Not you, Republicans:
I don’t mean to be “partisan” and “divisive”. It’s just that Democrats tend to roll with it. Yeah, MAGA people seem to hate Democrats with a white hot passion to the point where they go hunting for them in the Capitol like they are prey. They call the family members of the Democrats to tell them they’re in the neighborhood and may pay a visit if the brother in Congress in the Capitol under siege doesn’t comply with their demands. They make it difficult for other Democrats to go into hiding during the siege. The speaker was in danger of her life.
And what did Democrats do? They waited until later that evening, walked into that chamber at 8:00pm and picked up where they left off. Calm, cool, collected, for the most part.
Democrats have been under siege for 4 long years. But I think the reason why they appear to be more courageous is because they don’t really have anything to lose. Republicans, on the other hand, don’t “govern” by “policy”. They’re in Congress because they run in districts where there is no other choice than Republicans so they only have to out harsh the other guy. Or glom on to a Q conspiracy theory. Or pack heat on the way to the grocery store because you never know when a “patriot” is going to be required in the produce department to put down a radical leftist who is liberating the grapes. It helps Republicans get elected if they are crazier than the other guy in the primaries.
They appear to either believe their current flavor of crazy or they are afraid of the crazier elements in their party. They can’t have differences of opinion. Opinions mean there are choices. And Donald Trump doesn’t allow for choices. It’s his way or the highway.
I mean, if Republicans enjoy being whip kissers, humiliating themselves and putting their offices at the service of a political mafia, then it’s a good thing we know it now. But courageous, they aren’t.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
A really good book needs to be written about the psychological makeup of current Republicans. Maybe I could write it, but I always prefer analysis to research. There is something really skewed and perverse about almost all of the Republicans now.. It would take much thought and delving to try to explain it. I do think that much of it comes from some kind of malleable religiosity, which tells them that they are always right, there is no room for nuance or doubt. What they want is what is right, and so they have no qualms. I think that many of them would have been fine with a mass assassination of Democrats in the capitol, if it meant that Trump would have another term. Seriously. Forty-five senators voted that the impeachment trial is unconstitutional, which makes no constitutional sense, since then any president could do any manner of atrocity in his last two weeks in office, and could not be indicted (DOJ opinion paper 46 years ago!),and could not be convicted and barred from running again (because they don’t want Trump to be, though most of them voted for Clinton to be convicted and forced from office due to lying about a consensual affair). And note that McConnell said that there would be no trial set until Trump was out of office, and now says that there should be no trial because Trump is out of office!
What is it that Republican officeholders want? To stay in office, be powerful, get perquisites and TV time, keep reducing taxes on themselves, destroy the environment so that they can make more money. Institute a fascist faux religious state. They have moved far beyond the Republicans of the 1970’s, they are not interested in anything other than winning and keeping power. They create this bogeyman of the “Left,” which will take all your freedoms away; except that whatever Left there is in this country never would do that, never would even get elected; and it is always the Republicans who take away rights. The Republicans have carefully installed (this took years, but most looked away) a media culture which propagandizes them, so that most Americans have no idea which side is up or down, they believe what they are told, that Republicans are fighting for them. And just as Goebbels got German papers to print drawings of Jewish people as rats, preparatory to trying to kill every one of them, the language of Trump about monsters and swamp creatures and vermin has now convinced maybe millions of his supporters that it is a great patriotic thing to kill Democrats. This is beyond horrifying, and it would require an immense effort of national will to somehow root it out and remove it from the country.
Republicans have moved beyond hypocrisy or contortion. They want what they want, and they are determined to get it, no matter how much it contradicts their professed religiosity, or is the opposite of what they said two weeks or a year ago. It doesn’t matter. Think of RIcky Roma in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” whose only goal is to sell deeds to worthless swampland, any way he can. Every word he utters is to that end, it has no meaning in itself. Republicans literally watched as a mob entered the capitol with the goal of killing most or all of the people inside; yet they want us to forget it, get beyond it, just don’t cover it any more. They don’t want the Senate trial, because what will be revealed there will be very damaging to them–except that they will do everything they can to mask it or pretend it is something else.
Lindsay Graham says that if Democrats call witnesses, Republicans will call their own witnesses, and it will drag on! Oh, what witnesses will they call? Nutcases like the Republican Party of Oregon, which is saying that it was actually anti-Trump people who did this rioting and attempted murder, to embarrass Trump, and “gain complete power for the Left?” Yes, they actually are saying and writing that, and it is Goebbels-level horrifying. The nation which was founded on principles of the Age of Reason, is now turning into something out of Orwell or the Dark Ages, where whatever the potentate said was the truth; the planets go around the earth; you will fall off if you travel out too far on the sea; you must not know anything but what we tell you, do not read, do not consider, just obey or you will go to Hell, unless you buy some expensive pardons from the Pardoner., or confess your sins right before we burn you at the stake for your own good. Whatever the Republicans have morphed into, is absolutely anathema to democracy and rationality. I don’t know what we can do on a large scale about this, but I would suggest that we stop calling them “Conservatives” or “Republicans,” and call them authoritarians and fascists, because maybe that kind of labeling will wake some people up. Fighting totalitarianism and brute power with well reasoned arguments only, may be a futile endeavor, stronger measures are needed. I don’t care how long this trial goes, call the witnesses, the rioters; get the phone logs and Twitter feeds, and broadcast them. This is not something that will go away, no matter how much one might wish it to. Republicans cannot change back, they have metamorphosed into something dreadful, and must be exposed and democratically eliminated, if the country is to be saved.
I’m lazier than William, so I’ll just post a picture.
Exactly, and that is why I am disappointed in the well-meaning Tim Kaine, who is going to introduce a censure resolution, because he figures that there will be no acquittal. We need the evidence put forward, and that will be very valuable. Bailing out without all of this being testified to on national television, would be very unsatisfactory.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/trump-s-covid-lies-were-tragedy-were-they-also-crime-n1255849?icid=msd_topgrid
YES!
Crimes against Humanity. No, I am not kidding.
Like I said, he killed more Americans than Kaiser Bill, Hitler, Kim il-Sung, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and al-Baghdadi.
Combined.
If that doesn’t earn him a lifetime berth in Gotti’s old cell at the Florence ADX, I don’t know what does.