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Republicans, including Sean Hannity, are looking around for someone to blame for the state of their party, as Kevin McCarthy’s ongoing humiliation is played out in front of the world.
Matt Gaetz is trying to get McCarthy evicted for being a squatter in the Speaker’s office.
Who could be to blame? How could this party have scratched its way to a scant 4-seat majority even with the help of gerrymandering and disenfranchising voters and still not be unified enough to vote for this man who stands for nothing?
Tim Miller at The Bulwark wrote, “Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tx.) expressed dismay over his Republican colleagues’ opposition to McCarthy, calling their actions “petty” and “childish,” and venting about how they are more concerned about notoriety than governing…
How might the new Republican conference have attracted these charlatans and con men and peacocking blowhards, I wonder?”
Yes, prostrating themselves before Donald Trump for six plus years, including after he incited a domestic terrorist attack upon his own country in a desperate attempt to keep power, is a big reason why they can’t attract or keep anyone with integrity now. They attract the George Santos types now, and the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and the Lauren Boebert types. These are not serious people.
Let’s go back to 2016 and Donald Trump. Back when the whole world found out that Trump was an admitted serial sexual assaulter, caught on tape bragging about it. He mocked a Gold Star family. He mocked a reporter with a disability. He did all of these things on video.
Yet, all of these things were made acceptable — in an effort to use Donald Trump to keep power. People with a lot of power and money thought he was their ticket to getting things they wanted, like a tax cut for the rich.
So, who was behind using Trump as a fake populist puppet to keep power? And what kind of base has been so primed for embracing an ideology that tells them it’s not only OK to hate and to do horrible things to others, but it is nothing to even feel bad about. A rejection of shame.
The same base that fell in love with Sarah Palin in 2008, because she attacked then Senator Barack Obama with racist dog whistles, not in spite of, but because of. The same party that used Sarah Palin, another astroturfed, fake populist puppet, in an attempt to give presidential power to someone more mainstream Republican, like Senator John McCain.
But the Palin monster ate McCain. She arguably cost him the election, and then left the Republican Party in tatters as she quit her job as Governor to travel the country with her grievance bus tour of botched history and raging resentment.
Instead of turning their backs on her, they used her for every ounce of anger she could stir up in her Tea Party base, to weaponize them against affordable healthcare for the masses.
Predictably, she melted down in a sea of antisemitic self-pity, claiming accusations against her were “Blood libel,” when her delusions about God picking her to be President didn’t pan out. Her Fox News hits dried up and reality TV show offers eventually withered into dust.
See a trend there?
This kind of degradation can happen with any political party. But all it takes to stop it is for the party to be willing to give up power until it regroups. That’s all it takes. They could have done this at any moment. They kept saying they would, but they didn’t.
Real conservatives have long since fled this party. They are homeless now, some of them even resorting to voting for Democrats in an effort to defend the republic from the Republican Party’s ongoing attacks.
There is no excuse for Trump Republicans. Their own history with Palin showed them the path was fraught. They chose this and now they are paying the price.
The larger problem is that we all pay along with them. So long as they are the only other political power in our democracy, we all suffer. A democracy like ours is meant to function through good faith vigorous debate about ideas. These people can’t even pick a Speaker.
Every day Republicans spend undermining the U.S. House of Representatives is a day work for The People is not getting done and a day that we signal to the world how dysfunctional western democracy appears to be – both are great gets for Putin.
Republicans have no one to blame but themselves. They had every chance to be better, but they failed. The fact that Donald Trump is still the leader of their party, two years after a deadly, failed self-coup that eventually resulted in the deaths of several police officers, says everything about their current state.
They have no one to blame but themselves.
Republicans Earned This the Hard Way