McSally? #LockHerUp
It pissed me off when that awful Arizona Senator, McSally, called the CNN reporter “a liberal hack.”
Not only is that an offensive term, but McSally’s body language was a mirror into her dark soul: angry, resentful, paranoid, self-aggrandizing, bullying, vicious. Does that remind you of anyone? Yes, McSally’s Fuehrer, Donald J. Trump.
Republicans have always been a nasty bunch. Of course, politics ain’t beanbag, as the American humorist Finley Peter Dunne once quipped, and Democrats can go for the gut, if they have to. But Republicans, it seems to me, have been quicker to resort to insults, and far nastier—because they have so little of substance to bring to any conversation, and because their default emotion is resentment.
Under Trump, of course, the politics of insult and smear has reached a new high—or low. Trump is an unhappy, unstable and thin-skinned man, and he makes no attempt to hide his deplorable side. Most men and women, when elected to high office, would at least try to put forth their better angels, but not Trump. He sees nothing wrong with being an asshole. He gets off being an asshole. In fact, he credits his asshole-ness with getting elected in the first place, which may well be true: Republicans like assholes, as long as they’re white nationalist assholes. And now, after three years in office, he’s worse than ever: mocking, scorning, disrespecting, his comments oozing sarcasm and resentment, and lying at an ever more prodigious rate. Republicans see him and think, “If he can get away with that shit, then so can I.” Hence McSally. What kind of person has Trump as her role model?
Democrats are so reasonable: Nancy Pelosi’s calm dignity, Adam Schiff’s lawyerly precision, Joe Biden’s decency, Mayor Pete’s scholarly grace, Amy Klobuchar’s good humor. Barack Obama is in a class by himself: surrounded by a perpetual aura of heartful decorum and gentleness. What is Trump surrounded by? Flies, darkness, vulgarity and fury. It’s as if he just crawled out of a sewer.
I heard some T.V. talking head over the weekend say something I strongly agree with. He said (I paraphrase), it’s time for the news media to stop treating both sides equally: “Here’s the Democratic side. Here’s the Republican side. You decide.” (It’s what Chuck Todd does on Meet the Press.) That used to work, when both sides had intellectually valid points to make and merely differed on policy specifics (tariffs are a good example of a topic in which reasonable people can disagree).
It no longer works to portray both sides equally, though, because one of those sides—Republicans—no longer possesses any validity. Republicans are disinterested in making sense, in talking truth, in facts. They don’t care about uniting the country—in fact, they want to divide it. They no longer care about fundamental decency, about respecting traditional American values. They’ve gone further into indecency than any political party in modern history, and in so doing they’ve followed their leader from the sewer to the cesspool to the swamp.
Martha McSally merely aped her leader. Study carefully the clip of her making her “liberal hack” insult. Some part of herself knows she’s not being a good Christian: her face gives it away. But that’s only part of the story: She also knows she no longer cares about being a good Christian. She’s dropped all pretense of decency, and is physically enjoying her romp through the muck of nastiness. She has given in to, yes, her dark side.
As have her Republican colleagues in the Congress, and all Americans who continue to call themselves Republicans. Someday, these people, who invariably call themselves Christian, are going to have to explain how they manage to support the most unChristian president in history.
Is it possible for a man to say he believes in god, and then to profane that god with every breath he takes? I’ve never been able to understand that. I, personally, have no fixed belief in god, and a main reason for that is because the most god-preaching people I’ve seen have been the most hateful. Many people, including Ghandi, have said they love Christianity and Christ, but they hate Christians. That’s pretty much how I feel. As the Sojourner, Stephen Mattson, said, “I love the grace, forgiveness, and love that Jesus reveals in the New Testament, but the only Christians I know promote judgment, fear, and shame.” Thinking of Jesus, or reading about his works, my heart grows tender, my eyes moist. Then I see a Franklin Graham or a Devin Nunes on T.V. and I want to throw up.
We have to beat these thugs, we just have to. This Impeachment trial is going to be great fun to watch, and we’re going to learn more and more about Trump’s crimes as the weeks unfold; but he’s not going to be convicted because his co-conspirators, Republican Senators, have “the fix” in. So that leaves Election Day. I’m not a praying man, but if I were, I’d pray for a Blue Wave 2020, in which we keep the House, take the Senate, and overwhelmingly elect a Democrat as president. A humiliated, infuriated Donald J. Trump can then skulk off to Mar-a-Lago and play golf as much as he likes.
