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The Screaming Moderate

Oys! and Yos!

5/26/2021

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(The Screaming Moderate occasionally hands out awards for Yos! and Oys!, celebrating those individuals who do good deeds (Yo!) and bad ones (Oy!). The Committee on Yos! and Oys! meets when it feels like it.)

A gigantic Yo! to all those students (grammar, high school, and college) for adjusting and succeeding at distance learning the past year and to those graduates who endured/enjoyed their senior years without the traditional markers (proms, graduations) most of us had. It couldn’t have been easy and it had to take dedication and focus to ignore all the more fun things that surely distracted many from putting in the hours on their computers/tablets. Congratulations!

An equally gigantic Yo! to those first responders, health care workers and scientists who performed above and beyond to save as many people as possible from the pandemic at risk of their own lives. The scientists developed incredibly effective vaccines in an incredibly short amount of time that already is saving lives. Thanks, too, to former President Trump who okayed Operation Warp Speed which dedicated billions of dollars to rush the vaccine development. While he deserves credit for that, he also deserves a huge Oy! for his denial of the seriousness and neglect of pushing for mask-wearing and more to protect Americans. The battle is not over yet as more Americans need to be vaccinated, though. So, get vaccinated!
 
Oy! and yo! (Depending on your politics) to a group battling for the low ground to fill an eventual void of Donald Trump. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is doing his best Trump imitation not only by closing what should be public events to the press (except to his favored right-wing outlets like Fox or OAN) to trying to pull more and more power into the Governor’s hands and away from local officials.

Then there’s Georgia Cong. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose every utterance is aimed at raising money. She is a money-raising machine as well as a bigot, racist, anti-Semite and more. For her outrageous and hurtful comments, several weeks ago the House (all Democrats and 11 Republicans) censured Greene and removed her from all her committee assignments.  She is left to focus 100 percent on making outrageous comments and tweets, and to raise huge amounts of money, which seems to be the reason she ran in the first place.

This week’s mind-bending entry by Greene was comparing wearing masks to protect against COVID to the Holocaust. Yes, she did. Americans, she said, were tattooed with masks not unlike the tattoos forced on Jews in Nazi Germany to identify their backgrounds, and who went to their deaths in to the ovens.

Not much can be said about that. Speaks for itself. Greene, like her role model Trump, never apologizes, though she does take down Tweets (Lord, when did that become the bar?) Greene uses white identity and grievance politics just as Trump does. That’s because there’s a significant number of voters in the Party, or who at least vote for Trump, who agree with that.

Used to be someone ran for office out of ambition or arrogance or an honest devotion to service to his or her country. Now it seems people run so they can a get a big “commentator” cable news contract, to build a brand, raise money and say outrageous things. Another reason our D.C. politics is frozen. To apologize or admit mistake is to hurt your own brand. It’s done by politicians across the spectrum, but the standouts seem to on the right.

There are the runners-up in the “I want to be the next Trump” sweepstakes like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz who has buddied up to Trump despite Trump not only insulting Cruz’ wife during the 2016 Republican primary but accusing Cruz’ father of being among a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.

Then there is Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton who hasn’t smiled since…well, I’m not sure he’s ever smiled and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley who says he never raised his fist in solidarity with the January 6th insurrectionists despite photographic evidence that he indeed did.

Oy! to former President Donald Trump who has fought to keep his tax returns and other financial documents from the public eye (no, that’s not why this Oy!) but a  few weeks ago the former President, who has yet to (and never will) concede he lost the 2020 election, had his lawyers argue  to a judge, to keep those records private, in an official filing, “While the TRUST Act (key to this case)  is not the clearest statute, the best reading is that it does not apply to former presidents,” the argument stated, Voila, clearly the former President will argue against himself when it comes to letting the public know anything official about his finances. But the Big Lie continues.

A big Oy! to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (a front-runner to succeed Trump as the 2024 presidential nominee) who is doing his best to centralize state power in the state capital and shoving Florida from purple to red by fiat (Trump attempted to do this in Washington too). To get there, DeSantis has to stomp on the wishes of local governments (and citizens), which also goes against the grain of the traditional Republican Party which believes (believed?) that power must go to the local and state governments as much as possible. It’s an all-out assault on home rule, from seizing control in health care emergencies to messing around in police budgets to voters’ abilities to launch ballot initiatives.


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RIP GOP.

5/10/2021

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It’s not often you can predict a death with precision. But this is one time:

The Republican Party will breathe its last on Wednesday.

That’s when Cong. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) will be removed from the caucus’ leadership. Her crime: telling the truth.

This is why the GOP is on the brink of death. The House Republican leadership is officially banning the truth Wednesday. The Republican National Committee already has let the party pass on with its chairman, Ronna McDaniel (nee Romney), who long ago pledged fealty to a different philosophy. Well, not a philosophy really. A man.

To coin a phrase,  “They can’t handle the truth!”

The truth is (spoiler alert!) that Joseph Robinette Biden won the election last November, was sworn into office on Jan. 20 and is performing his duties as leader of the country and commander-in-chief. Yes, it’s true. And no phony recount in Arizona is going to change it.

But that is not the reality for the soon-to-be-late Republican Party. It now is (and you’ve heard this before many times) a cult. The Republican Party is being reborn, shedding its previous name of the Grand Old Party (GOP) and replacing and rebranding itself as the Cult of Trump (COT).

The Republican Party had a set of values it lived by and an ideology that led its thinking for many decades. The COT has neither. It has … Donald John Trump. Whatever Trump says, the party backs. Even his lies.

If you do not pledge fealty to Trump and his lie that he actually won the 2020 election, you are effectively blackballed from the party. Gone, Kaput. Ironically, you are "cancelled" – yes, the same “cancelling” that many in the COT have pointed fingers at liberals for their cancelling (but not really) Dr. Suess and Mr. Potato Head among  other things.

As Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (COT-Georgia) said of Liz Cheney, “her first fist bump to Biden was when she voted to impeach President Trump.” The picture of the fist bump Cheney gave to Biden as he headed to the podium to give his first Joint Session of Congress speech, “is just the one that made it public,” Greene said.

And, yes, showing respect to the presidency also no longer is part of the former GOP’s values.

Now, Green and her cohort Matt Gaetz (COT-Florida) are on a countrywide tour to call out Republicans in Name Only (RINOs) because they are not toadying to Trump.

It’s funny they call it a tour to out RINOs because those RINOs include folks who represent past big Republican office-holding families that helped build the party. Folks like Mitt Romney, whose dad was governor of Michigan, and former President George W. Bush, whose family spans  political involvement from the 18th to the  21st centuries. And, Ronald Reagan, once considered the gold standard of the modern party couldn’t get the nomination today.

Gaetz, a sitting congressman, makes time for the tour because it distracts from an investigation into his allegedly sleazy sex life involving girls (a female under 18) and other possible crimes.

Greene, a sitting congresswoman, has time because she was stripped by the House of all her committee assignments for her past incendiary comments and support of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

Meantime, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is so craven to be the Speaker of the House that he has buried any self-respect he earned when he first criticized Trump over the insurrection but then made his pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s ring.  As have other COT leaders.

A large part of the party now is promoting legislation across the country to suppress the votes of various constituencies that typically vote Democratic. They are using Trump’s Big Lie to justify those bills. They say they are tightening the security of elections because the last election was, well, it was secure and declared so by Trump Administration officials and multiple judges across the country, including many appointed by Trump.

One might ask of those pols, to coin another phrase, “Have you no sense of decency?”

McCarthy sees riding the Trump train as the way to achieve the Speakership because Trump is spending his first post-presidency months carrying out the Donald Trump Revenge Tour and finding candidates to primary anyone who ever took a stand against him.

Ironically, Cheney has a far better record voting for Trump policies than Rep. Elise Stephanik, who is likely to replace her as the House Republican Conference chair, third-ranking in GOP House leadership, which isn’t really much of a job but the title sounds good.

Cheney's vote ratings also make her among the more conservative of congressmen in the party.  But being a conservative is no longer the measurement to be in the party, now it is being wholly dedicated to Trump.

Also remember that Cheney is the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney who led the charge against those Weapons of Mass Destruction that were never found during the Bush 43 presidency. And his daughter was shoulder to shoulder with him on that. She did not vote for Trump’s first impeachment but did for his second, thus her banishment from leadership and probably from her House seat next election, if not before.

The conventional wisdom is that Republicans have to suck up to Trump so that his supporters stick with the party’s Congressional and Senate candidates, who, if blessed by Trump, have a leg up in most primaries within the party. While primaries aren’t elections, it wouldn’t take many wins to retake the House and the Senate in 2022, which is all McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has not pledged fealty to Trump, care about. In fact, McConnell is another long-time Republican leader that Trump would like to take out.

Then there is that poll, conducted by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), whose mission is to elect Republicans to the House, that shows Trump’s support is weak in “key battleground states.”  The poll was presented to Republican House members at a recent retreat.

But that negative information about Trump was left out of the presentation. Why? Because in the COT any informaiton negative to Dear Leader is hidden.

In the poll, Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in “core districts.” This information was withheld even though a sitting congressman asked that specific question during the presentation. Let’s call it the Littler Lie. And it's information that House Republicans should have been given at that retreat.

The Republican Party once stood for smaller government and against budget deficits. Those were not highlights of the Trump Administration. While Ronald Reagan is famous, among other things, for proclaiming “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Trump is famous for saying nothing ever to get Gorbachev’s successor, Vladimir Putin, upset.

Yes, I know, “what about the sanctions?” But you seldom heard Trump talk about them. He just kept saying nice things about Putin. Not to mention Trump's love letters pen pal,  Kim Jong-un in North Korea.

Trump also upended the GOP’s long-held support of free trade by criticizing trade deals entered into before he was elected, most negotiated by Republican administrations. And, he accused our NATO allies of not pulling their weight, putting a huge strain on our formerly strong relationships with our allies. And our hard-earned role as Leader of the Free World.

In short, things the party stood for, for decades, don’t matter anymore. It has lost its policy way. In fact, at the 2020 Republican Convention, the party had no platform – Trump didn’t want one. No philosophy, no ideology, no roadmap for leadership.

It all, though, gets whittled down to the Big Lie, which is that Trump actually won the election he lost, in a landslide according to Trump’s own calculations of what a landslide is (because Biden’s margin was similar to Trump's in 2016).

If you don’t side with Trump on the Big Lie, you can’t belong to the former Republican Party, demonstrated this week by the all-but-certain vote that will boot Cheney from leadership. For those current and former Republicans who don’t agree with the Big Lie, there are limited places they can go:
  • They can become Democrats and form a true Conservative caucus within that party;
  • Or, they can create a third party, which likely would strengthen Democrats because that third party would split votes with the Republican Party.

Those are about the only options.

The party that for years called itself The Big Tent is now a Pup Tent.


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    B. Jay Cooper

    B. Jay is a former deputy White House press secretary to Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He also headed the communications offices at the Republican National Committee, U.S. Department of Commerce, and Yale University. He is a former reporter and is the retired deputy managing director of APCO Worldwide's Washington, D.C., office.
    He is the father of three daughters and grandfather of five boys and one girl. He lives in Marion, Mass.

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