October 8, 2019
We are starting to forget what it was like to live in a country where every hour did not bring news of a new horror perpetrated by the President. A country with a leader who soberly carried out his responsibilities, thoughtfully deliberating whether decisions were in the best interests of the American people is becoming a distant memory.
Amnesia is powerful…and dangerous. It causes us, not only to forget what was, but constricts our imagination, so that we don’t even remember what is possible! We fear that the best that we can hope for is a terrible president who is not a terrible person. How else do we explain the viral picture of Ellen DeGeneres yukking it up next to George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys game? How do we explain other LGBTQ celebrities waxing nostalgic on Twitter, conveniently forgetting that Republican strategist Karl Rove secured W.’s re-election in 2004 by having referendums banning gay marriage on ballots around the country, in order to boost turnout among homophobic Fundamentalists, (Source: “Karl Rove says he didn’t engineer anti-gay marriage amendments. He did.”, by Wayne Slater, The Dallas Morning News, 8/26/10).
We justifiably react with horror to Trump’s snap decision to abandon the Kurds, our allies in the fight against ISIS, exposing them to almost certain slaughter at the hands of Turkish forces. Trump made the decision after a phone call with Turkish President Recep Erdogan; without consulting the State Department, Defense Department, or even his Republican allies in the Senate. It was so extreme that even sycophant-in-chief, Lindsey Graham, went on record criticizing this as a disastrous decision.
No one should be surprised. Trump has never hidden who he was— a corrupt, narcissistic, shallow and evil little man who cares about nothing and no one but himself. His pathetic ego demands tributes that he hasn’t earned and doesn’t deserve. When we fail to feed the bottomless pit of his insecurity, he bestows tributes upon himself, referring to his “great and unmatched wisdom.”
In this moral and ethical void, Mitt Romney is trying to position himself as the principled savior of the Republican Party, and by extension, the republic. Anonymous sources leaked to Vanity Fair, that as the lone Trump critic in the Senate, Romney wields enormous power to sway other Republicans to vote for impeachment, (Source: “‘Romney Is the Pressure Point In The Impeachment Process:’ Mitt Won’t Primary Trump, But He’s Trying to Bring Him Down,” by Gabriel Sherman, VanityFair.com, 10/7/19). He demurred when asked if he would run to challenge Trump, but don’t think for a minute that Mitt is not calculating whether he can muster sufficient numbers of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents to give him a shot at the nomination. A status quo loving media class stands ready to promote Romney if he jumps into the fray, eager to recast his opportunism as heroism.
It is true that Trump’s complete absence of principles or intellect makes other Republicans seem exemplary by comparison. Don’t be fooled. The last Republican administration lied to get us into a disastrous war that killed almost half a million people, (Source: “15 years after the Iraq War began, the death toll is still murky,” by Phillip Bump, The Washington Post, 3/26/18). Today, a Supreme Court dominated by the ultra conservative justices nominated by Bushes 41 and 43, and two nominated by an amoral reprobate and confirmed by a Senate majority that included Mitt Romney, are poised to decide whether, in 2019, LGBTQ Americans deserve legal protection from employment discrimination, (Source: “Supreme Court Hears Cases on Bias Against LGBT Workers,” by Adam Liptak and Jeremy Peters, The New York Times, 10/8/19). That is the present made possible by the affable ex-president who rode a wave of homophobia to re-election. This threat to basic human rights was enabled by the vote of a man positioning himself as the savior of democracy. Don’t forget it.