“We’ll never know, because after he screws something he gives it $130,000 not to tell anybody.”
As someone long scornful of Donald Trump I had to laugh at that Colbert joke on last night’s Late Night. On the other hand most of the rest of Stephen’s all too easy shots in the fish barrel were more dispiriting. I once found some refuge in late night comics dishing back to President Trump the same crap he spews out every day. Its getting old now even if it seems ever bit as necessary as it did with his inauguration.
My inclination is to blame this on what the Republican Party has become more than the man who can not grow up to his unexpected responsibilities. Heck, all he wanted from his run for the Presidency was to buy Fox News. Now he has to turn his campaign straw into gold like a Trumpelstiltskin. Republican hatchet-men made their party vulnerable to the hamstring Republicans that, while representing about ten percent of America, have the power to throttle any useful compromises. The call themselves “freedom Republicans.” Their self identification reminds me of the old union complaint about right to work laws being right to starve laws. Its so ironic that the un and underemployed blue collar workers who might once have brandished this accusation at Republicans now vote with the same Republicans that exported their jobs overseas.
I published the full email I received from the fellow who once hailed me as “Handsome Harry.” It seems to be a precursor of the anonymous pro-white flyers being sent to the Iron Range and St. Cloud. My old friend seems to think its OK to distinguish “good” black people from the bad ones by calling the bad ones like our 44th President a “nigger.” I think he’s got his head up his ass. No doubt Donald Trump would have included my old ally among the “good people” protesting at Charleston. I can’t help but think that in 1921 my old friend might have been caught grinning in that old photo of satisfied citizens next to the downtown lamp post where Clayton, Jackson and McGhie were lynched. They hung the alleged rapists of a white girl with all the ceremony that Donald Trump used in full page ads in New York Daily’s calling for the execution of five innocent black kids for a rape they didn’t commit. Talk about generating “fake news.”
My friend keeps sending me links to news reports extolling the virtues of the anarchic Trump Presidency. The six or seven points my old friend makes are echoed in a long series of letters from Trump supporters who were highlighted in the New York Times a couple days ago in letters that saw no need to spew out the “N word” I so loathe. They testfiy to Trump’s “Vision, Chutzpah and Testosterone.”
There is not a single one of the talking points that aren’t deeply flawed, at least as I see them. I’ve probably found fault with most of the arguments somewhere in my blog at some point over the past two years. Taken together they make clear the guilt the Republican Party should shoulder for where America is right now. The folks who believe this Fox/Limbaugh embellished twaddle are rightfully angry that the nation’s politics are so dysfunctional. They are dysfunctional because the Republican Party hatchet-men began creating a class of No Nothings who could be counted on to primary out all moderate Republicans to extinction. The Republicans who are now called moderates would have been regarded as hardliners when I began easing away from the GOP in the early 1990’s. For ten years before that it was irritating to go to political conventions where the other side regarded a pro-choice guy like me as a baby killer or worse a “Mass Murderer.” Today’s pro-lifers are so committed to a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v Wade that they have no problem with designing an elective system that discourages untrustworthy Americans from voting and gerrymands districts and that denies a legitimately elected President from having the Congress consider his appointments for vacant judgeship’s in Federal Courts.
I suspect like my old ally the self identified “Freedom Republicans” feel they are sticking up for the “little people.” Funny, but that’s just how the supporters of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro view themselves all the while preventing the majority of their country from electing a more representative government. That’s the rot that the Republican Party has wrought.
