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Shooting the Monster

If Frankenstein’s Monster became too difficult to manage — or indeed, as soon as it had outlived its immediate election campaign usefulness — you take it out behind the castle, drop it in a pit, and fill it with concrete.  Bury it, declare the area cursed, and walk away wiping your hands.

Donald Trump had given the RNC heaps of good reasons, once the election was over and delivered, that they might suddenly say “you know, we just noticed this guy isn’t what the Party of Regan is about … we are getting rid of him”.  Most notoriously was the recording of him bragging about sexual assault.

Just after the 2016 election, I distinctly recall saying that I expected that within 90 days, the RNC would quietly “shoot the monster”.  President Trump would be impeached by the Republicans themselves — with their numbers, they are the only ones that can impeach him, after all — and Vice-President Mike Pence would become President Mike Pence, and the real view of the RNC agenda would be seen.

According to Twitter political commentator and feminist blogger @Shakestweetz (AKA Melissa McEwan), we are now at Day 319.  So far, the RNC has not shot the monster, nor buried it in a hole, irrespective to the clear damage that the monster is doing to both the RNC brand as well as American standing in the greater global community.  This defies logic.  Why would they opt to continue to suffer this way?

The so-called Tax Reform Bill brought to the floor and voted upon the 1st of December, 2017, pretty much explains it all.

As I opined earlier in this post, the GOP has become the political equivalent of a mercenary unit.  The only thing that matters was the contents of the party coffers, and the will of their employers.

At this point, the GOP have been thwarted in every attempt at delivering the promised legislative targets to their patrons.  With the “Russian Affair” investigation headed by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, steadily advancing and the recent indictments showing the pace to be accelerating, the GOP runs the risk of never being able to deliver.  For a mercenary outfit, a failure to deliver is a failure to get paid.

Trump continues to be the President, I think, because the GOP continues to desperately need a “dumb guy with a pen”.  Until the investigation into Russian meddling with the 2017 US Federal Election conclusively proves that Vice-President Mike Pence was “in on it”, then they must keep President Trump as the patsy. His job is to sign unpopular and irrational legislation into law, while keeping the blood-sport of hyper-partisan American politics as horrifically messy as possible.

As long as the crowd is entertained, the detail about people being fed to lions or crushed by chariots will escape them.  Donald Trump is, first and foremost, an entertainer.

I still believe that the RNC / GOP will turn on President Trump as soon as they can.  He is a destructive force that is doing distinct and visible harm to both America’s Bottom Line as well as the GOP brand.  Unless the GOP end-game is to abolish democratic rule — and I could make the argument that is their end game, but that is another blog post — they have to survive the 2018 mid-terms and then 2020 Federal elections.  Otherwise, a Big Blue Wave is going to simply obliterate everything they have done, and they will be thrown to the Federal political hinterlands for the next decade or more.

For now, I’ll be watching the unfolding disaster in America as a cautionary tale.  We will see how well this blog post has aged by this time in 2018.  No matter what happens, I fully expect that political historians and political scientists of all stripes and credentials will be studying this four-year piece of history, and its ramifications, for the next fifty years.

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Published inInternational Politics

One Comment

  1. Warren R. Edge Warren R. Edge

    The 25th Amendment which supersedes the original succession articles in the US Constitution (Article II, Section 1, Clause 6) was ratified in 1967, after first being proposed in 1960, and written up between 1963 and 1965.

    It was both for the succession of the VP as well as the President that they had to re-do it; it had been a problem since the 1841, when John Tyler took over from William Henry Harrison and the precedent was set….even though the Constitution really didn’t say it should be done the way it was.

    Check the Wikipedia article on the Amendment for the basic lowdown.

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