The snow stopped falling, for a while, so, I cleared my sidewalk and driveway. As I worked, the neighbor to the west ran out – in gym clothes – started his pretty new Jeep, then dashed back inside his house. A couple of minutes later the neighbor to the east trotted out and started a cute little Korean sedan, then ran back inside.
Free Car Day in Oakville!
Now, all of us know that an unattended, running car is a bad idea. Many such cars get stolen and the police dutifully try to get them back to their owners. Still, each week several such vehicles wind up on the TV news, usually wrecked after a police chase. Yet, with a wind chill below 10’ the risk/reward math starts leaning towards a toasty car.
This week in the United States Senate most Republican Senators are ignoring those stolen cars.
Yes, they know promoting insurrection and murder is bad. And, they understand that sedition committed with just two weeks left in office is just as much a crime as seditious acts committed on the first day in power.
Alas, when faced with an obvious crime they’ve decided to ignore it: there is nothing they can do because Donald Trump is now a former president.
Point of fact: most murderers get arrested after they commit their crime and leave the scene. By McConnell’s reckoning, well, many murderers must go unpunished because they weren’t immediately arrested.
Remember how Ronald Reagan talked again and again of a Shining City On A Hill – while aides in his White House were running guns to Iran? Republicans don’t have a monopoly on hypocrisy but they keep the fridge well stocked. Throughout the Age of Trump the GOP has grown more tolerant of aberrant behavior because most of the bad stuff traced back to their president and his slimy friends. And, when caught, they routinely lied and distorted reality. Big empty spaces in front of the Capitol during Trump’s inauguration: he still had the largest crowd of any president.
“Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”
Richard Pryor & Chico Marx
So, this week the United States Senate hears the second impeachment case brought by the House of Representatives against Donald Trump. Neither the eloquence of the House managers nor the facts presented will make a difference. The majority of Republican senators – including Missouri’s Roy Blunt and Josh Hawley – have already signaled that they won’t be bothered by facts. They will cling to Mitch McConnell’s fiction that once a president is out of office he gets a free pass from the Senate no matter how much blood or broken glass is on his hands.
If the running car gets stolen out of the driveway, that just happens.
This question remains: is this Trumpian transactional morality a fad, or, will the party of John Danforth return?
Sorry Jack. It’s gone.
Glenn