Trump pushes his party to normalize corruption

[Zorro]

With the impeachment trial of President Trump beginning in earnest, right-wing populism has come full circle. Trump was elected on the theory that American politics had become corrupt and broken. Now he is calling upon his party and his followers to normalize corruption and brokenness as essential features of our political order. It is a bold maneuver by a skilled demagogue. Trump has cultivated disrespect for politics as a dirty business and now seeks to benefit from dramatically lowered public standards.

The question at stake in the Senate trial is plain: Is the use of public funds as leverage to gain private, political benefits from a foreign government an impeachable abuse of presidential power? The matter is so simple that Trump’s Republican defenders are reduced to babbling incoherence in trying to avoid it. When asked whether Trump’s solicitation of foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election was proper, Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) responded, “Well, those are just statements, political. They make them all the time. .?.?. People do things. Things happen.”

“Things happen.” This is a revealingly ludicrous response to a charge of public corruption. No, trying to cheat in a presidential election is not like losing your keys or getting caught in the rain without your umbrella. Those are the kinds of “things” that just happen. The evidence that Trump cut off military aid to a friendly government in the middle of an armed conflict to compel that government to announce the investigation of a political rival is overwhelming. Several administration officials found this action so unethical, dangerous and disturbing that they expressed their alarm to relevant authorities. Those who dismiss such accusations as a political vendetta or a coup attempt are engaged in willful deception.

And because Trump denies any wrongdoing — pronouncing his own actions “perfect” — senators who vote for his vindication are effectively blessing such abuses in the future. Their action would set an expectation of corruption at the highest levels of our government.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-pushes-his-party-to-normalize-corruption/2020/01/20/0922102c-3bc1-11ea-b90d-5652806c3b3a_story.html

IMHO Republicans have embraced and encouraged the corruption of government institutions, processes, and norms for the past five decades.

[Marcuse]

1. Republicans seek to normalize corruption, foreign and domestic.

It's amazing on its face that Trump and his team are eager to make foreign bribes easier, but it's the larger political context that makes the story all the more extraordinary.

Republicans seem eager to tell the public that Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine, not as part of an extortion scheme, but because of the president's deep and abiding concerns about foreign corruption. The increasingly absurd talking point has been discredited by evidence, but there was Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday, once again asking people to believe Trump was committed to "rooting out corruption."

Except we know this wasn't the case in Ukraine, and it now doesn't appear to be true more broadly, either. As New York's Jon Chait explained, "Trump actually approves of corruption.... [T]he truth is that Trump has focused on corruption. He wishes there was more of it. It's astonishing that, even as Trump's impeachment defense hinges upon his supposed hatred for foreign corruption, his administration isn't even hiding its desire to weaken the country's most powerful law against overseas corruption."

[link:https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/white-house-eyes-backward-steps-anti-bribery-laws-n1119201|

[Newest Reality]

2. No Confidence!

I vote no confidence in any Republican who is currently holding office and who that supports any subversion of the fundamental aspects of our Constitution and the government that is based on it. I also vote no confidence to those office holders who passively ignore this crises when it is their sworn duty to protect it.

I say, no confidence, because that may be the result they just may get from a majority of the population. Not everyone projects a religious devotion on one party.

I am also willing to believe that no confidence may not matter to them if they, like trump, want to condition the public for the decimation of the system and the dark, Orwellian replacement of our democracy in order to assume complete control.