phony and least skilled tactician in American politics, ever, to achieve the nation’s highest office. Trump is the GOP’s Frankenstein monster and there is no way that they can deny their complicity not only in selecting such a creature to be their standard bearer in 2016, but then not removing him from office when there was compelling reason, and overwhelming evidence, to do so in January. It is Republican complicity and corruption that has put America where she is today and that bill is coming due in a few short months.
Steve Schmidt explained recently that the reason the Republican party is in such trouble is because they willingly “became foot soldiers in the cult of personality” of Donald Trump. Schmidt is absolute in his assessment of the races of Cory Gardner and Martha McSally, (they’ll both lose) and believes that the GOP senate majority is tenuous. While I’ve never forgiven Schmidt for inflicting Sarah Palin on us, he is making sense here. And conservative columnist George Will chimes in with his assessment of the big picture and why the GOP needs to go down in flames at the ballot box. Washington Post:
The nation’s downward spiral into acrimony and sporadic anarchy has had many causes much larger than the small man who is the great exacerbator of them. Most of the causes predate his presidency, and most will survive its January terminus. The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear “magically,” as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.
In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what? Praying people should pray, and all others should hope: May I never crave anything as much as these people crave membership in the world’s most risible deliberative body.
A political party’s primary function is to bestow its imprimatur on candidates, thereby proclaiming: This is who we are. In 2016, the Republican Party gave its principal nomination to a vulgarian and then toiled to elect him. And to stock Congress with invertebrates whose unswerving abjectness has enabled his institutional vandalism, who have voiced no serious objections to his Niagara of lies, and whom T.S. Eliot anticipated:
We are the hollow men . . .
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
or rats’ feet over broken glass . . .
The Republican party has been going downhill for quite some time. It consisted of elements that at one time it insisted were “fringe” because they were so embarrassing, namely the religious fanatics and the white supremacists. The GOP labored to convince us that a figure like David Duke in their ranks was an outlier and an oddity. And then along came Donald Trump and blew that fiction right out of the water.
It’s been said that Trump isn’t a Republican. Au contraire, Trump is the quintessential Republican and as Schmidt put it, all the little foot soldiers heard the dog whistles and fell right into line. This was going to be great, indeed, just like what was printed on the hats. Somebody was finally going to lead the backlash against everything Obama stood for, and halt — preferably reverse — all the forward momentum of the past five decades towards equality for women, gays, POCs, the social safety net and global responsibility, in all senses of the term. The GOP was so fragmented and rudderless that it actually put a clown, at the top of its ticket and that was the price of admission to the circus that we all live in now. The decision was actually made to nominate a game show host and tabloid headliner for president of the United States and even those who initially opposed it, yes Senators Cruz and Graham, we’re looking at you, came in time to love tangerine Big Brother.
Will opines that “decent people judge our nation’s health by the character of those to whom power is entrusted.” Indeed, they do. And what we have shown our allies is that one of our two major political parties has degenerated into a rotting husk and the judgement of its elected leaders cannot be trusted at all. America has never come close to flirting with fascism, let alone embracing it, before this current iteration of the GOP was elected.
The Republican party as we once knew it is finished — thank God. Participating in the personality cult of Donald Trump was its suicide ritual. The funeral comes in November, on the pyre of public judgement. It will be interesting to see what new version of the GOP resurrects. Conservatism, as that term was once understood, took a terrible wrong turn in the dark and got lost. What is left of the GOP, what we see daily, the cowardice and casual cruelty of it’s Stepford wife leaders is a perversity and an abomination. Lady Liberty weeps for her lost children.
Well said Ursula, well said! I love that comic at the top! It made me laugh out loud and it is perfectly apropos.
Trump can’t sell us down the river fast enough. Putin is sitting over at the Kremlin trying to figure out a way to explain to Trump how to get a grip on things, since his last piece of advice, “dominate the battleground” seems to not be working so well.
I forgot to mention that we will need flush 10 to 15 times to remove all the rot from our government.
No, Putin is telling Trump exactly what the latter DOESN’T need to hear. I suspect that’s deliberate, as you have to figure he’s as fed up with Trump as the rest of us. Could also be that he’s started blaming Trump for the cascading domestic disasters that keep popping, the latest being an Exxon Valdez style spill in the Arctic region. Yes, makes no rational sense but time and stress can make folks believe many strange things.
Go look at those articles I posted last week about how Russian TV is cheering Trump on. Putin is hoping for victory, unless I miss my guess. That said, Putin is no fool and probably figures that Trump has done as much for Putin’s cause as he’s going to.
I actually commented on those articles, as I recall, Ursula. That’s when I came to the above conclusions on the why of it, which are largely unchanged. Trump may have gotten us used to blundering, loudmouth evil but taking Putin’s cheerleading at face value would suggest an ignorance in the latter unsupported by the evidence.
Putin pretty well knows trump is toast. There’s the odd chance so he’s not going to throw in the towel. But maybe we will finally see what Putin has on trump. Putin is a bad guy to piss off. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a file or two fall into the wrong hands. Just enough to burn the orange turd.
I weep no such tears. The GOP had every chance and opportunity to turn back. They chose the other way. We will all pay for that choice but they need to pay most of all.
Will’s choice of quote is pretty much the view from the top. The poem “Jim Jones” is the current view from the bottom: “Now it’s day and night,/The irons clang,/And like poor galley slaves,/We toil and toil,/Until our lives,/Must fill dishonored graves…” As last week proved, LOTS of people are sick of that state of affairs.
That’s a great poem, and one I’m not familiar with. Who wrote it?
It’s a traditional poem from Australia. I first heard it quoted many years in the video game Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Whenever I’ve been knocked down by the bullies in my life, I quote as a mantra, a reminder that nothing bad is forever.
America under wooden headed Pinocchio, Moscow mitch, hog jowled Brutus barr, & the others with rooms reserved in hell marked by the angel of darkness with R, is ALREADY a fascist government. We will know in november, when they refuse to give up power. The question will be, will we start goose-stepping down the street, or take our country back. Make no mistake, we are no longer a nation of laws equally applied.
I don’t know if the GOP would refuse to give up power. Trump is already formulating a conspiracy theory, whereby the polls are faked and I have no question that the Deep State will be blamed for his demise. But I think the rest of the GOP will either vanish from public sight or have some kind of an epiphany and try to save themselves.
Regarding that epiphany, it’ll be of the “too little, too late” variety. Most of them are old enough to have laughed at Carter’s fall. They now get to experience a worse version of such in the twilight of their lives.
OMG…Scott, come ON. If EVER the moment of fascist takeover was going to happen, last week would have been it. What happened instead was a lot of noncompliance and backpedaling when the magnitude of the clustereff became obvious to everybody. The military is not onboard and neither is mainstream law enforcement. Without those, said takeover will go nowhere.
Trump and barr’s big coup, takeover ploy last week didn’t work. That is why Barr is distancing himself, and pointing the finger at Trump. Now Trump is back to tweeting ridiculous conspiracy theories. Trump is doing his very best to lose the rest of the older people’s vote. I think he will succeed.
I just watched a three part series on Jim Jones and the awful culmination of his rule as a cult leader. I think for all the Hitler comparisons that have been made over the years Trump is closer to Jones than Hitler. Or perhaps he’s a combination of the two. I do believe that unlike Hitler he craves more than absolute power. He craves universal adoration, but unfortunately possesses the traits and “skills” of a cult leader. Jones might be the most jarring example of a twisted cult leader who will induce the entire group to kill themselves and/or each other before killing themselves or doing the “suicide by cop” routine but he’s far from the only one. Make no mistake about it – Trump has that same mentality in that he will do all in his considerable power to kill the United States as a punishment should he go down to defeat this fall. One can only hope that Pence has some semblance of reality left within him AND hasn’t done so much that he can’t cut a deal to avoid incarceration – in which case he can have everything in place to invoke the 25th Amendment within hours of the election being called in Biden’s favor.
Much like with Hitler, Trump is the brain damaged version of Jim Jones.
WELL SAID!
When this is all over will there be anything left. It Moscow mitch he in my mind is the one who has rotted everything because he is the one that’s has been doing everything to the courts to rule us by. The Lord of the ring wasn’t just a movie it was a history of what was coming slowly and we are just waking up and I hope were in time. Just my thought out loud
Oh, Mitch has his hand well into the cookie jar and trying to pull whole handful of cookies out at the same time. They have McConnells darling wife under investigation over a 94 million dollar grant thing. They have uncovered more to. Then the whole thing went quiet. Makes me wonder whether they misplaced her file till after January 2021. Some of the story was pointed at old Mitch to. They are still a little incensed over Mitch and his Russian pal building that factory in Kentucky. Seems Mitch involved somehow in getting sanctions lifted on the Russians right before they announced factory deal.
Hey Bare…no fascist leader or government looks exactly the same or goes through the same process to get & keep power. I was in the military. They follow the orders of the present commander in chief, not retired generals writing books or whining on tv. The individuals, who defy that process would have to demonstrate across the board a willingness to sacrifice themselves for a principle. As Emerson wrote, ” men are more protective of their pocketbooks, than their principles”. Vonnegut knew a former SS member, also a writer, & asked him what he thought the German people’s tragic flaw was. He replied, “obedience”. Maybe we’ll avoid that, but so far over 20million citizens have been criminalized for unscientific “drug” laws, while white men committing perjury in front of cameras go2 the presidency, the supreme vourt, run the Senate etc., remain in power. Evidence piles up on my side of the argument. Oh, and I am a white man from rural America.
So am I on that last part…which is why I know none of this is going anywhere. Seeing the recent “solidarity” activities of businesses in the wake of these protests tells me everything I need to know about what will protect THEIR pocketbooks…and none of that will help Trump. Ditto flag officers coming out openly against this conduct. Ditto Barr doing his best to lay a “reasonable doubt” defense in the press in case charges get dropped on his head for clearing the streets.
Any fascism is going to have to speak this century’s language before it can get any further than here. And we both know how illiterate Trump and his remaining people are in such.
Whining? By those lights, no one can speak out.
Excellent assessment, Ursula! I will share this article.
Thank you very much, Meg. I appreciate it.
I have to wonder: Where were all these “Never Trumpers” and George Will back in 2010 when the GOP sold its proverbial soul (what little there was of it, that is) by embracing the Tea Party extremists? By accepting that bunch of know-nothing extremists for the sake of keeping power (at the very least–we all know what happened in Nov 2010), the Party set course on the path that would eventually end up with Trump as the Party’s 2016 nominee. But I don’t remember any “mainstream” GOPer or long-time “conservative pundits” issuing any warnings about that alliance (which was essentially the result of extortion or blackmail). Nope. All I can recall was the willingness to accept the Teabaggers to avoid risking a potentially massive loss of GOP seats if the Tea Party “their” candidates as third-party choices.
What do they call “buyer’s remorse” a DECADE after you’ve made the purchase? THAT is what these “Never Trumpers” and George Will types are all about. They didn’t want to run the risk that their “beloved” GOP would be reduced to fewer than 150 seats in the House and about 30 in the Senate (based on the numbers going into the 2010 election, I’m guessing the “Tea Party”–or, more likely, the “Tea Party Coalition”–would’ve ended up with 60-65 House seats and 15-18 in the Senate*); the numbers wouldn’t have really made a big difference in the Congressional balance of power (aside from leaving the Dems in charge of the House and Senate) but, given the propensity for Dems to “vote their conscience” rather than the “party line,” a GOP-Tea Party alliance could’ve posed as big a headache as the “divided Congress” we had from 2011 to 2015.
*I honestly believe the Dems could’ve taken a slight advantage if the Teabaggers went their own way in 2010, especially in states which don’t provide for run-off elections for the November general election and allow for a plurality winner. If a hypothetical GOP candidate took 36% and a Tea Party-supported candidate took 20% while the Democrat took 44%, the Democrat would get the office (even if, in a normal year, the Democrat would only get 44% of the vote to the GOP candidate’s 55%).
Well I thought the tea party would sew a wide division into republicans. But it didn’t. They just found a way to corrupt it. Same as every move since then. When I seen the second bush I thought we were toast. Then the whole 9/11 thing came along. It saved the party but broke our hearts. Then Barack came along and made it right. In a just world Beau wouldn’t have got sick and Biden would have stepped up. It would have been great. Then we got a out of work actor clown. Now it’s time for Biden to step up and lead us into a new beginning.