Why I Have To Call Out a Good Guy
Why I Have to Call Out a Good Guy--
I read the entire article linked below by US Senator Ben Sasse in The Atlantic. I encourage everyone to do the same.
Pardon me for being a stickler. I have a quirky personality. I hate Bullshit.
Sasse is not a bad guy, and actually has some moxie. He has continually defied Trump and his party leadership, and risked himself in doing so. I believe he will vote for conviction in the Impeachment trial. He calls for the ousting of QAnon and radical conspirophiles from the GOP. He wants a return to civility and Bipartisanship. If Ben Sasse were to become Republican Minority leader that would be excellent, and it would breathe some life and viability into what remains of the two Party system.
So, what am I hot and bothered about?
His premise for this opinion piece is the problem. He argues that it is the insurgency of QAnon and other whack job extremists which is destroying the GOP from the inside, and that once freed from this cancerous influence, the GOP can resume its place as the repository of mainstream Conservatism.
Stop!!! His argument that the GOP leadership failed in refusing to keep the QAnon crazies out, and that this is what is destroying the GOP from the inside strains all credulity.
This is the Party which has been courting racists, extremists, and religious bigots since the 1970's. Nixon's Southern strategy recruited the Dixiecrats from the Jim Crow States to overturn Brown vs Board of Ed, the Civil and Voting Rights Act, and to stop the Equal Rights Amendment. They merged with the perverse Evangelicals who stood for Shareholder values, Prosperity Theology, and Armageddonism. They rallied around Free Market ideology, and the Gospel of austerity, busting Labor, deregulation and policies of Mass Incarceration to service a privatized prison system of slave labor. They joined Gingrich's "Contract for America", which sought to shift the labor force into low paying jobs in the Sunbelt, fill up the prisons with petty offenders to provide cheap prison Labor, and sought to weaken the US Presidency with a sting/entrapment operation to Impeach Bill Clinton.
In 2008, they welcomed into the GOP the refuse of David Duke's KKK, rebranded as the Tea Party, an openly racist Populist mob with no agenda other than to destroy our first Black President, and slash Federal taxes for the wealthy.
So, please, Ben Sasse, don't undercut your own moral authority which you have gained as a persistent and gutsy "Never Trumper" with these grade school debating points. Don't even try to make the case that the GOP is afflicted with a recent sickness, brought in by an aberrant Cult like force which people didn't recognize in time.
That argument is like the guy who has been going to Bordellos for 20 years, and having unprotected sex, who one day wakes up with a discharge and can't urinate, then blames the Sex worker for the STD he's acquired. Your party has been playing a form of Russian Roulette with extremists for decades, and it has used your crazy people strategically as wrecking operations against the FDR/New Deal/Civil Rights Revolutions of the 20th Century. You thought you could manage this new generation of nuts, but underestimated the ability of Trump to weaponize them, and deploy them as he did on January 6.
Your article rings hollow until you own the insane and destructive policies of your Party over the last 50 years, not just last year. Your Party is not being destroyed by QAnon, it is self destructing, and will take you and other well meaning people down with it unless you jump ship, and disassociate yourself from the malignant policies and outlook of your GOP colleagues.
Don't try to get over on us Senator Ben. We've been paying attention.
