Taking Solace Where I Find It

George Will has no room to criticize anyone for hypocrisy, or for the voluntary blindness that's become the hallmark of the GOP Establishment. ie: "Holy fuck - the Republican Party seems to be filled with Republicans".

He's been a de facto cheerleader for the GOP's fuckery for 35 years - always looking the other way as they pulled the most heinous shit on people, telling us the results of the election proved the party was representing the will of the people and blah blah blah. 

But anyway - now he's considered an Elder of the Beltway Tribe, and so of course, we have to listen when he croaks out something that sounds vaguely cogent.

File this under - "When You've Lost George Will..." which has grown into a gargantuan folder, and still somehow, George's "conservatives" continue their dickishness apace.

(ed note: try to ignore the very old and very stale "windsock" analogy - George himself is old and stale, so - yeah)

From WaPo:

Back in the day, small rural airports had textile windsocks, simple and empty things that indicated which way the wind was blowing. The ubiquitous Sen. Lindsey O. Graham has become a political windsock, and as such, he — more than the sturdy, substantial elephant — is emblematic of his party today.

When in 1994, Graham, a South Carolina Republican, first ran for Congress, he promised to be “one less vote for an agenda that makes you want to throw up.” A quarter-century later, Graham himself is a gastrointestinal challenge. In the past three years, he had a road-to-Damascus conversion.

In 2015, he said Donald Trump was a “jackass.” In February 2016, he said: “I’m not going to try to get into the mind of Donald Trump, because I don’t think there’s a whole lot of space there. I think he’s a kook, I think he’s crazy, I think he’s unfit for office.” And: “I’m a Republican and he’s not. He’s not a conservative Republican. He’s an opportunist.” Today, Graham, paladin of conservatism and scourge of opportunism, says building the border wall is an existential matter for the GOP: “If we undercut the president, that’s the end of his presidency and the end of our party.” Well.

- and -

On a recent day, in 90 minutes he went from “I don’t know” whether the president has the power to declare an emergency and divert into wall-building funds appropriated by Congress for other purposes, to “Time for President . . . to use emergency powers to build Wall.” The next day, he scrambled up the escalation ladder by using capitalization: “Declare a national emergency NOW. Build a wall NOW.” Two days later, he scampered down a few rungs, calling for his hero to accept a short-term funding measure to open the government while wall negotiations continue. Stay tuned for more acrobatics.

But stay focused on this: Anyone — in Graham-speak, ANYONE — who at any time favors declaring an emergency, or who does not denounce the mere suggestion thereof, thereby abandons constitutional government. Yes, such a declaration would be technically legal. Congress has put on every president’s desk this (to adopt Justice Robert Jackson’s language in his dissent from the Supreme Court’s 1944 Korematsu decision affirming the constitutionality of interning of U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent) “loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” Or an implausible one. However, an anti-constitutional principle would be affirmed. The principle: Any president can declare an emergency and “repurpose” funds whenever any of his policy preferences that he deems unusually important are actively denied or just ignored by the legislative branch.

Why do they come to Congress, these people such as Graham? These people who, affirmatively or by their complicity of silence, trifle with our constitutional architecture, and exhort the president to eclipse the legislative branch, to which they have no loyalty comparable to their party allegiance?

Seven times, Graham has taken the oath of congressional office, “solemnly” swearing to “support and defend the Constitution” and to “bear true faith and allegiance” to it, “without any mental reservation.” Graham, who is just 1 percent of one-half of one of the three branches of one of the nation’s many governments, is, however, significant as a symptom. When the Trump presidency is just a fragrant memory, the political landscape will still be cluttered with some of this president’s simple and empty epigones, the make-believe legislators who did not loudly and articulately recoil from the mere suggestion of using a declared emergency to set aside the separation of powers.

One important point that Mr Will doesn't include in this little sermon is that once Cult45 is out of office, guys just like George Will are going to assure us that either it never even happened, or it was some really strange anomaly. 

Yeah, you bet - an anomaly that keeps happening in much the same way over and over again.

Mr Will wrote this same column about Bush43, and then carried a lot of water for the people who needed us to forget about that particular chapter of GOP fuckery, having done almost exactly the same after Reagan's fuckery.

At least this time, he touches on the problem - that Lindsey Graham is a symptom of the disease - but he fails to point it up properly.

The failure is all about refusing to deal honestly with that problem. And even more to the point - the failure lies in promoting the kind of memory loss that pimps Deliberate Ignorance on the part of Team Rube so they'll keep voting against their own best interests.

45* and Lindsey Graham and Steve King and Devin Nunes and and and - those guys have not remade the party in some weirdly warped image of themselves. They are the near-perfect reflection of what the GOP has been evolving into for the last 40 years, at the behest of the guys with all the money, and the power to buy these Coin-Operated Politicians.