Charles P. Pierce: Why Republicans Can Never Fully Separate Themselves from Trump

[babylonsister]

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53619/republicans-separating-from-trump/

Why Republicans Can Never Fully Separate Themselves from Trump

Delegitimizing the presidency of Barack Obama is a proud pastime.
By Charles P. Pierce
Mar 6, 2017


snip//

There is no telling where this ends. There are only three possibilities as to what happened. First, the president* doesn't know what in hell he's talking about and is just trying to distract us all. Second, the previous president engaged in nefarious dirty tricks on behalf of the Democratic candidate and then, shrewdly, declined to make the results available to the public or to the Democratic campaign! (That evil genius!) Or, third, the previous administration got some information that was alarming enough to convince some federal judge or judges that the situation demanded further investigation. None of these three options is comforting.

The obvious fact is that the executive branch of the government is beginning to eat its own entrails. The president* has made open war on the intelligence community, and on the agencies over which he is ostensibly in charge. He has appointed people to run agencies that they actively despise, or that their utter incompetence is guaranteed to cripple. (Or, in the case of Betsy DeVos at Education, they can be both.) The destruction of the administrative state is well underway, and the administrative state is fighting for its life in the only way it can. This seems to afflict the president* in some visceral way, causing him to spiral even further out toward the far fringes of American thought, and it seems to frustrate him into a kind of ungovernable rage.

Meanwhile, Beggar's Day is coming for obvious anagram Reince Priebus, the comically out-of-his-depth White House chief of staff, and the attorney general has had to recuse himself from a controversy he started himself. This may be what Steve Bannon wants. It may even be what Vladimir Putin wants. (Although I'm coming around to David Remnick's sharp insight that it's really the Russians who are the dog that caught the car.) It can't be good for the country, though.

In truth, the really fascinating element of this great carnival of fools is the behavior of the Republican Party. Watching Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan whistle their way past the graveyard of American democracy on their way to constructing the deregulated, privatized oligarchical hellscape of their dreams is like watching two men building a mansion in the middle of Chernobyl. Even this weekend, the Republicans who expressed vague regrets that the president* had gone around the bend did so in such a way as to keep one foot in the crazy.

The standard Republican position is, "let's investigate everything," which is a way to keep the president*'s basic charge alive while deploring the fact that he made it. The reaction of Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, who is one clever climber, was quite typical. From CNN:

Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, a frequent Trump critic, said the President should publicly release the FISA Court order that would have been needed if his phones were legally tapped by the government. And, if Trump believes his phones were illegally monitored, he "should explain what sort of wiretap it was and how he knows this," Sasse said in a statement. "We are in the midst of a civilization-warping crisis of public trust, and the President's allegations today demand the thorough and dispassionate attention of serious patriots," Sasse said. "A quest for the full truth, rather than knee-jerk partisanship, must be our guide if we are going to rebuild civic trust and health."

Deep between the lines of Sasse's statement, you can discern the one unifying principle of the Republican Party in 2017. From its chaotic Executive through its occasionally baffled congressional majorities, the Republican Party has continued its eight-year project to delegitimize the presidency of Barack Obama. Right now, at the congressional level, it manifests itself in legislation that will undo the Obama administration's primary accomplishments. In the executive, apparently, it is going to manifest itself in attempts to sling mud at what was a scandal-free presidency.

This is what unites all Republicans, including people like Ben Sasse, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and all the rest of them who have made hay in "deploring" the actions of a lunatic presidency without doing anything substantial to stop it. This is why not even Donald Trump can make them let go.

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. That need to delegitimize the black guy is why McCain cant do the patriotic thing

He too is still smarting from the whooping he got from the black guy.

They have little time left to become patriots. We are rapidly running out of time.