Dear America,
Reluctantly, I have to admit that there is disingenuousness on both sides of the congressional aisle these days. President Biden's "infrastructure package" does comprise infrastructure measures, but it also includes measures that have nothing to do with infrastructure. And now the Republicans have introduced their own infrastructure bill that comes to almost a trillion dollars, but it is strictly infrastructure as we have always used the term. They are on the right side of this argument in my opinion, but that doesn't change the character of the party on other issues in general. For example, the Republicans' insistence on investigating the Black Lives Matter movement concomitantly with the Democrat's proposed investigation of the January 6, 2021 invasion of the halls of congress is pure partisanship, and no amount of sophistry can change that. Their complain that there are already too many investigations of the insurrection when they initiated more than a dozen investigations of the attack on the Benghazi consulate by Libyan rebels in the hope that they could fabricate some connection to the events on the part of Hillary Clinton is nothing short of a contrivance. Republican shills like Daryl Issa and Trey Gowdy shamelessly and knowingly hyperbolized their purported righteous indignation to justify their public zeal for what they tried to characterize as the quest for just deserts...all to no avail by the way. And of course, the list of Republicans' overt insincerity goes on.
Who can forget Mitch McConnell's crocodile tears over his refusal to allow the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Merrick Garland because, he purred like the asp in The Garden, there was only a year until the next election and he insisted that the electorate decide who should be on The Court. Then, less than three months before the 2020 election he rammed through the Trump initiated nomination of Amey Coney Barrett in record time claiming some lame distinction that was without a difference between the two events as Ted Cruz wove a spider's web of historical precedents that didn't seem to come to mind when the nominee was put forward by a president from the other party. And most prominent of all Republican canards is the fixed election trope. It is so preposterous that the leadership of the party has disavowed it, but they have done nothing to prevent Donald Trump and his acolytes from perpetuating what can only be described as a malignant, self-serving fairy tale that actually inspired an attempt to overthrow the government by preventing congress from affirming the electoral college vote. People died on that occasion, yet Republicans like Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, is satisfied to call it a dead issue that we should all forget rather than investigate to determine who is to blame.
It would be one thing if all this were anomalous, but it is just a continuation of party history, and I don't mean just the politicians. In our family there are Trump voters who continue to harbor the delusion that Trump actually won the election along with the majority of registered Republicans. And you can go back to Nixon's "silent majority" and beyond for more of these false narratives that have allowed a minority of the American polity to claim themselves to be our nation's proper governors. The prolongation of the Vietnam War was Nixon's aim, but "The Pentagon Papers" proved that the war and its expansive lethality were a long lost cause that didn't justify the loss of life that occurred during the six years of the Nixon tenure.
And so, here we are again having to listen to the Republican prattle about a deficit in our budget that they gleefully embraced when they passed a tax bill favoring people like their new moral leader more than they did anyone else, and led to a trillion dollar deficit in its first year after enactment...this from the party of fiscal restraint. And we can add to their two-faced protestation their bemoaning of the impending withdrawal from Afghanistan, which one of their own started purportedly solely to effect the apprehension of Osama bin Ladin after 9/11. At that time the country was controlled by the Taliban, and now the Republicans profess to fear that they will ascend to control of the county again, ignoring the fact that without American intervention and the consequent losses of life and fortune, such would have been the case all along.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. There are moral differences between Republicans and Democrats that are fundamental. And while Democrats exhibit their own moral frailties, they don't rise to the level of nefariousness. I don't think the Republicans can say that of themselves.
Your friend,
Mike
Leave a comment