General Discussion

babylonsister

(171,092 posts) Mon Jul 31, 2017, 03:20 PM Jul 2017

"It's like a Tarantino remake of Duck Soup, with Seb Gorka as Zeppo."

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a56719/republicans-distance-trump-white-house/

A Few Thoughts About This Photo

There's a lot going on here.

By Charles P. Pierce
Jul 31, 2017

I think this is the most awesome picture in the history of photography. If you put everyone in this picture in a barrel and rolled the barrel downhill, there'd always be a vicious dunce on top. (By the way, does Omarosa really have business cards that say, "The Honorable Omarosa"? Please tell me that's true.) My favorite part of the picture is old Corey Lewandowski there, clearing the way for the Nut Pack with a jaunty little point of the finger. It's like a Tarantino remake of Duck Soup, with Seb Gorka as Zeppo.

Ever since the president* left Reince Priebus's cake out in the rain on the tarmac at Andrews last Friday, there's been a lot of journalistic energy expended explaining that the president* deliberately has distanced himself from the Republican Party, and especially from its majorities in Congress. The available evidence would suggest that there's more than a little truth to this view. The White House was virtually invisible during last week's prolonged skirmish over the healthcare aspects of Mitch McConnell's big tax-cut bill. However, after it failed, again, the president* scalded the congressional Republicans on the electric Twitter machine. His budget director was on teevee over the weekend to state that Congress should do nothing else until some form of this bill passes. (Hell-o, debt ceiling!) He's at war with Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who still has pals in the Senate. He's even threatened to monkeywrench their healthcare until they send him something he can sign and then talk about at a rally somewhere.

Steve M has a good survey of how some folks have decided that the defenestration of the world's most obvious anagram has been declared the point at which the president* is Not A Republican anymore. He also makes the point that this gives the Republicans two brands to sell in 2018. The president* will keep the suckers in the tent, while the "responsible" Republicans in the formal party apparatus will convince Thought Leaders that Camp Runamuck is a self-generating freak show as detached from the party as it is from empirical reality. Given the nature of elite political reporting in this country, this might actually work. However, given the nature of the folks in that picture, and the president* at whose erratic pleasure they serve, the odds are that it won't. But there is one thing that will guarantee that it works, and that's the well-known ability of the Democratic Party to stare down the gullet of any gift horse that comes its way.

The only way this bizarre Republican strategy works is if the Democratic Party continues its futile pursuit of people who haven't been reliable Democratic voters since 1979. This pursuit undoubtedly will be enabled by elements of the elite political media who have spent weeks on archaeological digs in Ohio and West Virginia, ferreting out the obviously arcane reasons why people hate the healthcare they have because "The Black Guy" got it for them. The only way for the Democrats to weaponize properly the fact that we are now being governed by a claque of dimwitted saloon bouncers is for the party not to be overly concerned about insulting the people who put the claque of dimwitted saloon bouncers into office.

You can be gentle about it, but you can be firm, too. You can mock the burlesque of government that's occurring right now. And you can be very clear in your messaging that the memory hole that swallowed the incompetence of President George W. Bush on behalf of the Republicans is now closed. They own this president and all of his policies, such as they are. He was the inevitable result of nearly 40 years of a brand of conservatism from which the GOP profited greatly, and the excesses of which it never decided to check until the damage those excesses did became too obvious to ignore. In that case, the party simply walked away and too many people inside and outside the party allowed them to do that.

I mean, look at those clowns. Yeesh.