Which is to say: The Democrats can't accept, and will never be able to accept, 45 as their president.
I have several responses to that sentiment:
You should talk. It was exactly that attitude that brought on the ad hominem attacks on Mr. and Mrs. Clinton. Republicans were indignant that Bill had beaten the hero of the Gulf War, Bush-41, by pounding away at an economy that was running off the rails. Wrapped in their religiously=afflicted pseudo-morality, they found a way to slip a prurient sidecar into their investigations by ginning up Slick Willie's personal life, which had no bearing on anything, and contriving impeachment out of it. It got them nowhere except to bring into office Bush-43, who drove us into Iraq, something that more than 60% of Americans (according to a recent poll) now believe was unnecessary (and they're right). Their attacks on Hillary as she tried to introduce a genuine national health care plan, too, were disappointing in the least.
You didn't want him, either. Until the very last days of the campaign, the never-45ers were either aghast (and said so) or quiet as mice, as they still are. They denied the bandwagon until it became clear that their kin on the ground were either shrugging with embarrassed acceptance, or snarky with wise-acre arrogance. Either way, they didn't have much to celebrate, either. The inaugural response was highly indicative of that.
You're scared to death of your own shadow. This okay-he's-a-jerk-but-he's-our-jerk posture is getting shopworn now. The pretense of holding yourselves parallel from him, weakly tethered but maintaining a semblance of proper image isn't holding. Any defense of him is as slippery as he is, and you own it.
You're scared to death of him. Talk about ad hominem attacks; it's just about the only thing he can do that gets decent attention. Nobody, not one of you, with anything to lose has stood up against him, not even Justin Amash, who has left his party (but whose integrity I still admire; at least he hasn't decided to leave the House). Bill Weld and Mark Sanford, who are running for president under the Republican banner, have chosen to take him on, and they're not presently in office. Even John Bolton, another kind of crazy, walked away from this monster. Your party has responded by doing what 45 has been doing all along--shutting down democracy's true intent, this time by threatening to cancel primaries. Last August, somebody supposedly inside this horrible White House chose to lay out 45's true awfulness, but that person remains unknown. It's time to take the Groucho Marx position of not belonging to any group who would have you as a member. Trust me, this is not a good look. It isn't leadership, either. It's clinging to power with an increasingly fraying string of posturing.
You're just as big a bully as he is. Yup, Mitch. You are never, ever going to live down what you did to Obama, stonewalling everything and anything he tried to do (Talk about not getting over an election--try two of them!), and Merrick Garland, nominated for the Supreme Court with an excellent record. That represented a turning point in how the parties deal with each other. You subverted the Constitution by interrupting a proper process and pretending it didn't matter nearly as much as getting your own way was, finally, in a decisive and incredibly petty piece of revenge. And you got upset about Kavanaugh, who did a great job of mimicking 45's most despicable aspects: Just keep lying and, if it looks like that isn't working, start shouting until it does. Right. Why are you the least bit surprised that you're standing behind someone who knows no rules and couldn't care less about them?
You'll have to make more excuses for him as he becomes even more unhinged. It's already happening. He's trying to lash out at the yet-unnamed whistleblower (granted, we'll get weary of that word soon), yearning for yet another dreamy time when 'traitors' were dealt with by shooting them. This is still your guy, Mitch. Tell us about his brilliance. We're listening. But I'd advise you to hurry up.
As this gets deeper, and it will, as Republicans plot to counter-accuse with conjured nonsense (led, apparently, by another purveyor of twisted baloney who happens to be one of my Senators, Ron Johnson), remember that they will try to get us to forget all that they have cultivated beforehand, including their utter fecklessness in displaying any meaningful gestures of debate and resistance against 45. Jeff Flake, another of those who bailed out before 'doing the right thing,' has been quoted as saying that probably 35 of the present 53 Republican Senators would, if they could do it in secret, vote to convict 45 of impeachment charges. Well, woopee ding. Way to stand up and be counted.
It is the Republicans, not Democrats, who can't get over the enormous mistake too much of the country made in getting 45 selected president (not elected, since he didn't win a plurality of the popular vote). And it is they who now find themselves trapped by the other process they hijacked--that of Congressional representation, which is gerrymandered so badly that only radical alternatives will dislodge almost any member in states into which it has been successfully instituted--Texas being one, Wisconsin another. This obsession with control has gone out of control, and too many districts are intentionally subjected to this fealty to demagoguery run amuck.
It's not up the Democrats to repair this breach of constitutional propriety; it's up to the Republican leadership, or all that once posed as such. That used to be the all-important task of "gatekeeping," as Seven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt say in their book How Democracies Die:
Had Republican leaders publicly opposed [45], the tightly contested,
red-versus-blue dynamics of the previous four elections would have been disrupted.
The Republican electorate would have split--some heeding the warnings
of the party leadership and others sticking with [45]. Still, [45]'s defeat
would have required the defection of only a tiny fraction of Republican voters.
Instead, the election was normalized. The race narrowed. And [45] won. (p. 71)
Making the Democrats out as the only rational actors may be a stretch, but in impeachment, they're doing the only other thing anybody can do to stop this autocratic crank and crook. The Republican leadership must step up, deny Ron Johnson's subterfuge, and cut a deal to rid us of this existential threat. The republic exists in large part only because entrenched opponents found a way through to see the larger picture. That moment may be upon us once again.
Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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