The GOP's Just a Racket Now, and Trump Is Its Godfather, Barr Its Wartime Consigliere
Last edited Wed May 1, 2019, 10:36 PM - Edit history (2)
Michael Tomasky column in the Daily Beast this evening:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gops-just-a-racket-now-and-trump-is-its-godfather-barr-its-wartime-consigliere
Then, starting in the 1980s, it lost the liberals. Then, in the 1990s, it started to lose most of the moderates, as right-wing issue and interest groups and Koch money began to define what constituted “conservatism,” pushing it ever-further rightward so that today it really isn’t even conservatism, but just a collection of grievances that they can use to piss off enough white people to stay in power.
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Their apologetics today are the natural consequences of their having marinated in these juices of resentment and rage for all the years they have. It’s what the party has become. And of course it’s the party that produced and elevated a gangster like Trump. It’s all of a piece.
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And all of it along the way—every racist dog whistle, every Rush Limbaugh rant, every false, out-of-thin-air accusation against Bill and Hillary Clinton, every lie about easily liberating the people of Iraq, every accusation that the rest of us hated freedom, every “joke” about Obama serving fried chicken, every disgusting attack on immigrants and gay people and you name it—has brought us to this point. Brought us to today, when a sitting attorney general said in effect to the American people whose interests he is supposed to be defending, “No, I truly do not give a fuck. I’m up here for the president, and that’s that.” And naturally, we learned three hours after he left the Senate chamber that he will not deign to appear at the House, where the questioning would likely be tougher.
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This racket known as a political party will try to pervert the law in ways we’ve never seen. Reverse the meaning of every word we know. Trump is screaming that he’s the victim of a “coup.” What he is doing, of course, is perpetrating a coup, against the Constitution, with the eager help of Barr and Graham and all the rest of them. Trump is an idiot, but on some intuitive level, he’s a smart man, smart enough to know that to get away with staging a coup, the very first thing you have to do is to accuse your opponents of trying to stage one.
Barr and Graham and Mitch McConnell and everyone else around knows that they’ve thrown in, and having thrown in, they can’t throw out. Survival will require every kind of lie you can imagine, especially and exactly the lie of accusing their foes of that which they are doing themselves. And before this is over, they’re all going to be in on it.
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And one by one, we’ve witnessed Republicans who had objections to Trump in 2016 go over to the dark side. Those who remained critical of the mid-administration have dropped out or died (McCain).
It’s not your parent’s or grandparent’s GOP any more. It’s all the historical worst aspects of conservatism: racism, sexism, xenophobia, de-regulation, militarism, use of political office for personal gain, greed, isolationism, etc. BUT now the party’s corpse is up and running on nitro, sucking up to murderous world dictators, making enemies out of long-term allies, removing us from international treaties, separating families and traumatizing children, deregulation to the risk-point of systemic breakdown, and raising an extended middle finger at the law.
What’s not to impeach? 
