Click here for an excellent article by Charlie Pierce at Esquire entitled "The Question Isn't How the Republican Party Produced This Disastrous President*. It's How It Took This Long." (I like the way Charlie always refers to the president* with an asterisk to signify something lesser, like a steroid cheat.)
The party is the problem, because of what it's become—a vehicle for bigotry, religious fanaticism, rigged elections, retrograde social policies, renegade plutocracy, staggering wealth inequality, scientific ignorance, reflexive stupidity, violent populism, white supremacy, and a view of the American electorate that is all switch and no bait. (Did I miss anything?)
Well, that's a pretty good start, Charlie. He goes on:
Three times since 1981, the Republicans have produced a president who basically embodied all of these things, just to varying degrees. Ronald Reagan played fast and loose with the truth; is that business about trees causing air pollution really any nuttier than whatever it was that El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago tweeted at 5 a.m. this morning? George W. Bush launched a war on false pretenses and made this a nation that tortures people and is proud of it. Is that any better than what's going on at the border now? The question isn't how the Republicans produced this particular disaster of a president*. The question is what took them so long.
What to do, what to do?
The only possible way to change the Republican Party is to force it to answer for itself, over and over again. One of the biggest mistakes ever made in American politics, as the redoubtable Driftglass reminds us almost daily, was the Democratic Party's blunder in letting the Republican Party off the hook for the various catastrophes wrought by the administration of C-Plus Augustus.
Obama let the Bush/Cheney merry band of war criminals off entirely too easy.
0 comments:
Post a Comment