So: After 8-years of no policy but nihilistic vandalism, the emptiness of the contemporary Republican Party is in plain view. And their leader is already a lame duck, because everybody with two eyeballs and a functioning mind is pretty sure that he’s a traitor who will be removed from office.
Quite the week in politics, don’t you think?
With all the plots, counter-plots, shady characters, big money, bluster and empty braggadocio … well, honestly, I haven’t enjoyed watching television so much since J.R. got shot.
My advice to Republicans:
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First, get it fixed in your heads that conservatism and right-wing ideology are not the same thing. Conservatives … conserve, preserve the best of what is while building the future with pragmatic, forward-looking realism. Eienhower’s investment in computer technology was conservative, as was building the Interstate Highway System. Organizing OSHA and the EPA were conservative measures; wanting to destroy them because they cost money is right-wing ideology. On the same grounds, conservatives should embrace same-sex marriage. We do know that being gay is not mere wickedness, that it is a biological switch set before birth. Conservatives should enlarge marriage, then, and the stability it affords society; persisting in hating gays and trying to run them out of society, because Leviticus says so, is right-wing ideology.
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Second, stop confusing mission and management. There is room for informed disagreement, for instance, about this EPA interpretation of the law, and that OSHA decision — but there should be no disagreement that their missions are needful. Conservatives should focus on better management; right-wing ideologues simply want to get rid of them because they interfere with profit.
I will add — though it shouldn’t be necessary — that summary directives such as ‘eliminate two rules for every new rule’ are simply too stupid to discuss. Anybody who didn’t cringe when he learned of that Executive Order is a right-wing ideologue — not a conservative.
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Grow the hell up. America has never been the fanciful Sunnybrook Republic of your imaginings, and only naive idiot children want to go there.
We have forfeited for a generation or more the presumption that America, if sometimes misguided, can always be trusted to proceed with at least good intentions, for the election of Trump was nothing so much as the triumph of malice and ignorance. The good news — and I use that word with acute discomfort — is that, with Intelligence Committee members going around talking about ‘damning’ not-yet-disclosed evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, there is solid ground for speculating that he will be removed from office. Since Trump is an empty man anyhow, and even the looniest Republicans — the nutjobs who think Putin makes good sense — aren’t going to want to stand too closely to him, his administration is destined to be ineffectual. So he governs, so to speak, with a recalcitrant party that is suspicious of him and a vastly larger public that frankly loathes him.
Only sixty-four days in … and the Trump administration is a clownish vaudeville act headlined by a preening buffoon.
There isn’t much to like about Mike Pence, either, and he is no more a conservative than The Donald. But he isn’t obviously mad, and nowadays that’s saying something. And he will probably be our president by this time next year.