American politics is devolving into a cesspit of polarisation, and it’s one side that is making it happen.
As has been said here before by many of you readers, only one side appears to be interested in actually governing, in actually getting things done. Trump reigned for a whole term and succeeded in unfairly stacking the Supreme Court (and lower courts) but wasn’t interested in anything else, such as an infrastructure bill that he constantly promised. In fact, his whole term was a mere mechanism to inflate his ego. It was an abject lesson in the destructive power of narcissism.
What gets my goat is the absolute rank hypocrisy that the Republicans engage in. They used to be these moral majority instigators of moral panic who were supposedly operating on a higher moral plane. And then Trump came along and lied and sexually harassed his way through life and then into the White House where he then lied and lied his way through the next four years.
Meanwhile, the religious evangelical community embraced his moral abhorrence because, you know, guns or abortion or socialism or something that FOX or their pastor scared them with.
Now GOP lawmaker Paul Gosar has produced a video and put it on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook where it has been allowed to stay that simulates him stabbing Alexandria Ocasio Cortex to death in the back and then attacking the President.
And he’s not being held to account by his own party.
Imagine the tables turned. Imagine it on Trump, or back with Bush when the party had a little more to it. Imagine the uproar. Imagine if the Democrats had released simulated videos of GOP rising stars being murdered.
The GOP has lost any last vestige of morality it may have once had. It’s a moral black hole, sucking its members and lawmakers into darker and darker places.
And yet the same desperate defenders will turn up in the threads here, deflecting with tu quoque fallacies, or whataboutery, or…not owning it.
Just watch Paul Gosar’s sister eviscerate him here in this fascinating interview:
Wow. Really, really strong words, including on his mental health and morality.
It’s difficult not to say that the GOP are just morally bankrupt. If I was an old-school fiscal conservative who maybe was socially modern, or even one with strong properly moral convictions, I would be fleeing the party now. It seems better represented as an ideology by fruitcakes like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.
Jesus wept.
EDIT
And this is fascinating. Just watch this. Republican primary in Ohio is shaping up to be a race to the bottom. When someone gets up to say, “Vote for me because I’m the only one NOT vaxxed…”, you know it’s screwed up. Honestly, check the clips out here. This is the GOP.
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