Before you spew at the screen and begin typing furiously, bear with me.
As you recall, Trump make the midterm elections about him. His pitch, everywhere he went, was "elect Republicans to support me,"
Well, we saw how that worked out. The GOP got shelled. More and more now-serving Republicans are heading for the exits, convinced that the 2020 election won't be any different.
As it stands now, the election is going to be a contest with one overriding question: Do you want Trump in for another four years? Regardless how much the Democrats may beat up each other in the primaries, the signs are that the losers will suck it up and campaign vociferously for the nominee. Independents largely seem to despise Trump. Women don't like him. For minorities, the polls are trending to the point that the margin of error about who doesn't like Trump will encompass the unborn and the dead.
In sort, all of the other issues, such as climate change or health insurance or immigration or anything else will be shuffled off to the side. Not a lot of people will care about them.
The only way that the GOP can get the issues of the day in the minds of the voters will be to push out Trump. Pence may be a tool, and maybe someone else will be run, but they'll at least get to fight about other issues. For much as the Democrats then may want yo yell about Trump and what he did, the GOP can say "in the final analysis, we helped get rid of him, so let's move on."
Trump has given the GOP a way to do that. As I understand it, once the IG for the intelligence community deems a whistleblower complaint to be of urgent and credible, the Director of National Intelligence has seven days in which to forward the complaint to Congress. That was not done. That's a violation of the law and now that the issue is of public record, Trump, by not ordering his DNI to comply with the law, is complicit in violating the law.
That's enough to impeach him.
The GOP should seize on the opportunity presented to them, now. But getting Trump out, they'll have a year to put this shit behind them.
In 1974, the GOP waited until three months before the midterm elections to get rid of Nixon. They got shelled, losing four Senate seats, 49 House seats and four governorships. If the GOP gets behind pushing Trump out, now, they may avoid a similar result. Even if Trump loses next year, the Democrats will be able to hang Trump around the necks of the GOP for quite a while.
But the GOP can save itself by getting Trump out, now.
(I'm not taking any bets on this, for they don't have the stones.)
Spanks, But No Spanks
1 hour ago
7 comments:
Ain't gonna happen because Trump is giving the Republican party everything it wants:
• Rich tax breaks for the rich
• Protection for health insurance companies against the onslaught of sick people who just want to get medical care
• Ditto for the drug companies
• New twists on the old poll tax, from closing polls, to gerrymandering, to insane voter ID laws to keep "those people" from voting
• A Supreme Court and judiciary that's going to outlaw abortion and in general move us back to the 19th Century. Or maybe the 12th Century.
• Protection for polluters, whom the Dems would make an endangered species
•And on and on
The only solution is to vote the bastards out of office. All of 'em. Or as many as we can.
Yours crankily,
The New York Crannk
You have a point, except that the Republicans' calculations are still going to be dominated by the factor which (in my opinion) has held them loyal to Trump all along -- fear of the fanatically loyal hard core of Trumpanzees. Trump's legions of knuckle-dragging Deliverance mutants still think of him as almost the Messiah, and I doubt the Ukraine scandal will change that, any more than the endless succession of other scandals has. Any Republican Rep or Senator who votes for impeachment/removal of Trump will be damned as a traitor by these people, and face an elevated risk of not being re-elected, perhaps even a risk of physical violence from the crazies.
At every stage since Trump first took the lead in the primaries, the establishment Republicans' responses to him have been shaped by their sheer cowardice.
I doubt even the party leadership would go for supporting impeachment. If that happens, their party rank-and-file will be engulfed in rage-fueled internal conflict which certainly won't settle down by November. The Trumpanzees won't just tamely fall into line behind Pence, never mind behind the very Senators who brought down their idol. The party would practically be committing suicide.
The republic party of Nixon's era is completely different from today's invertebrate cabal of conspiracy mutants. Trump could literally shoot down people on Times Square and today's GOP would say they all needed killing.
The GOP of Nixon's era were self serving but ultimately patriotic. Today's republic party stalwarts are traitors, putting foreign powers over American citizens.
WTF is wrong with Nancy Pelosi? Treason must be called out and punished. Has her vast personal wealth made her sympathetic to fellow plutocrats?
Except for the actual, you know, Republican voters, who gave him the most votes in a Republican primary in history. They knew who and what he is, and they like it. Also:
"The only way that the GOP can get the issues of the day in the minds of the voters will be to push out Trump."
The GOP loses big on the issues and have been running away from running on them for years. That's why they run on fear and racism. The remnants of the southern strategy are all they have, except for the corrupt and the very rich, who just aren't numerous enough to win elections.
Actually, they are running on geography, holding most of the rural areas and losing the urban ones, which is a deader demographic dead end than their bets on the white electorate, given the inexorable migration to the economic and cultural richness of the cities that has been going on for so long.
They talk a lot about revitalizing the rural economies during their campaigns, but never actually do anything to revitalize them.
Barack Obama did more to try and boost manufacturing jobs in rural areas than any Republican of any stripe, and for his trouble they hated him for it and voted for the king of the birthers.
The Republicans have a problem with their base.
You know who wasn't surprised when a two-bit con man walked in and co-opted their base wholesale?
Us liberals who tried to warn them against inviting all of those bigots and imbeciles into their party when they fled the Democratic party over our civil rights legislation. And we knew what we were talking about because they had been our bigots and imbeciles for generations.
But NO! It was gonna be great! You were gonna win elections into perpetuity and you would always be able to control them with god, guns, and gays.
How did that work out for you, now that you find yourselves kissing the bloated ass of a carnival-barking vulgarian?
The Republican party has to deal with the monster it created, and it won't accept any help or guidance from anyone not approved by Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh, so I don't hold out much hope for them to come around any time soon, although the country really needs them to climb back down from the stupid tree and hold up their half of the government. Until such time, the Democrats are saddled with running things when they can, and cleaning up the mess left by the Republicans every time they get the chance to make one.
Also, since the senate would acquit him in a heartbeat and allow his campaign to begin braying "TOTAL EXONERATION!!" just in time to get him reelected, they should hold the impeachment hearings on live TV a few weeks after the conventions, when it might actually mean something.
If that seems like too cynical of a strategy to you, just say "Merrick Garland" a couple of times and you'll know what to do and when to do it.
-Doug in Oakland
I have the Republican party doing a three way fracture after the election as probable. That creates a vacuum.
J,JJ, I wish. I think, unfortunately, Donnie will get re-elected. A combination of dirty tricks, double dealing, voter suppression and Electoral College math.
People purely hate to be wrong and purely love being right.
I see Trumpers looking really angry and sour, with an enormous chip on their shoulder. They don't want to be wrong and they are purely pissed that reality is rubbing their face in the shit they have created. It must be somebody else's fault...*MUST BE*
The biggest thing a human being can be is to be humble and admit to, apologize for and work to correct for being wrong. And Trump's base would rather commit suicide (and take the innocent along with them) than admit to being wrong.
I grew up in South, where people have been covering themselves in shit and glory since forever in being wrong. But then we could have a Second Coming with Christ appearing in the clouds and nothing would change.
What sorry creatures we are. I'm 72 and won't be around much longer, but I would dearly love to know if and how we may survive the oncoming locomotive of reckoning. We are going to have to figure out how to survive our insanity...or perish.
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