Earlier this week, yet another iconic venue of the liberal (’enemy of the people’) media, in this case The New Yorker Magazine, published the umpteenth version of how Trump’s legal and twitter campaigns against election ‘fraud’ represent an assault on our most cherished democratic institutions and “further undermine confidence in the U.S. government.”
The op-ed went on to chastise the “shamelessly craven nature of the Trump-era G.O.P. in Washington,” as compared to local Republicans who have stood up against Trump’s shameless and even dangerous attacks.
I have been listening to this continued drumbeat about the failure of Republican office-holders in D.C. to stand up against the leader of their own party and I must say that my friends on the blue team display some very short memories, when all is said and done. How many members of the Senate or House Democratic caucuses came out and denounced Bill Clinton for getting a pipe job in the Oval Office from a teen-age intern while he was talking on the phone?
Okay, now maybe that behavior didn’t represent a threat to our democratic institutions. So, I’ll give you a better one.
In 1967, just months before the Viet Cong launched the Tet offensive and basically began kicking our asses out of Viet Nam, Johnson asked for an additional increase in the military budget to ‘defend democracy’ in Southeast Asia. After all, Johnson wasn’t going to be the first American President to lose a war.
How many members of the Senate Democratic caucus refused to vote the dough? Exactly two – Ernest Gruening and Wayne Morse.
Want to believe that Trump’s tweets are a greater threat to this country than what we were doing in Viet Nam? Go right ahead.
The United States happens to be the only democratic country in the entire world which has not experienced a single, mass political challenge to its governmental institutions over the last one hundred years. When I went to France to study at the Sorbonne in 1969, the country was still recovering from a combined nationwide student protest and general strike – the May Days – that came within an inch of bringing the de Gaulle government to its knees.
This country has never had a general strike. This country doesn’t have a single union which espouses a Socialist line. This country does not have a single, national political party that calls for resistance to the government from the Right.
Yea, yea, I know about ‘all’ those schmucks armed with their assault rifles who show up at rallies protesting lockdown orders and other limits to our ‘freedoms’ and Constitutional ‘rights.’ I have lived and worked both in Europe and the Near East, and this country is so law-abiding that the idea the Trump is stirring up a massive assault on democratic institutions is a joke.
I don’t think there’s any other country which even understands the concept of getting in line. Don’t believe me? Try jamming your way onto a subway car in Madrid during the rush hour. Or maybe you should try driving around a traffic circle in Rome at any time.
Want a good test for how people respect each other’s space in public places? Watch what happens when a bus pulls up at the Ha Tahana HaMerkazit HaHadasha bus station in Tel Aviv and more than three people are waiting to get on. Have you ever seen what happens when three adults push their way through the entry doors of a bus at exactly the same time?
Let’s cut the bullshit once and for all. Trump’s no threat to democratic institutions. He’s a liar, a racist and a fool. And let’s just remember that there’s a runoff election in Georgia on January 5th and I guarantee you that every, single vote will be counted as carefully as the votes were counted for the election on November 3rd.
Send some money down to Georgia. Send it now: 2020 Georgia Senate Runoff — Donate via ActBlue.
Dec 05, 2020 @ 12:20:47
I don’t see how the Viet Nam was a threat to our democracy. That line has been used for at least 60 years to justify military spending while there was no real threat to our institutions or physical land. But the Dept of Justice actions this year – Barr basically following Trump’s orders – is against democracy. Heads of military accompanying him to the plaza in the midst of demonstrations gave me chills. And more. But I won’t take up more space here.
Dec 05, 2020 @ 23:03:26
Yeah, Trump’s a liar and a racist and a fool by all objective measurements, but that means nada to millions of voters and lots of their kids, and beyond that number, even more non-voters, and also to the RNC and its spidery network of committees. And now there’s the Internet, which as a mechanism to facilitate associations among persons and, let’s say, “clubs” formerly distanced on the map, can now rub up against each other to heat up all kinds of wacko ideas. And that rubbing happens very, very fast in these fiber-optic days. And the Republic is still trying to function in these Gingrich days, when the Fat Man From Georgia described politics as a winner-crush-the-loser coliseum sport, which concept continues to be supported by the likes of Grover Norquist, to whom every Republican must kneel and supplicate with a signed pledge to never raise taxes, else be destroyed by Grover-led incineration, using the same tactics as employed by the NRA and GOA and vicious “primarying” schemers dotting every State. Today it’s a New World, which it appears from your indifference to current facts and obvious poisonous currents enabled by 21st Century technology, you have not yet entered.
Dec 06, 2020 @ 06:27:41
Exactly, Trump doesn’t give a flying hoot if he is destroying democracy. He is in serious financial trouble and is simply staging a con and or grift to get enough money to pay off his debts and for money to hire lawyers to fight the 90 or so legal challenges coming his way after January 20. Most of the money that his sheep are giving him goes directly into his pockets. Trump is in deep dodo and he knows it. The only way he knows how to get out of it is how he has gotten away with everything in the past. Grift and con his way out!