Max Boot used to be a Republican cheerleader. He's not cheering now. Things, he writes, have changed:
I’m old enough to remember when the Republican Party was known as the “party of ideas.” That was in the 1980s. Since then it has become the party of pseudo-scandals.
The change began with Newt Gingrich:
The change occurred, as the Princeton historian Julian Zelizer documents in his book “Burning Down the House,” because of the efforts of Newt Gingrich, then a Republican backbencher, to bring down House Speaker Jim Wright in the late 1980s. Casting about for dirt he could use, Gingrich focused attention on the fact that the speaker had published a book that was bought in bulk by lobbyists. While the book deal looked bad, it was not against the law or House rules. But it didn’t matter: Gingrich thundered that Wright was “the most corrupt speaker in the 20th century” and compared him to Mussolini. Wright was pressured into resigning, Gingrich soon became speaker himself, and the GOP was off to the races.
Since Gingrich's ascension, it's been all downhill:
Since then, the Republican Party, in cahoots with media partners such as Fox “News” and Rush Limbaugh, has manufactured one pseudo-scandal after another: Vince Foster’s suicide, Whitewater, Mena airport, John Kerry’s Swift Boat service, Barack Obama’s birth certificate, the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s emails, among others.
The party has become thoroughly focused on pseudo scandals. And, under Donald Trump, that focus has been turbocharged:
The process has been turbocharged under President Trump, who is even more ruthless and unscrupulous than Gingrich. The former reality-TV star won the 2016 election by defaming a former secretary of state and first lady as “Crooked Hillary” and demanding that she be locked up for unspecified offenses. Now he is trying to run the same playbook on Joe Biden.
Trump got himself impeached by trying to blackmail Ukrainian officials into accusing Biden and his son Hunter of wrongdoing. That didn’t stop Trump’s attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, from working with shady Ukrainian contacts — including a lawmaker described as a Russian agent by Trump’s own Treasury Department — to produce dirt on Biden. Until recently, this had resulted in a few audiotapes of interest only to One America News Network.
Then Giuliani turned over to the New York Post the supposed contents of a laptop supposedly belonging to Hunter. The alleged emails have never been authenticated, and the New York Times revealed that the New York Post’s own journalists had so little faith in the story that the lead reporter refused to put his name on an article he had written. The Washington Post reported that Trump’s own national security adviser told him that “any information Giuliani brought back from Ukraine should be considered contaminated by Russia,” and more than 50 former intelligence officers warned that the emails have “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” (Trump’s director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, denies that the laptop is part of a Russian operation, but he has scant credibility.)
The second non-scandal is the claim that Joe Biden was part of a 2017 deal with Hunter Biden involving a Chinese oil company. Even if true, this also wouldn’t be wrong, because Joe Biden was a private citizen then. But it’s not true. The Wall Street Journal reports that the venture “never received proposed funds from the Chinese company or completed any deals” and that “corporate records … show no role for Joe Biden.” So this was a deal that never occurred and that Joe Biden wasn’t involved in. Some scandal.
As if that weren’t bad enough, right-wing rumormongers have been spreading even more vile accusations against Hunter Biden that are straight out of QAnon. Donald Trump Jr. claimed to Fox News, with no evidence, that Hunter is linked to “human trafficking and prostitution rings.” How low can you go?
Trump knows no bottom. Nor does the Republican Party. It's rotten to its core.
6 comments:
Owen
However rotten the GOP is we cannot write them off as they steal the election. A ginned up SCOTUS,a cabal of Repuglican State Houses and a committed base of 40% that will never repudiate tRump.
The pundits are calling this election a success so far based on increased turnout, but is it really we will never know until election day whether this is a committed voter turnout or just an effort to make one's vote count.
Put me in the "convince me" column so far. I do not trust the repugs one iota and the Dems have a history of cocking things up. For instance they could have stopped the SCOTUS fiasco by having the Congress send articles of impeachment - pick a name but mine would be Barr, to the Senate. But the Dems still believing in fair play didn't have the cojones to do it.
Just my two cents worth, while I hold my breath
Lots of people are holding their breath, Ben -- because they know the Republicans have no bottom.
Trump is the culmination of a process that "old school" Republicans did nothing to derail when they might have saved their party. Das Boot supposedly didn't see the light until Trump was installed in office.
Boot et al sat on their hands as the Tea Party got its nose under the tent until the radical right consolidated its position within the Republican ranks. Today, QAnon followers are running for Congress. Some of these lunatics are expected to be elected.
I watched Bill Maher's show last night, for the first time in ages. He cited a survey that found 25% of the voting public believes in QAnon. Another 24% believes its possible that QAnon's conspiracy theories might be right. Let's remember the core conspiracy narrative is that Democrats, led by Hillary, are operating a pedophile, child trafficking ring. Yet QAnon has found a home in the "big tent" GOP.
Republican political promiscuity has brought the "party of Lincoln" low. The NYT weekend editorial is an obituary to the Grand Old Party.
"Mr. Trump accelerated his party’s demise, exposing the rot that has been eating at its core for decades and leaving it a hollowed-out shell devoid of ideas, values or integrity, committed solely to preserving its own power even at the expense of democratic norms, institutions and ideals."
"Having long preached “character” and “family values,” Republicans have given a pass to Mr. Trump’s personal degeneracy. The affairs, the hush money, the multiple accusations of assault and harassment, the gross boasts of grabbing unsuspecting women — none of it matters. White evangelicals remain especially faithful adherents, in large part because Mr. Trump has appointed around 200 judges to the federal bench."
"Mr. Trump just greased the slide. “He is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party has become in the last 50 or so years,” the longtime party strategist Stuart Stevens asserts in his new book, “It Was All a Lie.”
"The scars of Mr. Trump’s presidency will linger long after he leaves office. Some Republicans believe that, if those scars run only four years deep, rather than eight, their party can be nursed back to health. Others question whether there is anything left worth saving. Mr. Stevens’s prescription: “Burn it to the ground, and start over.”
Burn it down, Mound. Or failing that, let the party -- like the Israelites -- wander in the desert for forty years.
The Israelites will not have to walk too far!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/25/donald-trump-jr-2024-picture
Shudder, remedy a large single malt with ice and I do not mean those weird ICE stormtroopers of the US.
TB
Thanks for the link, TB.
"It is a political performance art to show your contempt for norms, institutions and education.”
That sums up Trumpworld. The rotten apple hasn't fallen far from the tree.
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