Who’s Running The GOP? Dr. Strangelove — That’s Who.
I don’t know how much money the GOP spent on yesterday’s vote to recall Gavin Newsom in California, but when you lose any election by a two-to-one margin, the one thing you’ve managed to do is what Grandpa would call ‘aroys gevorfen gelt’ (read: a waste of money.)
I knew Newsom had it in the bag even before the polls closed when his GOP challenger, a loony, right-wing shock-jock, Larry Elder, began yapping about election ‘fraud’ a charge that was, of course, immediately repeated by Trump. ’ God only knows from where the GOP digs up these candidates, but after four years of the so-called Trump Presidency, I guess anything goes.
On the other hand, the results of the recall vote in California should at least alert the GOP to the possibility that unless the party can come up with some kind of narrative which reflects a bit of reality, the party may become extinct.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not concerned about how people vote in places like Idaho, or Kansas, or even in Mississippi. Or I should say, how White people living in those really-red states vote. Those states will always vote GOP — good for them.
The question is this: How much would it take for a state like Texas to swing from red to blue? How about a state like South Carolina? Those two states alone count 44 electoral votes. Keep states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin on the blue side of the aisle, and the GOP can’t win another Presidential election no matter how much they complain about voter ‘fraud.’
And for all the talk about the importance of the mid-term elections and how the GOP may end up holding both sides of the Hill next year, let me break the news to you gently, okay? In terms of revenue, expenditures, employees, and real estate owned and/or managed, the United State of America happens to be the world’s largest corporation, second to none. And guess who happens to be the CEO of that corporation surrounded by a hand-picked Board of Directors known as the Cabinet?
Yea, yea, I know all about how Congress holds the purse strings and how the Senate approves judges for the Federal bench. Good for them. Ever notice how often the national news carries an interview with a member of the Senate or the House?
I’m a political junkie so I happen to know the names of all three of my federal reps — two for the Senate and one for the House. I guarantee you that a majority of the folks living in my town can’t give you those three names. But everyone knows the name of the man in charge.
It now appears that Trump has taken it upon himself to cleanse the GOP of all those so-called RINOS, who are willing to make deals with the Democrats or the Socialists or whatever you want to call anyone who believes that the 2020 election results turned out to be correct.
On the other side of the fence, however, we have a story just breaking which appears to have been first developed as the script for a 1964 movie — Dr. Strangelove — starring George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Peter Sellers, Slim Pickens, and Keenan Wynn. The movie is about how a crazy Army general played by George C. Scott, pulls the nuclear trigger, and sends off a B-52 to drop an atomic bomb on Russia.
The movie was released at the height of the Cold War, when the idea that the United States and the Soviet Union might somehow get engaged in a nuclear conflict wasn’t an event that could simply be dismissed. Nor can the unthinkable idea of a nuclear exchange be dismissed today, because the United States happens to be one of the countries which has refused to ratify the treaty banning nuclear weapons which was voted at the U.N. in 2017.
So, it now turns out that General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, made phone calls to his Chinese counterpart, Li Zuocheng, on October 30, 2020 and again on January 8th, to inform him that the United States had no intention of launching a military attack on China. He made these calls because he had become convinced that Trump was considering military action against the Chinese as a way of nullifying the 2020 vote.
Milley also held a meeting with the senior Pentagon staff to remind them of the necessity to inform him if they saw any evidence that Trump was considering or actually giving the go-ahead for a first-strike attack. This meeting came after Milley received a phone call from Nancy Pelosi who voiced her concerns about whether Trump was stable enough to be trusted with the nuclear trigger prior to returning to civilian life on January 20, 2021.
Of course, Trump has denied ever considering the nuclear option and in typical fashion, referred to Milley as a ‘dumbass,’ who needs to be charged with ‘treason.’ This is exactly the kind of stupid verbal behavior that made Trump so unique in 2016 but wore thin to the breaking-point over the following four years. Know what was the average blue vote in the 17 states that were considered the ‘battlegrounds’ last year? Try 49.8%, up from 46% in 2016.
So, thanks to Trump and sycophantic followers like Larry Elder, it looks like the GOP may have reached a tipping-point that will render the party a permanent, second-class status until and unless my friends on the blue side of the aisle manage to find a way to screw things up.
Of course, the GOP can always rely on a physician named Rand Paul, who invented his own medical certification, to challenge the medical credentials of Anthony Fauci.
Maybe Rand Paul should lead the effort to overturn yesterday’s California results. After all, he knows ‘for a fact’ that Donald Trump will be looking for a running-mate in 2024.
