Permanent musical accompaniment, How do I live (without you) by LeAnn Rimes (1997).
Trump fluffer Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is missing his abusive boyfriend, Donald Trump. Maybe he has to pay for his rounds of golf now. Being Trump’s caddy and ball washer simply wasn’t good enough for free golf anymore.
On Thursday, Sen. Graham weighed in on the looming Republican purge of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from House leadership over her opposition to former President Donald Trump. Lindsey Graham Mocked After Making Bizarre ‘Trump Cult’ Prediction About GOP’s Future:
Cheney is the latest victim of conservative cancel culture as she’s reportedly on the verge of losing her position as conference chair, the number three Republican in the House, due to her criticism of the former president.
This is the MAGA/Qanon personality cult’s version of the Night of the Long Knives or the Röhm Purge in 1934, “a series of political extrajudicial executions intended to consolidate Hitler’s power and alleviate the concerns of the German military about the role of Ernst Röhm and the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazis’ paramilitary organization, known colloquially as Brownshirts.”
The MAGA/Qanon personality cult’s purge is to remove any Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump after he incited a violent seditious insurrection on January 6, and who will not promote his Big Lie propaganda that the election was stolen from him. Hopefully the MAGA/Qanon cultists will not actually execute these Republicans, but after their “hang Mike Pence” objective on January 6, can anyone really be certain?
But Graham wasn’t all that sympathetic to her plight.
“Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no,” he said on Fox News on Thursday night. “I’ve always liked Liz Cheney, but she’s made the determination that the Republican Party can’t grow with President Trump. I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”
Just like the lyrics of the song say:
How do I live without you
I want to know
How do I breathe without you if you ever go
How do I ever, ever survive
How do I, how do I, oh, how do I live
The most accurate analysis of Sen. Graham’s sycophant plea for love from Donald Trump came from MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
This is refreshingly honest. Partly because he views her as making a tactical determination as opposed to a moral one (possibly true!) and also because this logic is independent of any moral considerations whatsoever. https://t.co/JdUErOcOXm
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) May 7, 2021
Chris Hayes is correct. There are no saints in this internecine GQP warfare, only sinners. They are all amoral, calculating assholes making a strategic decision driven only by their lust for power. Whatever damage this does to the country does not factor into their self-serving calculations at all.
Liz Cheney is betting that Trump’s innumerable legal troubles will neutralize him by 2024, and the party will turn to the scion of Republican royalty, as they did for years with the Bush family, and she will be the party’s “savior” for a return to its Neoconservative permanent war roots. That’s a bad bet.
Sen. Graham is betting that the MAGA/QAnon personality cult of Donald Trump has forever transformed the GQP into an anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian fascist party – he is correct – and he wants to go along for the ride. Maybe he wants to be Trump’s Attorney General, or God save us, a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. (Remember that Graham threatened to hold Stalinist show trials to exact political retribution against Trump’s political opponents if Trump was reelected and he became chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee).
Chris Hayes expanded on his comment on All In With Chris Hayes on Friday.
HAYES (on camera): Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes. You know, the Republican Party tried to sell both its base and the country CEO of capitalism, the freedom of the market with Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney. They tried to sell perpetual global war with John McCain and George W. Bush. And no one now wants any of it.
The party landed on Donald Trump. That is who the base chose. They do not have an alternative other than him. And while there`s a lot of debate about the future of what the post-Donald Trump Republican Party should look like, which is the heart of the fight between Liz Cheney and the party now, the takeover of the Republican Party by Donald Trump and the MAGA cult is all but complete.
Now, last night, in an almost refreshingly honest moment, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina explained his party`s predicament more clearly than just about anyone else basically acknowledging that they just don`t have an alternative to Donald Trump. He is their only way forward as a party.
And as someone who has been on both sides of the Trump debate, Lindsey Graham certainly has had all the perspectives. Remember when Donald Trump was running for the presidency in 2016, Graham was arguably his most vocal opponent within the Republican Party.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): So, here`s what I think. I think Donald Trump is a political car wreck and people slow down and look at the wreck, but they eventually move on.
I`m not going where Donald Trump is taking the party. I don`t believe that Trumpism is conservatism.
He`s becoming a jackass at a time when we need to have a serious debate about the future of the party in the country.
How do you grow the party with Donald Trump saying most illegal immigrants are rapists and drug dealers? How do you grow the party when he has a level of intolerance that I haven`t seen really in my lifetime?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: So, it was only a few years ago that Lindsey Graham was wondering how the Republican Party could possibly grow under Donald Trump. Remember that, that question, how do you grow the party? Now, Graham then famously changed his tune once Trump is elected, becoming Trump`s devoted golf buddy and most ardent sycophant in the Senate in their stiff competition.
And following the violent insurrection on January 6th, when Graham and his colleagues were physically put in harm`s way by Trump`s words, and his writers that he sent to Capitol Hill, Graham publicly moved on from Trump and his speech on the Senate floor later that night, explaining why he thought Congress should vote to confirm Joe Biden as President.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GRAHAM: You`re able to object. You`re not do anything wrong. Other people have objected. I just think it`s a uniquely bad idea to delay this election. Trump and I, we`ve had a hell of a journey. I hate it then this way. Oh, my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he`s been a consequential president. But today, first thing you`ll see. All I can say is count me out, enough is enough.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: But now, enough is clearly not enough. Can you hear the adrenaline his voice, right? He`s still kind of shaking from the fear of the hundreds of people that violently stormed the Capitol, that tried to gouge out cops eyes, that concussed them, that shocked them that chanted hang Mike Pence. That crowd, you can see it and Lindsey Graham`s face there, he`s still flush, because there was a mob of people sent by Donald Trump that probably wanted to kill him. So, he says Enough is enough. But that was then.
With House Republicans attempting to purge Congresswoman Liz Cheney from leadership, the only one in leadership for refusing to go along with the big lie, Lindsey Graham is once again on the Trump train.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GRAHAM: I would just say to my Republican colleagues, can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no. I`ve always liked Liz Cheney, but she`s made a determination that the Republican Party can`t grow with President Trump. I`ve determined we can`t grow without him.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: His voice is calmer there. You can tell, right? There`s not a mob outside that`s erected a gallows. Now, that was Lindsey Graham last night saying that Donald Trump is now the only way for the Republican Party to grow. What Lindsey Graham is saying, I have to say, is refreshingly clear and notably amoral in a diagnosis of what this is all about.
There`s just a bunch that stand out about that one statement from Lindsey Graham. One, Graham is not pretending that his backing Trump is anything other than sheer strategic determination about what is best for the Republican Party, not what is best for the country, not what is best for American democracy. There is no pretending that is the thing that he is thinking about. None.
He`s also saying straight up, he thinks Liz Cheney is doing the same thing. And, gosh, maybe she is, that she`s not thinking about any of those principles either, that Liz Cheney has simply made a different conclusion on the strategic question. She`s concluded that Trump is bad for the Republican Party. She`s making a different strategic determination about the future of the party.
No one is pretending there is any principle in play, that there is any morality or any concern about violence whipped up by the President or anti- democratic sentiment or the endurance of the peaceful transfer of power. None of that. They don`t care.
You also get the idea that Senator Graham does not actually care, one way or the other, what the Republican Party actually is or what it stands for or what role it plays in American life just so long as it grows and continues to exist in a position of power. He just — he wants it to grow. Well, he doesn`t care what it is. It could be ways of Trump`s, McCain, whatever, grow. A pretty remarkable thing to just come out and admit.
I mean, even as much as they think about power and winning elections, most politicians pretend to care about other priorities. Lindsey Graham is basically done pretending. And if you follow it all along, he was sort of been that way forever. When he thought Trump would hurt the party, he was against Trump.
Since then, he has basically said Trump can help the party, so whatever he does is fine, I`m going to defend it. It`s that simple. And after defending Mike Pence following the insurrection, now Graham is basically saying, if the Republican Party becomes the party of Hang Mike Pence, well, too bad, Mike. Good luck.
The last thing from a practical standpoint about this continued embrace of Donald Trump is that it seems weird to look at someone who lost the popular vote and his first election by some three million votes, squeaked into office, then proceeded to cost Republicans control first the House and then the Senate and lost reelection for himself by seven million votes and think that guy`s a winner, that guy is the ticket to public popularity. That guy, we got to have him.
But here`s the thing. It is not totally off base. It is true that Trump has an appeal to certain segments of the electorate, the traditional Republican emphasis on deregulation and capital gains tax cuts and privatizing Medicare and wars overseas does not. It`s not like the alternative to Trump, the Liz Cheney wing within the party has any real popularity. What have they got? They got nothing.
So, Graham is right in the way about that. Graham is also right that the coalition that Donald Trump is putting together has another thing going for it. It is an extremely efficient coalition at exploiting American anti-democratic institutions like the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate. So, as to make the Republican Party viable and competitive even if it is not a majority party, they think Trump is the skeleton key to unlock a kind of politics that can cover with a minority of the country and they might be right.
A tyranny of the minority by authoritarianism, Trumpism, the new American fascism.
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Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said on Sunday “Right now it’s basically the Titanic. We’re … in the middle of this slow sink,” he explained on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “We have a band playing on the deck telling everybody it’s fine. And, meanwhile, Donald Trump’s running around trying to find women’s clothing and get on the first lifeboat.” “I think there’s a few of us that are just saying, ‘Guys, this is not good’ — not just for the future of the party, but this is not good for the future of this country.”
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan slammed his Republican colleagues Sunday on “Meet The Press.” “It bothers me you have to swear fealty to the dear leader or you get kicked out of the party. It just doesn’t make any sense,” Hogan said. “It’s sort of a circular firing squad where we’re just attacking members of our own party instead of focusing on solving problems.”
Jennifer Rubin explains “The contrast in the messages that each party is offering to Americans could not be more stark. One party is out selling popular policies and promising to help ordinary Americans; the other is selling its soul to pledge fealty to the disgraced former president.”
“The difference between what the two parties are offering Americans could not be more stark”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/07/what-each-party-is-telling-americans/
David Corn reminds us “How Liz Cheney and Her Dad Paved the Way for the Big Lie”, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/05/how-liz-cheney-and-her-dad-paved-the-way-for-the-big-lie/
Cheney does these days look like a courageous truth-teller, defying the cultism and alternative-fact addiction that has taken over her Grand Old Party. But, in a way, she is the victim of her own success–that is, the success of her family. In particular, the success her father had in lying to the American public.
In the 21st century, American presidents have at least twice tried to shape the world with a lie of enormous impact. Trump attempted to demolish the nation’s constitutional order and retain power with his false claim that the 2020 election was rigged and Joe Biden did not truly receive more votes. As Cheney points out, this lie delegitimizes the essence of the American political system. And two decades ago, another Big Lie was concocted and pushed by a Republican president that resulted in profound (and lethal) consequences. Her dad was its main architect.
That was the untrue allegation that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass of destruction and was prepared to use them against the United States. The Bush-Cheney administration used these charges to garner public support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Dick Cheney was the chief pitchman for this flimflam. In an August 2002 speech, he proclaimed, “There is no doubt [Saddam] is amassing [WMDs] to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” Soon after that, he publicly asserted that Saddam was trying to obtain aluminum tubes that could only be used for enriching uranium for weapons. And he also publicly cited a report that one of the 9/11 ringleaders had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague.
None of this was true. And Dick Cheney’s lies were not the result of intelligence failures.
[O]ne lesson of the Iraq war is that a big lie can work. Liz Cheney, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs during this stretch, supported the war—and has defended it ever since. (She co-wrote a 2015 book with her dad on US foreign policy.) She even insisted that one of the main lies of the Bush-Cheney fraudulent case for war—that there had been a significant connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq—was true. (She also hawkishly defended a sordid chapter of that sordid war: torture, saying it was “libelous” to call waterboarding “torture.”)
There was another odious lie that Liz Cheney also defended—or played footsie with: the racist conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Asked about birtherism in 2009, she replied, “I think the Democrats have got more crazies than the Republicans do. But setting that aside, one of the reasons you see people so concerned about this, I think this issue is, people are uncomfortable with having for the first time ever, I think, a president who seems so reluctant to defend the nation overseas.” Without endorsing the conspiratorial and disproven details of this nutty notion, Cheney was providing moral support to its adherents. (Trump’s championship of this lie helped turn him into a right-wing hero and set up the foundation for his 2016 presidential bid.)
It is a good thing that a hardcore conservative like Liz Cheney has joined the opposition to the Trumpian authoritarianism that has fully infected one of the nation’s two major political parties. Most of the GOP base is beyond persuasion.
[S]till, Liz Cheney deserves hardly a cheer, for it ought to be remembered that Trump is pushing his Big Lie in the wake of other big lies—and that Cheney, her father, and so many other Republicans not so long ago did much to blaze the path for the dangerous political villainy she now decries.
I think your question “What is wrong with you?” is better directed to you, crazy lady. BTW, Dana Carvey owns the rights to this act. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_mePjkQW_c
I thought that once we were rid of Trump, I could shake off this feeling of unreality…that i had somehow found myself on the other side of the Looking Glass, stumbled and fell down the rabbit hole just in time to hear the Cheshire Cat say “We’re all mad here” but no such luck. Now the phrase echoing in my brain is from a Firesign Theater schtick…”We’re all bozos on this bus.” Please someone rescue me!
It’s like a sporting event where you can’t stand either side so you’re rooting for serious injuries.