Only eight years ago—how time flies!—Republicans were actually embarrassed by the fact that since 1988 their nominee for president had won more votes than his opponent only once, compared to five second-place finishes. Now if you ask a Republican “strategist” about the fact that it’s now one out of eight, he’ll explain to you genially that that’s why we have an electoral college: The majority is supposed to lose! Otherwise, well, we’d have the worst kind of tyranny, the tyranny of the majority! Thank God the Founders saved us from all that!
Donald Trump’s disgusting demagoguery, and the Republican establishment’s disgusting indulgence in it, will, of course, not prevent Joe Biden from actually taking his place in the White House. But it will most assuredly embolden Republican governors and state officials to become even more “aggressive”—that is to say, arbitrary and corrupt—in rooting out “corruption”—that is to say, Democratic votes.
From now on, Republicans will treat every election as a “Flight 93 election”, one in which the opposition is so monstrous that it is “necessary” to “fight fire with fire”—to treat every Democratic victory as proof of corruption and to use the legal apparatus of the state to “punish” such wrong-doing..
Republicans have been heading way for a long time. Donald Trump’s efforts are so noxious that even vicious right-wing attorney/plug-ugly Ben Ginsberg is gagging on the swill and working against Cap’n Two Scoops, but, as this piece by WashPost reporter Michael Kranish makes clear, Ginsberg has dirt aplenty on his hands. Ever since the 2000 presidential election, when the “Shameless Five”—William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas—handed the presidency to George Bush on a silver platter, Republicans have been in the vote suppression business. In the future, I think, they will make the shift from suppression to theft.
It’s certainly better than nothing that Ginsberg, and fellow vicious right-wing attorney/plug-ugly Steven Calabresi, co-founder of the “notorious” Federalist Society, have limits. Calabrezi whined about Robert Mueller’s “unconstitutional” investigation of the Trump campaign’s blatant Russian connections, which they could never stop lying about, and also opposed Trump’s impeachment for illegally halting congressionally allocated funds to Ukraine in order to squeeze out a political favor from that country’s new president, brutally corrupting the country’s legal system in the process, but when Trump started talking about postponing the election, Calabrezi went ballistic, writing an Op-Ed for the New York Times demanding, yes, Trump’s immediate impeachment if he didn’t shut the hell up about a postponement.
So, to vary the metaphor, and the orifice, both Ginsberg and Calabrezi could, in the words of Ronald Reagan, crap a pineapple but not a cactus. But in the future, them cacti will be a-flyin’. We are so not out of the woods on this one.
Afterwords
Attorney General William Barr is yet another vicious right-wing attorney/plug-ugly with about an eighth of a conscience, refusing, for example, to indict Hillary Clinton for “treason” just because Donald Trump told him to. Next time around, we should be so lucky.
UPDATE Bolton Gone Wild!
John Bolton, one of my least favorite neanderthal neocons puts the wood to both Donnie in Denial Trump and cowardly Trump-coddlin’ Republican whores like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in this op-ed for the Washington Post. If Republicans like Mitch had a sense of shame, this might make a difference. But that's a pretty big if.
Do any of the Republicans have a sense of shame?!
Perhaps Mitt Romney. I read Woodward’s “Rage”. Trump “trusted” Woodward who was all the time taping their
conversations. Trump knew it. He has no shame! What a joke!