You Can't Teach Old Dross New Tricks

The Republican Party spins downward so fast these days, it’s difficult to keep track of past transgressions, and so they get buried and forgotten as the new pile of junk gets dumped on top every day – even though in ordinary times such things would be the unforgettable headline for months.

But these days, we get things like Trump praising Putin, Mike Pompeo praising Putin, Tucker Carlson defending Putin, Marjorie Taylor Greene addressing a white supremacist conference last week, Lauren Boebert heckling the U.S. President talking about his dead child at the State of the Union Address on Tuesday, Fox “News” claiming that DOJ lawyer John Durham exposed Hillary Clinton’s hacking crimes only to have Durham himself explain he did no such thing, both Democratic and Republican state senators in Arizona voting yesterday to censure Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers after she made “violent and discriminatory comments” at a white supremacist conference and also attack Ukraine President Zelensky on social media, and on and on and on and on and on.  And on and on and on.  And on.

So, all this morass just covers up the other garbage, and it gets pushed aside for the latest.

There so much of this.  It goes back six years through the Trump years, when – given his fascist attempts to overthrow democracy and 16,000+ documented lies – it almost seems quaint that he called Mexican “rapists,” had the tape released with him laughing about grabbing women by the "p*ssy”, asked Russia to hack computers to find his election opponent’s emails and oh-so much more.  And that’s before he was even elected.

But still, for all the GOP horrors that have been buried by the latest horror and piled on by the next horror and the next – all of which deserve to be remembered – there’s still one around the top of the list that most-especially deserves to still be front and center.  And that’s when only a month ago (though it seems so much longer, given all the rubbish that’s piled on since then), the Republican National Committee called the January 6 insurrection attempting to overthrow democracy “Legitimate Political Discourse.”

To be fair, this was so reprehensible, egregious and telling about who the Republican Party is today that it’s not nearly as overlooked as so much of the other GOP transgression.  It’s just that it’s no longer at the top of the list – where it should be – in order to make room for things like Trump praising Putin as a “genius.

But now that the Republican Party has officially said it stands for rioters overthrowing the government as legitimate political discourse, I think that it will be a part of the mid-term election discourse.  In fact, I suspect that TV ads have already been made about it and are being held in wait for the campaign season to begin.

But I’ll go a step farther.  Even with all the rest that’s going on with today’s GOP, including the Republican Party’s Putin Love, I’m close to thinking the GOP’s “Legitimate political discourse” should be the ONLY issue to discuss for the mid-terms.  And 2024.  And every election until the Republican Party decides differently -- and explains why.

(This, too, relates to the GOP Putin Love.  Now that there has been such a near-united reaction against Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – near-united, not total in the GOP – and polling likely shows that supporting Putin is an anathema – many Republicans have joined the “I Hate Putin Club.”  But that’s not good enough.  You can’t get to ignore years of praising and supporting the Russian murderous dictator and enabling your party’s leader trusting him more than U.S. intelligence service merely by saying, now, at last, “I hate him.”  You have to explain why it was so horrific that you supported him before, and why you’ve finally changed – and don’t plan to go back after the invasion is over.)

But back to “Legitimate political discourse.”  This is an issue, arguably the issue Democrats should pound and pound at the mid-terms.  They should wallpaper the airwaves with ads that show the GOP calling the insurrection legitimate political discourse against a backdrop of the violence.  And they should relentlessly attack their opponents for supporting the party leadership and Trump who still defend it all.  Force them to criticize Trump and the RNC on this.  Because it's this attitude, that the January 6 insurrection was supposedly “legitimate political discourse,” that colors most all GOP transgressions, including Trump calling Putin a genius.

In fact, more than just making it the predominant issue, what I’d love to see is that at any debate where their Republican opponent has not criticized Trump and the RNC report, the Democratic candidate should say upfront “This is the ONLY issue I will be talking about tonight – because it’s the ONLY issue that matters.  If my opponent and his party and the party’s leader Trump think that an insurrection to overthrow the government and democracy is ‘legitimate political discourse,’ then how any of use feel about infrastructure and health care and the environment will not matter.  Because we will be living under fascist dictatorship.  The ONLY issue that matters is that my opponent supports violent insurrection to overthrow the government as ‘legitimate political discourse.’  And so that is all I will be talking about tonight, whatever the question.”

By the way, when I wrote about all the garbage that keeps piling on top of the previous Republican outrage after previous outrage after previous outrage, I took out my trusty thesaurus to find a different word I could use in place of my repeated used of “garbage” and “junk” and “trash.”  And there was one synonym for garbage that I almost used because it was described as “archaic” and also because I thought people would think I was just making up a word to be scathingly critical.  But no, it’s a real word.  And a synonym for garbage.  Where the second meaning is "A worthless message."

The word is “trumpery.”

If anyone thinks there is no God, there's the evidence to the contrary.