POWER MINUS PRINCIPLE - The Grand Old Party's Last Lions Roll Over

[DonViejo]

POWER MINUS PRINCIPLE

The Grand Old Party’s Last Lions Roll Over

The Republican conscience became a total oxymoron at roughly the moment that John McCain abased himself to defend, incoherently, the man who mocked his experience as a POW.

MICHAEL TOMASKY
06.12.17 1:00 AM ET

For 150-odd years, since the time of the Civil War, the political contest in this country has been between the two parties we have now, Democrats and Republicans. This match constitutes what historians call “the third party system,” the first having been the competition between Hamilton’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, and the second the one that featured Jackson’s Democrats versus the Whigs. The Republicans replaced the Whigs in the late 1850s, and we’ve been in the third system ever since.
Lately, I’m wondering how much longer it can last.

I just can’t see how a party as brain dead, soulless, mercenary, and unprincipled as Donald Trump’s Republican Party can survive for long. I know; the party still does represent a set of positions—one would be hard-pressed at this point to call them principles—to which millions of Americans attach themselves. And it serves as a great megaphone for many Americans’ racial and sexual repressions and resentments, and the unfortunate staying power of all that is not to be gainsaid. But the party just has no intellectual integrity or credibility left. These thoughts barged their way into my mind as I was thinking Sunday about John McCain and Orrin Hatch. Here were two once-respectable Republican members of the Senate. They were conservative, to be sure; anyone they weren’t conservative enough for was an extremist.

But yes, they did some things with Democrats. They compromised. They did, in other words, their jobs! McCain on campaign finance and tobacco legislation. Hatch on health care and all manner of domestic policy, usually working with none other than the Mephistopheles of Chappaquiddick himself. One used to read stories in the 1980s and 1990s of the two of them spending time together. Teddy, who was getting around town pretty good in those days, let’s just say; and Hatch, the Mormon teetotaler, who wrote these religious songs that Teddy used to sit down and listen to and, no doubt, praise to the skies. That’s what the founders wanted senators to be: high-minded and transpartisan. And that’s what Hatch, as often as could reasonably be expected ofa Utah conservative, was. McCain too.

And what did we see last week?

Well, we saw McCain bumble his way through incoherent questioning of James Comey. But more interesting than McCain’s discombobulated mental state was what he was apparently trying to do, so far as anyone could tell. He was trying to pin a double-standard charge on Comey because Comey exonerated Clinton before the election but left an investigation hanging over Trump. Never mind that Comey hammered Clinton publicly in July and then announced with flimsy justification the reopening of the Clinton probe in late October but never spoke of the Trump campaign probe. What McCain was doing was trying to carry water for Trump.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-grand-old-partys-last-lions-roll-over

[PoorMonger]

1. When I Saw That McCain was Coming on Last

And esentially being called on especially to pinch hit ( because he wasn't on the committee , but invited ) I honestly wondered for a moment if the GOP had given him the chance to salvage some of their credibility by being serious. Instead they tarnished further one of their last voices of (occasional) reason. I would imagine if they told McCain to do that they'd know he wouldn't be good at it. If all they wanted to do was use the last questions to attack Hillary you'd think they would have enlisted a more practiced asshole like Turd Cruz.