After RINO hunts, only the left is left
Moderate republican - extinct
Disloyal republican - nearing extinction
Bloomberg Businessweek writes:
The start of Donald Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial is the latest reminder that although he’s left the White House, the former president hasn’t vacated his role as the dominant figure in the Republican Party—and the most divisive one. Republicans had hoped to spend the Biden era stoking tensions between moderate Democrats like the new president and the rising faction to his left. Instead, it’s the GOP that’s quickly fractured over the question of whether its members should remain in thrall to Trump or seek to move on from him.“Many of you are hacked off that I condemned his lies,” Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, whose state party plans to censure him, said in a video defending his criticism of Trump. “Let’s be clear: The anger in this state party has never been about me violating principle or abandoning conservative policy. I’m one of the most conservative voters in the Senate. The anger’s always been simply about me not bending the knee to … one guy.”
Make no mistake, when Sasse says he is one of the most conservative voters in the Senate he means it, He is a radical right authoritarian or maybe something worse, e.g., a semi-fascist. He is not close to moderate by any reasonable definition. GOP voter loyalty to the party has shifted to the ex-president. Even radical conservatives people like Sasse are facing extinction unless they join the fascist cult.[1] That is where mainstream American conservatism has moved.
Biden has no GOP moderate wing to try to work with. All that remains is a few tribal radical right authoritarians like Sasse and the majority fascist personality cult. Biden has no choice but to act without GOP support or do nothing.
What McConnell wants
NPR's Michele Martin interviewed investigative journalist Jane Mayer, chief Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, about his ambitions.
Martin: So how closely tied to whatever victories Trump did achieve was Mitch McConnell?Mayer: Oh, McConnell has been incredibly important to Trump. He's made Trump's administration look like it was competent because they got legislative victories and these judges through. .... And so this turn against Trump is really dramatic in the final day just before Biden was to be inaugurated.Martin: So what do you think was the cause of that shift?Mayer: Well, if you look at McConnell's career, there's really one theme running through it from start to finish, and it's always his self-interest. He doesn't act out of sort of moral principle, particularly. He's always calculating what the angles are for him and for his party. And so he's got his eye on 2022. He wants to get back into being the majority leader. That's what he lives for, really. And he's now come to think of Trump as standing in the way.
What Trump has done is split the coalition that has kept the Republican Party in power for many of the past few decades. It's a coalition between big-business Republicans, sort of the establishment wing, and the social conservatives that are in the evangelical wing of the party and sort of white reactionaries. And Trump is taking those in one direction, and McConnell is getting heat from the business community and the other because after the Capitol mob rebellion and insurrection, the business world said, forget it, we're not supporting these people anymore.
Again, there is no hope of bipartisanship on the horizon anywhere in the fascist GOP. McConnell was not acting out of constitutional principle or public interest in breaking from the ex-president. He was, as always, acting in self-interest and party interest in the name of personal political power. That came at the expense of all other interests. The GOP has rotted to its core. For the time being, it appears that the business community that had been supporting the GOP even while it morphed into demagogic radical right authoritarianism seems to have stopped short of supporting full-blown fascist cultism.
Fox is invincible, really!
Some sources have reported that Fox News ratings have dropped in the wake of the Nov. 3 election and the 1/6 coup attempt. Consumers are angry and agitating to boycott advertisers, but that is futile. An NPR broadcast of On the Media reports that unless Fox is deplatformed, consumer backlash will not faze Fox. OTM points out that Fox became more extreme over the last year or so. It downplayed COVID and supported election fraud conspiracy theories. Fox was busy bringing dangerous previously far-right fringe lies to the mainstream. In recent weeks activists and journalists have called on advertisers and cable providers to pressure Fox to moderate or get kicked off the air.
Well over 90% of Fox revenues come from cable providers who pay Fox to be in their lineup of cable channels. The only way to faze the Fox is to get it deplatformed and booted off cable. Us consumers are the ones who financially support Fox and the poison it routinely injects into American society and politics.
That is galling, to say the least. It shows exactly what the morals of the business community and especially the cable news industry are. Specifically, their morals are profit. Social and political poison is of no significant concern, i.e., lip service does not count.
Footnote:
1. A blog post at Patheos, Kinzinger’s Family Letter: God, the GOP and Conservative Media, describes just how vicious, reality-detached and incoherent at least some of the fascist GOP cult is. This is both sad and terrifying:
There are three legs to the stool upon which public opinion over Trump and the impeachment sits: God, the GOP as a tribal entity, and conservative media in its incurably rabid form. Nothing exemplifies this more acutely than the letter that Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican House Representative who voted to impeach Trump, received from his own family. It’s a pretty torrid and shameful affair.Kinzinger voted with his conscience, he did the correct moral thing, and he has been disowned by his family and claimed to be possessed by the devil for doing so.
In the two-page letter, Kinzinger’s family said he embarrassed their name by breaking with Trump, called Democrats the “devil’s army,” and rebuked him for losing the respect of several conservative talk show hosts. They also accused him of falling for the Democratic party’s alleged “socialism ideals.”
“Oh my, what a disappointment you are to us and to God!” the letter dated January 8 read. “We were once so proud of your accomplishments.”
“You should be very proud that you have lost the respect of Lou Dobbs, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Greg Kelly, etc., and most importantly in our book, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh and us!”
Honestly, we have got to unFox our box.
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