My Blog Week: May 2 to May 8

A Word on the Week

Charmless Offensive

First, a theory of mine. That the deep GOP cabal wants to burn Trump out as an asset. If they didn’t prefer him contained at Mar-a-Lago, they could manage differently. It seems he can’t afford staging rallies, can’t start a tech arm of his company to build a real social media site… Probably can’t pay his legal bills. The pandemic hasn’t stopped the billionaire lifestyle, but the loss of taxpayer funding and staffing seems to have stopped Trump from approaching such a life. If, though, any of the rich really wanted to sponsor him, like an old royal visiting the dukedoms, he could carry his entourage from house to house, and live at the expense of others. But the party sages (so I theorize) can hope his health and crimes catch up to him before 2024, while claiming for the alleged base that they were never disloyal.

If their embarrassing positions are strategic, though, they haven’t salvaged as much as they’ve squandered.

The question of Liz Cheney’s ouster gets some help from the liberal side, reliable for complicating arguments with hot tangents, that serve the propagandist’s goal of nothing ever being resolved. Whether courage and truth-telling deserve a friendly environment that welcomes them, should not be debatable. You might think, then, that no one would claim worthiness, of character, family, professional record, along with an impossible historical adherence to a new position, should be raised as barriers to lauding courage and truth-telling. But the criticisms sidestep all that by treating matters of character and history as unresolved contingencies…which, if not hashed out thoroughly, cannot allow the next step. (While a freestanding truth is not, in fact, a step waiting the completion of a previous step…)

It’s as if the Trolley Problem had to hinge on whether the trolley driver is a nice person, and has been nice to the right people, for the right length of time.

The trouble for the GOP, and why the party will have to split, is the embrace of racism. People who value sly knowingness so greatly, who find that insidery, hinty manner so smart, seem stupidly to believe a few minced words can disguise a conscious choice they’ve made. On the theme of character, this is not a quirk to chuckle away when times change. The worst of the GOP “celebrities” (whores for TV slots, at any rate) have made themselves poison.