“The only difference between the Republican and Democratic
parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when
corporations knock on their door. That’s the only difference.”
- Ralph Nader
"An Excellent Summary"
by Sheila Kennedy
"In slightly less than two months, Americans will go to the polls to cast votes in what I believe to be the most consequential midterm election of my (long) life. (For that matter, it may be the most consequential election ever, period.)
This blog has focused–sometimes obsessively–on what is at stake, but a recent essay from the Contrarian summarized the situation more concisely, in a post analyzing Trump’s newest plan for self-promotion. As several media outlets have reported, Trump plans to run election ads touting his own record as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests to be decided. Mr. Delusional apparently believes that tying Republican candidates to his own performance will increase Republican turnout and votes. For reasons that are obvious to sane folks, Democrats are delighted.
What really struck me about that essay, however, was the following summary. The nonstop stream of ostensibly “small,” petty, and entirely politically daft outbursts reminds us that an emotionally unstable, decaying figure atop the only global superpower (though that status has become a subject of increasing debate) poses enormous risks for the U.S. and the rest of the world. It’s not the laughable midterm ad campaign that should keep us up at night, but the realization that someone so obviously off his rocker is making life-and-death decisions about war and peace, blowing up trillions in market value and family wealth, deporting hundreds of thousands of hard-working migrants, and striving to bollix up the smooth operation of the upcoming midterm elections.
Now is no time for legacy media sanewashing of Trump nor for Democrats to underplay the urgency of the moment. Trump’s danger to the republic has never been greater, nor has MAGA Republicans’ cowardly refusal to grab the wheel and protect the country been more dispiriting. In November, Americans will go to the polls to endorse or reject the multiple Republicans unwilling to face up to the fact that the Commander-in-Chief is insane. Looney-tunes. Off his rocker and doing inestimable damage.
We won’t be voting on what would – in a different administration – be considered public policy errors that have made us a less healthy, more economically fragile, more racist, and less free polity. We won’t be voting to confirm or reject the Mad King’s withdrawal from longstanding, critical global alliances. We won’t be casting our ballots to show whether we favor – or are appalled by –the various tacky and garish efforts to remodel the People’s House, or by his embarrassing, childish attempts at renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario. We won’t even be voting on his dangerous, expensive, impulsive and ill-considered war on Iran.
Instead, we will be voting to retain or reject the cowards and cultists of a once-Grand Old Party who support all those things, who refuse to see Trump for what he is (at least publicly), and refuse to exert their constitutional authority to stop the dismantling of our government. We will be voting whether to return to office the party of political invertebrates who “see no evil,” who meekly sane-wash an obviously deeply mentally-ill occupant of the Oval Office, who pretend not to see his massive, monumental corruption, or the increasingly obvious incompetence of an entire administration peopled by the grifters and clowns that they obediently voted to install.
Granted, all of those invertebrates and fools won’t be on our midterm ballots. (In Indiana, neither Todd Young nor Jim Banks is up for re-election in November.) There may even be some candidates running on a Republican ticket who might be willing to exhibit some integrity, although that’s doubtful, or Democrats running who, in less fraught times, we might not care to support. It doesn’t matter.
Our job – the job of every sentient American – is to go to the polls and vote Blue no matter who, to send an unmistakable message that we want accountability. That we want elected officials who take their allegiance to the Constitution seriously. That we want lawmakers who are willing to call a madman what he is, and take appropriate action. It’s a very simple, uncomplicated message: We want our country back."
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