Did Trump order Ukrainian sabotage of our election? He goes full Col. Jessup on us: “You’re Goddamn right I did!” China, too, and everyone else!
This is classic Trump strategy: smother us in a tsunami of his perfidy that’s too overwhelming for civilized minds to comprehend let alone deal with. The very concepts of truth and honor are obliterated under his blitzkrieg of incomprehensible actions. His ignorance of–and hostility toward–the Constitution and everything “America” hopes to stand for stupefies the imagination and paralyzes many peoples’ capacity for clear judgment.
I pray that the Congressional Democrats will remain focused on “just enough” of his clear-cut violations of office to warrant impeachment, and that some Republicans beyond Romney decide to reclaim their integrity and self-respect in honoring the oath they took. As the noble Joseph Welch put it to the despicable Joseph McCarthy, “At long last, sir, have you left no sense of decency?” Surely, some Republicans must…
Probably channeling my friend and mentor Fred Rogers, I find my contempt for them alloyed with a wish for their redemption and self-respect. I genuinely ache for those Republicans who know without doubt they are literally selling their souls to the devil. They all understand that the man they refuse to condemn and replace has committed grotesque offenses obvious to anyone with an IQ of room temperature or above. But they look the other way. The laughable “talking points” they’re asked to mouth are such an insult to them and to anyone to whom they are directed. And they also must cringe inside when reminded of their own contradictory words and actions so gleefully on display back when impeaching Bill Clinton or investigating Hillary Clinton.
I have made my own compromises with the truth during my lifetime. But either by design or dumb luck, none of them have been executed in the full view of the public, nor were they likely to be held up for scrutiny the next time I appealed for support to sustain my career. By contrast, the Republicans’ refusal to honor even their own loudly proclaimed belief in investigations and impeachments means one of three things: they didn’t mean what they said and did before; they have changed their minds since then; or they have decided to sacrifice their integrity.
This is the time for them to remember the words crafted by Robert Bolt in “A Man for All Seasons” when Sir Thomas More faced a crucial choice: whether to submit to pressure to sign an oath condoning the Act of Supremacy proclaiming his friend King Henry VIII’s unfettered authority, or to retain his loyalty to his prior oath of Christian faith. Remember? “When a man makes an oath, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then—he needn’t hope to find himself again.”
There is still time for Republicans who hope to retain any part of their respectable self at all to remember which oath to honor in order to do that.
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