Speaking Truth to the . . . Unhinged

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Our politics are insane, much more so than normal. Our national figures act as if they walked off the drawing boards of the cartoonists for Warner Brothers Looney Tunes. Our two major political parties modulate between a cult of personality and a nest of neo-Marxist revolutionaries. It’s deranged. Why vote?

Of special note is Donald Trump’s grip on the GOP. Opinion polls consistently show him to be the far-and-away front runner for the nomination. Objectively, by any measure, the guy is loathsome. Would you actually like your children if they grew up to behave like him? Think about it. The bombastic self-promoting narcissism has left a trail of former allies, now turned enemies, in its wake. All that’s left are sycophants and a chunk of the party base seemingly in the grip of a mass psychosis, for want of a better term.

To understand the gravity of Trump’s scorched earth of the party, first we must grasp the fact that there aren’t any serious RINO’s – “Republican in name only” in the mold of Lowell Weicker or the Rockefellers – in the party anymore. Reaganite fusionism defined the character of the party, and for most still does. RINO has been mindlessly coopted by Trumpers for anyone not enthralled by the man from Mar-a-Lago. “RINO” is conjoined to “establishment” and the “swamp” to make the nonsense compelling to those consumed in jargon and sloganeering, and nothing else weightier.

Speaking of nothing else weightier in the head, so bound up in jargon are Trumpkins, and so ill-informed, that a gaggle of them showed up at a July 29 meeting of the California GOP to protest a rules change at the behest of their political guru, DJT. They thought that it was the “establishment” trying to screw Trump, completely unaware that the rules change was concocted by the Trump campaign for the benefit of Trump. Whew, go figure.

Let’s examine the line of corpses along Trump’s path to power. Jeff Sessions, an early endorser and Trump’s first AG, was one of the first to end up on the cult’s blacklist. The Bushes, not as flamboyant as the orange man, were reduced to wishy-washy “neo-conservative” and “establishment”, not that most of the cult’s enthusiasts could define the words. Ex-military commanders such as John Kelley (chief of staff) and James Mattis (SecDef) quickly learned that working with an ignorant blowhard is untenable. Hawks of the peace-through-strength variety like John Bolton – the Democrats’ bette noir and now Trump’s – was tarred for not acceding to Trump’s impulsive isolationism. Bill Barr, Trump’s latest AG and bulwark against the Democrats’ Mueller grotesquerie, was blasted for not being sufficiently supportive of Trump’s stop-the-steal drivel. One could go on and on. The track record would invite the conclusion that anyone friendly to Trump will eventually become an enemy, given enough time. The closer you get, the more likely you will get burned.

It’s even true for that mainstay of conservatism, Mike Pence, VP under Trump. He’s now enemy # . . . for not rejecting Electoral College votes from states of Trump’s choosing on January 6. Trump besmirched Pence with the schoolyard taunt “Liddle Mike Pence” after Pence forthrightly recalled on Fox News, “The American people deserve to know that President Trump and his advisers didn’t just ask me to pause. They asked me to reject votes, return votes, essentially to overturn the election.” As if on cue, Trumpists showed up at a recent Pence event in New Hampshire yelling “traitor” and “sellout” as he tried to speak.

Pence brutally heckled, called a ‘traitor’ by Trump supporters at Iowa ... — Pence heckled by Trump supporters in New Hampshire

The stupidity should blast anyone in the face still in charge of their wits. Trumpkins enjoy the jargon of epithets, such as “neo-conservative” as a substitute for adult reasoning. That abuse of “neoconservative” by Trumpkins obscures the policy reality of “peace through strength”. Strength for what? Yes, peace, but also a peace worth living. Reagan’s “evil empire” and “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” is the quintessence of what used to be standard Republican foreign policy. If Trump exercised a little (liddle?) self-reflection, it was his too. Only, since the guy doesn’t read – he’s “too smart” for that – Trump had to first see it on tv: the bodies of gassed children after an Assad bombing. It took tv before Trump realized that’s there’s something more to foreign policy than “America First” sloganeering.

Go figure, dump Reagan to chase after an opinionated cretin. I refuse to follow the lemmings. That old saw about the election being a binary won’t wash a third time. I am not going to let a cult force me into seeing Trump as our only bastion against neo-Marxism. If the country chooses neo-Marxism to Trump, which seems likely, many Republicans will have to face life outside the cult and the country will have to face life inside a hellscape. Republicans should have presented a better option to the country.

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