Once The GOP Voted To Acquit, The Masks Fell Off
The GOP drove a stake into the heart of America.
Once you get past the bullshit, what the Republican Party said to everybody in the United States and the rest of the world at the impeachment trial is, “Who are you gonna believe? Us or your lying eyes?”
As a political strategy, it’s somewhat unconventional, I’ll admit. But it’s all they had left in their toolbox.
What the Republicans are doing right now reminds me of a bad comedian who’s shouting insults and lousy jokes at a silent audience that gets angrier the longer he’s on stage. Worse, the bad comedian doesn’t know it and thinks he’s doing great, so he cranks it up.
Similarly, the GOP isn’t reading the room clearly at all, because if they did, they would realize that not convicting Trump was the stupidest thing they could do. But they did it anyway.
Maybe these idiots should have Googled the word “consequences” first. As much as the Republicans hate paying taxes, they’re really going to hate all of the overdue karmic bills piling up in their mailboxes.
There’s a blogger named The Rude Pundit who made the point that back in the day there were Democrats who bought into the mythology of Tip and Ronnie drinking scotch together and putting aside their differences to get things done. That generation of Democrats are mostly gone now.
The Democrats in congress now grew up in the era of 9/11, An Inconvenient Truth, Sarah Palin, an inadequate minimum wage set in concrete, abortion clinic bombings, Rush Limbaugh, school shootings and Nazis marching openly in the streets.
These Democrats know that the Republicans have always been batshit crazy, and they’re pissed off. If anything, it’s the GOP who should be scared, because in the current political landscape Charlie Brown isn’t fooled by a smirking Lucy holding the football anymore.
For example, calling witnesses for the trial is what the GOP wanted the Democrats to do. When Lindsay Graham suggested it, the Democrats knew it was a trap. It’s a standard ploy from the Republican playbook.
Make promises you don’t intend to keep, bog everything down in the bureaucratic swamp so nothing gets done, employ your useful tools in the media to blame the Democrats for their failures. Delay delay delay, and hope something bad happens. Remember how Ted Kennedy’s death impacted the ACA?
Monstrous as it sounds, the last thing the GOP wants is a functioning government that’s responsive to the needs of their voters. Why? Because it’s harder to con the public into thinking “the government is the problem” when the last four years brutally illustrated what happens when the government doesn’t help at all.
And while Trump did bring more voters to the GOP, Trump also brought even more voters to the Democrats. He single-handedly negated the “both parties are the same” nonsense and terrified those voters who before could afford to be indifferent.
Mitch McConnell knows this, and he understands that Trump’s attempted coup put the GOP in a lose-lose situation. No matter how much lipstick Fox News puts on this pig, this acquittal ain’t pretty. I think that’s the reason Mcconnell is throwing Trump under the bus now.
There’s a big problem, however. Although McConnell is a cynical political hustler who can easily talk out of both sides of his mouth, trying to explain why he and the majority of the Republicans in the Senate voted to acquit a traitor who betrayed the United States is a damned hard sell.
Other than the bigoted idiots that voted for Trump, I believe that everybody else in the country probably felt like President Biden when he said, “This sad chapter in our history has reminded us that democracy is fragile,” and it’s absolutely horrifying to think about how close we came to losing it.
And the GOP didn’t give a damn. But that shouldn’t be a surprise, right? They didn’t give a damn when Covid-19 killed over 400,000 people either.
No matter how many atrocities happened during the Trump administration, other than giving tax cuts to white billionaires, the Republicans did nothing because they didn’t give a damn. They never did.
Unfortunately for them, everybody else knows it too, since this bad joke of an impeachment trial definitively exposed the GOP as frauds who can’t offer anything of value to the country.
That’s why Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations presently suffering from amnesia, is saying, “Donald who?”. A group of former Republican officials disgusted with Trumpism are talking about forming a third party. And thousands of Republican voters are leaving the GOP after the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.
I’m sure the GOP thinks they “won” the impeachment battle, but they lost the war.
