The 15 questions that will not be asked at the Republican debate

[Jilly_in_VA]

Sidney Blumenthal

The next Republican debate, like every previous one, is a staged performance simulating a debate. It is in the spirit of a Potemkin Village, the painted wooden facade of a thriving town transported place to place on the orders of Prince Gregory Potemkin to impress his lover Catherine the Great on her grand tour of the new lands of the Russian empire in 1783. The legend of the Potemkin Village gained currency with the publication of the Marquis de Custine’s Russia in 1839. Inspired by the first volume of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Custine decided he would secure his fame by the parallel feat of traveling through Russia. “The Russians have only names for everything, but there is nothing in reality. Russia is a country of facades,” he wrote. His insight has never faded, from the Romanovs through the Soviet Union down to Putin, where nothing is true.

The Potemkin Village of the Republican contest, conducted under the shadow of a tyrant, is more Custine than Tocqueville, more Russia in 1839 than Democracy in America. It is the triumph of scenography above ideology. Revealing the reality behind the theatrical setting is too terrifying to contemplate for the participants. The pasteboard facade of a debate is shuttled into the pasteboard facade of an impeachment.

Yet the utter political and moral collapse of the tattered remnants of the Republican party has been the subject of several recently published exposes. McKay Coppins’ Romney: A Reckoning has disclosed the lonely ruminations and regrets of the Republican presidential nominee of 2012. Mitt Romney is unrestrained in his contempt for Trump, his venality and threat to the constitution. Romney’s scorn for Trump is equaled by his disdain for Trump’s cowardly enablers, especially his fellow senators. “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone someone more than JD Vance,” he said. Observing from his unique perch, Romney wrote out for himself a line from William Butler Yeats’s apocalyptic poem, The Second Coming, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” “A very large portion of my party,” he told Coppins, “really doesn’t believe in the constitution”.

Liz Cheney’s new memoir, Oath and Honor, draws the same conclusion of a party jettisoning its principles in the embrace of a despot who would overturn the constitution. Her story describes herself running from Republican leader to leader as a modern-day Paul Revere sounding the alarm on the eve of the January 6 coup to find herself standing alone on Lexington Green. The only patriots joining her are Democrats. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, would-be master of strategy, tells her not to worry, there’s no need to do anything, he wouldn’t support Trump’s impeachment and removal after the coup, that Trump will “fade away”. She mounts her horse again to warn that Trump intends to establish a dictatorship for life.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/06/the-15-questions-that-will-not-be-asked-at-the-republican-debate

You have to get to the bottom to find the 15 questions, but OUCH! Brilliant! And I wish they would....