“I am extremely disappointed that a candidate like Corey Stewart could win the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. This is clearly not the Republican Party I once knew, loved and proudly served. Every time I think things can’t get worse they do, and there is no end in sight,” sigh tweeted former Virginia Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, sounding like a frog who’s suddenly noticed that the water temperature has just reached Fahrenheit 213.
Yes, the victory of unreconstructed rebel Corey Stewart, who thinks that the Confederacy’s single crime was its failure to kill enough Yankees, is an embarrassment and a disgrace to the “proud” name of the Republican Party. But it’s not as if there haven’t been warning signs visible for, say, the last 30 years.
Back in January 2017, on the eve of Donald Trump’s ascent to office, I wrote what was perhaps the easiest prediction in all of political haruspicy (divination of future events based on the examination of the entrails of sacrificial animals): “Donald Trump Will Be Our Very Worst President, By A Very Wide Margin”. In that piece I reviewed the long litany of Republican crimes, and the growing delight in those crimes! Yeah, we lie and cheat! That’s what winners do!
To choose only one example, when the news about the Reagan administration’s appalling record of high crimes and misdemeanors,1 aka “Iran/Contra”, first broke, innocent true believer Andrew Sullivan was shocked. Wait a minute! We’re the good guys! But Charles Krauthammer enlightened him. No, kid! We’re the smart guys!
Republican “honor” was officially tossed out the window with the election of Bill Clinton and Republicans adopted the position of zero cooperation with a Democratic president that they have adhered to ever since, consciously seeking to wreck every policy advanced by a Democrat as a matter of political “principle”, regardless of its effect on the country. During the Obama administration, Republicans deliberately sought to make the Great Recession worse, in the hopes of weakening Obama. “The worse the better” was their motto, though they never had the courage to state it openly.
Well, now they have their worst. Self-appointed good guys like Bill Bolling and William Kristol, who are revolted by what the Republican Party has become, should be equally revolted by their role in that becoming.
- Imagine if Bill Clinton had sold weapons to Iran and then used the money to fund abortion programs in Africa in defiance of legislation passed by a Republican Congress and signed by him. Would he have been impeached? I think so. ↩︎
