What Lindsay Graham has admitted he said, which amounts to a lawyerly-liarly way of soliciting Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State to throw out legally cast ballots should be as serious a felony that would not only get him ejected from any elected office, any appointed office and which should result in him serving a very long prison term in a real prison. What Doug Collins is accused of and is known to have said to pressure him to do the same should result in his expulsion from the House and, if convicted, to also result in a very long prison term. And they are only a few of the Republicans whose crimes against democracy in this election should result in their incarceration.
We have not taken crimes against democracy seriously at all, considering the rapidly mounting death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic, the results of autocracy under Republican-fascism proves the stupidity of using the misnamed honors system as the first defense of it, there being no further serious defense of it made even now.
The fact is our system has always been screw-ball, requiring elected officials and those appointed to judicial office and other offices to swear loyalty to the Constitution when the only legitimate source of their power is not the Constitution but the consent of the governed. THE PEOPLE. All of The People, that and egalitarian democracy are who they should be required to swear faith and faithful service to. And those who violate that trust should suffer a harsh penalty.
The Los Angeles Times had an op-ed in it that for any good ideas it might have contained, shows how inadequate a conventional, go along to get along analysis of the danger Republican-fascism poses for us.
The Republican Party’s refusal to write a platform for 2020 was a watershed moment. Instead of issuing a traditional document, GOP leaders put out a memo essentially saying that their only goal was Donald Trump’s reelection. That move revealed the current Republican Party to be completely untethered from the one that governed during the Reagan and Bush administrations.
The post-election drama shows this break even more starkly. Trump has refused to concede the race, falsely claiming the election is rife with fraud. Republicans in Congress, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and other GOP officeholders have overwhelmingly gone along with this, refusing to acknowledge President-elect Joe Biden’s clear victory and supporting Trump’s baseless legal challenges. The few prominent Republicans who have called on Trump to admit defeat, for the most part, have “former” in their titles.
One could argue that these two camps represent different factions of the Republican Party, motivated by different ideological visions for the party or representing different interest groups competing for influence. But that’s not exactly right. In some ways, it makes more sense to see these as almost completely different Republican parties. The Republican Party of 2012 — the one that nominated Mitt Romney for president and recommended moderation and an embrace of immigrants after his loss — bears staggeringly little similarity to the Republican Party of 2020.
That is total nonsense. The Republican Party of 2012 was the party that not only supported but insisted on the presidential ratfucking by a. Jeb Bush, b. the Republican Florida Secretary of State, c. Bush cousin John Ellis on FOX, etc. AND MOST OF ALL BY FIVE REPUBLICANS ON THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT, ONE OF WHOM, SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR, HAD BEEN REPORTED TO BE UPSET WITH AL GORE WINNING THE ELECTION BECAUSE SHE WANTED A FELLOW REPUBLICAN TO NAME HER SUCCESSOR.
No, the Republican Party of 2012 was also the Republican Party that, along with the billionaire astro-turf, cabloid fueled "tea party" weaponizing of racism against the first Black President, the party which had made the fully Trumpian Sarah Palin a powerful figure. It may have had one last gasp at a nominee who could pose as better than that, in a dishonest Susan Collins manner, Mitt Romney, but it had long been all-in on what's wrong with the Republican Party.
The fact is we have a party which favors democracy, the aptly named, at least after Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, Democratic Party, and a party of aristocracy and oligarchy and, as conditions make it to the benefit of the oligarchs, fascism. There may be the odd Republican who is not a fascist and a few who credibly reject fascism. There were some of those who rightfully concluded that the turn to fascist authoritarianism was not something they were OK with at all and that's somewhat to their credit. Even flawed people are capable of rising above their flaws in a crisis and that is not to be rejected. But there was always something very wrong with the Republican Party, certainly from the time they gave Nixon their nomination in 1960 and Barry Goldwater - who ran a viciously racist, anti-Latino campaign in 1964. The "southern strategy" of winning with racism pre-dates the traditional attribution of that to the 1968 Nixon, who won on the power of Supreme Court permitted lies in the media. There is virtually no one who is a Republican now whose own participation in the party pre-dates that turn.
I believe, fully and totally, in the power of redemption and that once someone is fully and permanently converted to the good, the true, the politics of the Golden Rule and charity to all their previous life is changed to the better. If the sincere and consistent and wise "never Trump" faction of former Republicans truly are converted to that many of their previous stands will be found to be inconsistent with their new convictions. The authenticity of their conversion is as reliant on their changed behavior as that of any former Stalinist or Maoist or Trotskyite who rejected those forms of authoritarianism for egalitarian democracy is dependent on their changed behavior. I think I have established myself as enough of a critic of the "left" of such supporters of mass-murdering gangsters who flew the red flag to make that critique of the democratic right, assuming such an entity is possible. I have certainly not skimped in my rejection and criticism of those I formerly considered worthwhile of consideration, even admirable, even if I, myself, had rejected Marxism from the start. I will admit that a lot of my former willing blindness to the evil of Marxism was quite similar to what obviously motivates the kind of journalistic cowardice that negligently fails to call Republican-fascism what it is.
But to pretend that anyone who has rejected Trumpism can reform the Repubican Party is to foster a delusion. It was fashionable, late in his life, as Barry Goldwater felt eternity creeping up on him to pretend that Goldwater was better than Nixon or Reagan or Bush I. That is the sort of media-based delusion that flows from that dodge of lazy, cowardly "journalism" both-siderism. There has been something seriously wrong with the Republican Party for a long, long time. It has always been a party with a small minority of decent people in it led by the servants of oligarchy and wealth. If it is true that you cannot serve both God and Mammon (wealth) then the Republicans have definitively chosen to serve the wealthy. That is not unknown among Democrats but there is a reason the billionaires support the Republicans.
If the sincere Never-Trumpers are not willing to sign onto a radical level of leveling in the post-Trump world but are unwilling to participate in the destruction of even the semi-democracy we have now, they would do better to found their own party and hope that they can topple the Republican Party like the Whigs were by the Republicans of 1860, the one and only example of a successful third party effort in our history. They will never fix the Republican Party, it is as stupid an idea as the idea that you could fix Nazism or Stalinism or fascism or Maoism. It can't be done.
I remember, during one of the interminable "Whitewater" hearings that were held under the Gingrich House,that the officially designated "decent Republican" Iowa's Jim Leech, "What's a nice guy like you doing in a party like this?" The answer was he was serving the same purpose as Henry Hyde, Lindsay Graham, etc. It's what they all do.
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