“Now is our moment to meet and overcome the challenges of our time.”
President Joe Biden – State of the Union Address
March 1, 2022
Since the 2020 election, the Republicans Party has attempted to rewrite history, whether echoing Trump’s baseless claims about a stolen election or redefining the deadly January 6th assault on the Capitol as “legitimate political discourse”.
While Democrats have wasted time and political capital on important but highly controversial socials issues and an unpassable multi-trillion-dollar spending bill; Republicans, absent any substantive legislative agenda, have been laser-focused retaking the House and Senate in the 2022 mid-terms and making Biden a one-term president.
All too many Republicans, pandering to Trump’s radical base, have readily chosen the “dark side” of politics, knowing their party’s reactions would be a deafening silence.
Senator Rick Scott, Senate Republicans’ campaign chair, labeled Democrats and the “woke left” as the “enemy within” (echoing Trump’s “enemy of the people” rhetoric) and a greater threat to America than its Civil War, World War II and Cold War enemies.
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green enthusiastically appeared at a white-nationalist America First Political Action Conference where Vladimir Putin, Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine and Adolph Hitler were cheered.
Speaking at CPAC’s recent convention, Trump again praised Putin’s “genius” and “smartness” before issuing less emphatic and convincing statements of support for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people.
Republicans have eagerly adopted their Party’s line, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was Biden’s fault and he has been too slow to enact economic and other sanctions.
How quickly and conveniently they forget Trump’s cozy relationship with Putin and his publicly defending the Russian leader’s claim Russia did not interfere in the 2016 elections, despite all US intelligence agencies being confident it did. They disregard Trump’s threats to withdraw from NATO, his publicly criticizing the leadership of most of America’s European allies and withholding military aid for Ukraine unless Zelenskyy helped get dirt on then candidate Biden or his son, for which he was impeached.
Trump-shattered relationships with and trusts by European nations had to be repaired and consensuses built by President Biden before some of the sanctions, including barring Russian banks form SWIFT and the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, could be implemented.
Given his proclivity for alternate realities, Trump’s claim, “this horrific [Ukrainian] disaster would never have happened if our election was not rigged, and if I was the president,” strains rational credibility.
The Ukraine is in danger of extinction. European democracies, and potentially the free world, are being threatened by dangerous external forces and ruthless dictators.
Meanwhile, our democracy is under attack from within. While the Democratic Party is in political disarray, the Republican Party of my parents, and that of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Bush 41, has all but ceased to exist.
It is past time for genuine Republicans and “conservatives” to repudiate the lies, conspiracy theories and alternative facts Trump’s RINOs continue spew as well as their Party’s willingness to embrace racists and white nationalists at home and international autocrats including Putin, Xi and Kim Jong-Il, with whom the former president “fell in love”, for the murderous thugs they are, their disregard of human rights and the dictatorships they rule over.
For the Republican Party it is defining moment and one history will remember!
