Dear America,
Not having any Trump atrocities to complain about or tweets to refute is such an odd feeling. After four years of living out the Mad Hatter's tea party, I barely know how to relax. I've awakened each day of Trump's presidency in fear of what folly was to play itself out that day, and now, lack of potential for a Trump debacle seems fantastical. Thank goodness, we still have the Republicans to dread, although even Mitch McConnell seems to be coming around in that he is almost amenable to convicting Trump at his impeachment trial. And now, Oklahoma Republican senator James Langford, who supported the fraudulent fraudulent-election conspiracy has published a qualified letter of apology to Tulsa's black community, disavowing the aspects of the Trump election conspiracy theory that focused on black voting districts in major cities, which was just about the entirety of the Trumpers' rationale. What's happening is that Republicans are finally recognizing that Trumpism was just a bad dream, and that the country has now woken up. There is still that lunatic fringe out there, which will probably never leave never-never land, but even if the Republican Party comprised no one but them, they would only represent about 80% of 27% of the electorate. So, if a Republican candidate gets that 21.6% of the votes in any future election, he or she still needs to come up with another 28.4% of the electorate to be elected even to the local sewer commission. That's 28.4% of an electorate that is presumably rational enough to recognize a candidate who is pandering to lunatics as a lunatic himself.
This is the imminent phenomenon that allowed me to wake up smiling today. Republicans have arrogated moral preeminence to themselves over the past four decades since Reagan was first elected by adopting sanctimony and trickling down as the national creeds. Since then, they have wallowed in their putative moral superiority, and Americans have drunk that Kool-Aid in buckets until just very recently. But since the downfall of the Mountebank Trump, America has been forced to wake up, and now questions are being asked. The vast majority of Americans know that there was absolutely no excuse for acquiescence in the Republicans' voter fraud conspiracy theory. No evidence supported it, and even if that weren't the case...even if there were no evidence either way...it was absurd on its face, which suggests that Republican rhetoric is absurd ab initio. Hence, Republicans have some explaining to do, especially the more-than 120 Republican congressmen and seven or eight Republican senators who protested and/or voted against affirmation of the electoral college vote for our president-elect, Joe Biden. They have shown themselves to be panderers and demagogues who seek nothing but self-promotion to higher office, and now they are going to have to scramble to just keep the offices they have now. No one is going to vote for someone who has subscribed to fraud in the name of retaining power and political favor...at least no one who isn't a Republican.
So here we are with the Republican political establishment largely in retreat, often groveling on their knees as they go, because they were co-opted by Trump and Trumpists on the election fraud issue, and scrambling to either claim that they know something that no one else knows or that they made an excusable mistake for which they should be forgiven. Even Republican Kevin McCarthy, the idiot minority leader of the House of Representatives who claimed to be qualified to be Speaker of the House after Paul Ryan--Ryan declined to run for reelection in the Trump era--is on the run. His qualification to be Speaker in his mind was that his party, largely under his leadership, had managed to defame Hillary Clinton sufficiently to keep her from winning the 2016 presidential election. But now he is abandoning his hyper-partisan sycophancy toward Trump in favor of seeking censure for Trump rather than impeachment and conviction in The Senate. Even the obsequious McCarthy knows that enough Trump is enough. And trailing right after him will be a parade of contrite Republicans beating their chests and gnashing their teeth as they complain that they were duped in their service to party loyalty, which like McCarthy, they claim to be a qualification to govern. Even Lou Dobbs, the wacko conservative pontiff of Fox News, is airing repudiations of the conspiracy theory, presumably in an effort to redeem his credibility among someone other than his fellow wackos.
I've heard political commentators say that the Republicans are in a good position to make inroads on the Democratic hegemony in the House and Senate in 2022, but the only way that can happen in my estimation is if no one has learned his lesson from the Trump presidency. But even if you didn't read the news, you couldn't help but see that our country had dropped into a rabbit hole worthy of a maleficent fairy tale. The Republican myth of moral superiority is now defunct. Thus, the only question that will be answered in 2022 is, who wants to stick our collective finger in the fan...again.
Your friend,
Mike
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