Civil Commotion

I know people who will fall for this.

Watching the impeachment debate yesterday, marveling at the overt dishonesty of House Republicans, I found myself recurring to a single thought: Is this what it was like to watch Germany go mad in the 1930s? Trump is not Hitler — yet — but his cult is no less poisonous, no less corrupt, no less dismissive of settled facts, no less on the cusp of rage-fed violence.

I mean … the impeachment of Donald Trump is a reprise of the crucifixion of Jesus? A reprise of the treachery of the Pearl Harbor attack? Seriously?

The Republican Party is no longer part of the decent, educated, ethical world; it has become something dark and primal, fed by incoherent rage and beyond the reach of facts and reason.

If you think I overstate the decline of the GOP into madness, consider this remarkable take on events:

President Donald Trump’s religious-right allies are predictably responding to his impeachment by the House of Representatives with howls of outrage. Samuel Rodriguez and Johnnie Moore, two of Trump’s informal advisers and vocal evangelical defenders, were among the first to cry foul.

In a joint statement released after last night’s vote and reported by the right-wing site Newsmax, Rodriguez and Moore claim that “millions of Americans recognize that the House leadership is not actually impeaching the president of the United States but the policies and people that he represents.”

There really is some kind of weird mass psychology at work. Take notes. If the Senate fails to step-up and do its duty and defend the country from madness, the historians of 50-years from now are going to be wondering just how a great country fell under the control of deranged rodents.

Donald Trump, famous con-artist, has sent a letter to Nancy Pelosi protesting impeachment.

Typical:

Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying “I pray for the President,” when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense.

The letter is 6-pages long, and virtually all of it is similarly nasty and unhinged. The particular passage I quoted will probably please evangelicals, who believe that Catholics serve the Antichrist (which is why Catholic girls are, you know, e-e-e-asy), but the rest of us ought to wonder if Trump has gone off his rocker.

Y’all will recall that I predicted this sort of thing.

Trump’s behavior will grow more erratic, more nasty and mean-spirited, more incandescently dishonest, as events proceed. That won’t affect many in his squalid little cult — but that’s the only support he’s going to have.

And let’s not forget: The First Felon hasn’t been formally impeached yet; that will probably happen tomorrow.

Here is the complete letter:

Baptist professor claims he was fired for being too anti-gay

A gadfly college professor who clings to the largely discredited practice of “conversion” therapy to change sexual orientation says the Southern Baptist Convention is wavering in its condemnation of homosexuality.

“I think the Southern Baptist Convention is going to flip on homosexuality, but they are going to do it very indirectly,” Robert Oscar Lopez, until recently a humanities professor at the undergraduate arm of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, said in a recent interview with conservative Christian talk show host Bryan Fisher.

I live in Southern Baptist country, and I can guarantee you that there is no danger of the SBC ever ‘flipping’. What is going on here is that Professor Lopez is so strident that even the crazies find him off-putting. Still, the kernel of the story make for an engaging daydream.

I am sure that, here to there, there must be Southern Baptists who don’t revile gays; in a denomination of about 15-million people it’s all but a statistical certainty that there are such. But anybody who thinks gays will be welcomed into rural southern church ‘families’ anytime soon is out of touch with reality.

If you still have visits left to the New York Times’ Web site this month, spend them reading these columns.

Michelle Goldberg’s Democracy Grief probably overstates the case — but not by much.

Lately, I think I’m experiencing democracy grief. For anyone who was, like me, born after the civil rights movement finally made democracy in America real, liberal democracy has always been part of the climate, as easy to take for granted as clean air or the changing of the seasons. When I contemplate the sort of illiberal oligarchy that would await my children should Donald Trump win another term, the scale of the loss feels so vast that I can barely process it.

Donald Trump is dismantling the norms that sustain the liberal West, and has nothing to replace it on offer. There is nothing at work within him but malice. I still believe, as I have said more than once on other occasions, that the only good thing about Trump’s election is that anybody with 2-eyes connected to a properly functioning brain can finally see clearly the malice that drives the Evangelical Right.

In a similar assessment of the damage Trump has done to the country, Charles Blow offers this:

Trump and his administration have so overwhelmed the country with successive outrages that it all begins to flatten out, to smooth out, to become a kind of toxic new normal.

To be clear, not everyone sees what Trump is doing as outrageous. The country now exists in two worlds on the issue of truth and facts. One acknowledges some basic truths; the other is un-tethered from them.

It was clear long before the election that Donald Trump is a mean-spirited ignoramus — and that’s what some people voted for because they hate the well-educated people who have left them behind in a world that can scarcely understand; there is a lot of malice underpinning Trump supporters — and the morons are so stupid and shortsighted that they’re willing to take the whole country down in order to hurt the people they despise. There will never be any reasoning with them, and there will never be any communion of goodwill. They must be defeated.