little arts

 

The Washington Post

Opinion by George F. Will, Columnist:

Will Senate Republicans allow their louts to rule the party?

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---------------- The first of this century's national traumas is denoted by two numbers:  9/11.  One purpose of, and a sufficient justification for, the second impeachment of the 45th president was to inscribe this century's second trauma in the nation's memory as:  1/6.

Although not nearly as tragic as 9/11 in lives lost and radiating policy consequences, 1/6 should become, as its implications percolate into the national consciousness, even more unsettling.  Long before 9/11, Americans knew that foreign fanaticisms were perennial dangers.  

After 1/6, Americans know what their Constitution's Framers knew:  In any democracy, domestic fanaticisms always are, potentially, rank weeds that flourish when fertilized by persons who are as unscrupulous as they are prominent.

The Framers are, to the 45th president, mere rumors.  They, however, knew him, 

as a type -- a practitioner of what Alexander Hamilton (in Federalist 68) disdainfully called "talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity."  Post-1/6 America has a quickened appreciation of how those "little arts," when magnified by modern modes of mass communication as wielded by occupants of the swollen modern presidency, make civilization's brittle crust crumble.

Intelligent people of goodwill disagree about the constitutionality of an impeachment trial of a former president.  Forty-four Republican senators voted (generally less from constitutional conviction than from political convenience) to truncate the trial.  

They lost, but their role as jurors remained.  In that constitutional role their duty was to decide whether the president's two months of inciting what occurred on 1/6 constituted an impeachable offense.  As this is written on Friday, only the size of the see-no-evil Republican majority is in doubt.

The presentation by the House impeachment managers was a demonstration, the more welcome for its rarity, of congressional conscientiousness and meticulousness.  

Congress is an investigating institution, for three purposes:  To establish the need for particular legislation.  To provide oversight of the operation of existing laws and the institutions they undergird.  

     And to inform voters about matters that they must understand in order for representative government to function.  The investigative aspect of impeachment proceedings serves this third purpose.

Information is inherently good, and the trial was a cornucopia of information about the sights and sounds of 1/6.  And about the Republican Party.  Its congressional membership overwhelmingly says, and perhaps believes, that 1/6, and the low presidential intrigues that preceded it, were not violations of the presidential oath to defend the Constitution.

As the trial proceeded, there appeared a new aspirant for membership in the Republican senators' large Lout Caucus:  Lindsey O. Graham (South Carolina), Ted Cruz (Texas), Josh Hawley (Missouri), Marco Rubio (Florida), Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), et al.  

     In Ohio, Josh Mandel announced his candidacy to replace Rob Portman, the temperate conservative and meticulous legislator who is retiring in 2022.  Mandel said the impeachment "got my blood boiling to the point where I decided to run."  His blood boils frequently:  This will be his third Senate run.

His agenda for creating a more perfect union is "to pulverize the uni-party," meaning "this group of Democrats and Republicans who sound exactly the same and are more interested in getting invited to the cocktail party circuit than they are in standing up for the Constitution."  

With his stupefying unoriginality, Mandel sounds exactly like innumerable congressional Republicans who clawed their way to Washington by espousing an anti-Washington-cocktail-circuit stance as conservatism.  Mandel has perfect pitch for populism's rhetorical banalities.

...Today's two major parties have framed political competition since the middle of the 19th century -- since the Republicans rose from the rubble of the Whigs.  An essential conservative insight about everything is that nothing necessarily endures.  Care must be taken.  The Republican Party will wither if the ascendant Lout Caucus is the face it presents to this nation of decent, congenial people. ------------------------- End

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reader comments

~~  Funny how Republicans join 'the establishment' by knocking it, and then will do absolutely anything, including sedition, to stay IN 'the establishment'.

~~  Republicans decided to let the louts take over back in 2010--remember the tea party?  They weren't just guys in tricorn hats.  Their protest signs were viciously racist, they talked openly about killing the president for "treason", they carried weapons at their demonstrations.  

The GOP has been a sanctuary for bigots, con artists, authoritarians, bible beaters, and cuckoo bananas conspiracy theorists for at least the last decade.

~~  Where the eff have you been, Mr. Will?  The louts have been running the Republican Party since Lee Atwater.

~~  There are three qualifications for being a Republican candidate, now:

1) drooling loyalty to Trump

2) mediocrity so aggressive that it sinks to the level of imbecility

3) absolutely no ideology other than #1, above.

~~  "Will Senate Republicans allow their louts to rule the party?"

Is this a trick question?

~~  Josh Mandel is such a weasel.  He was involved in student government when I was in grad school at Ohio State in the late '90s, and there was more than one occasion where he got in trouble because he couldn't be bothered to color inside the lines.  By all accounts, he's gotten even worse since then.

~~  Let us not be too quick to accept this Republican "abandonment" of Trump; that is part of the whitewash.

     The GOP is animated by a marriage of social conservatism (zealous intolerance and racism), economic libertarianism (corporate welfare and income inequality) and foreign policy hawkishness (other people's children getting killed for economic libertarianism).  

Republicans consider laws, morals, ethics, and honesty as weaknesses to be exploited for profit; this--and active harmful measures against minorities--is their platform.  

Republicans have always defended vertically integrated corporate monopoly, tax cuts bankrupting the federal budget for corporate subsidies, and ignoring human rights as inconvenient obstacles to corporate profit.  

At least since 1980, Republicans have sought to "govern" in the same manner as the Nazis did during the short-lived Weimar Republic, to purposefully destroy the government from the inside.  

The slurry of financial, sexual, violent, and ethically questionable actions and crimes is normal Republican behaviour, just more obvious under Trump because of its non-apologetic openness.

Republicans own Trump.  They are Trump.  To their core, their essence, their marrow.  Trump is the conjoined twin of every Republican running for or in office at every level nationwide.  

No Republican is excused or exempt from complete association, complicity, or enabling of Trump's every action and utterance since January 2017.  

Republicans used Trump as a distraction from their quiet enacting of the agenda cited above, which remains the same.  

Only now Trump has become inconvenient does the public distancing start.

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