CSotD: Mush from the Wimps

I’ve got to agree with John Cole on this one: The response from the GOP to the revelations from Mar A Lago are at least as disappointing and depressing as the facts themselves. (If you didn’t get that headline, here’s the background.)

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) have been burning up the Twittersphere with over-the-top anti-Democratic distractions, as have the somewhat anonymous GOP accounts, but nobody on that side of the aisle seems to want to address the plain fact that Donald Trump not only mishandled top secret documents but took them out of the White House to his private home and falsely claimed to have returned them when he clearly hadn’t.

Well, except to keep calling the FBI’s legal search a “raid,” as if they’d swept into Palm Beach like the James/Younger gang attacking Northfield, Minnesota.  Which, by-the-by, is being celebrated as we speak, as a victory for law-and-order.

The Great Northfield Bank Raid inspired a couple of pretty good movies, while the FBI Fully Legal Well-Justified Search has inspired this

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Christopher Weyant)

 

(Michael Ramirez — Creators)

 

(Rob Rogers)

Weyant dismisses it as yet another example of Trump’s ongoing disregard for the norms of our government, which brings to mind what others have said: The Constitution and our overall system have their safeguards, but are very largely based on the assumption that we want the government to function and the nation to continue to exist.

We’ve had a few bumps in the road, certainly: Aaron Burr attempted to set up his own little empire, and the same year the James/Younger Gang hit Northfield, the Rutherford B. Hayes Gang bribed their way into the White House, and then there was that unpleasantness in which half the country rejected the results of a presidential election and 750,000 Americans were killed before order could be somewhat restored.

“Somewhat” referring back to the promises kept by Hayes and currently being resurrected by disloyal citizens in response to the results of the 2020 election.

Five-Thirty-Eight states that, “out of 529 total Republican nominees running for office, we found 196 who fully denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election” and that 60% of voters, so far, will have the opportunity to put one or more of these supporters of Trump’s fraudulent claims into office in November.

Ramirez — who seems to have missed the memo explaining that being “conservative” has become a loyalty test and no longer means clinging to conservative values — questions calls by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene to dispense with law enforcement if it insists on enforcing the law.

It’s also worth wondering if the issue of “What did Trump’s Congressional supporters know and when did they know it?” can be answered by the fact that Rand Paul recommended abolishing the Espionage Act before it was even revealed that Trump was hoarding nuclear secrets.

This raises the important question, where is Rand Paul’s neighbor when our country needs him?

Meanwhile, Rogers simply points out that the Republican switch from defending law-and-order to promoting anarchy and one-man rule is a gift to the Democrats that Biden has seized upon.

 

Which may explain why, despite how Republicans and their supporters have dwelt upon his approval ratings, his current ratings place him above Trump, Clinton and Reagan, only one of whom (no names, please) failed to be re-elected to a second term. And bear in mind that the two he trails most dramatically were waving flags and waging war at this point in their administrations, which tends to skew things in their favor.

The Wall Street Journal notes a surge in overall support for Democrats in the upcoming election, fueled more by the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade than other events, while additional polling indicates, perhaps incongruously, that most Democrats would like Biden to step aside in 2024 to let younger hands take over the top spot, a case made eloquently by AB Stoddard in a must-read posting at the Bulwark.

However, before any Democrats begin popping the corks, Marc Murphy cautions that loyalty to Trump is based not on his policies or actions but on a sense of tribal allegiance that transcends established senses of America’s place in the world as well as the common decency of adherence to law, to Christian values and to plain good manners.

Which brings us to a second

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Bob Gorrell — Creators)

 

(Man Overboard)

Gorrell is one of several rightwingers who have seized on immigration at our southern border as a crisis without offering any evidence indicating that things are dramatically worse under Biden than they were under Trump, or showing that increased numbers of apprehensions show failure rather than success.

Several of them attack Biden for failing to go to the border for photo ops, while attacking Harris for doing just that, without any acknowledgment that both met with Mexican President López Obrador in Washington, during which talks Biden revealed significant action on border security, including having Mexico pony up $1.5 billion in improvements.

This might be readily dismissed as spin — even with the unsupported accusation of insanity — had Dear Leader not made such a big deal out of his empty pledge to get Mexico to pay for a wall.

At the same time, it seems of a piece with efforts to establish Christianity as a state religion while, as Man Overboard notes, carefully confining the actual teachings of Christ to Sunday morning sermons.

All of which is to say that, if you’re looking for rational discussions of political theory, you’ve come to the wrong country.

 

Instead, we get farcical justification for clearly illegal actions, spoofed here by Dave Whamond.

 

And, as Adam Zyglis depicts it, we have ugly, partisan backlash in place of intelligent debate over the role of political parties in preserving and advancing the national interest, or, as every member of Congress has said

“True faith and allegiance” having to do not with whether someone might shoot someone else on Fifth Avenue but whether he might abscond with documents that should not have even left a secure location for the White House residence, and which could readily subvert our national security should they fall into the wrong hands.

Or even the theoretically right ones.