Outrageous lying by Republicans about vaccines a sign of them waking up how badly damaged their mismanagement of COVID and refusal to join Biden in rapidly defeating it has left them.
When parties make mistakes of the magnitude the GOP has made in recent years it can keep you from power for years, decades. What happened to them last century.
GOP didn't only oppose Biden's wildly popular plan to bring a rapid end to COVID, restart the economy, they didn't even bother to offer an alternative.
Their message - we are uninterested in ending COVID, restarting the economy.
GOP has utterly abandoned even the pretense of having a governing agenda now. Their collapse and descent into extremism and silliness has become profound. I think @RadioFreeTom comparison to late stage Soviet is apt. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
"Republicans have entered their own kind of end-stage Bolshevism, as members of a party that is now exhausted by its failures, cynical about its own ideology, authoritarian by reflex, controlled as a personality cult by a failing old man" - @RadioFreeTom.
Every day we are watching Senators and other leading once respected Republicans just say the most outlandish things, invent obscene lies. Like this truly crazy one:
DC chose to vaccinate essential workers who live in MD, VA but work in DC. It's a defensible strategy, but the practical impact has been to short DC residents.
Again, goal now is for @MayorBowser to make clear how we catch up. Status quo unacceptable.
Things GOP doing now - letting folks freeze to death, sending them directly into COVID line of fire, taking bribes from rich donors for access to the vaccine, just making crazy shit up all the time - so outside any understanding of public good, morality.
If Trump's team doesn't call those close to Trump who could help exonerate him - Pence, Meadows, McCarthy, Tuberville, Don Jr, Stephen Miller, Stone, Flynn - it means that they can't actually exonerate him.
Short thread recapping some key takeaways from today.
Trump's lawyers lied on the Senate floor about whether the President knew Pence was in danger. It's just implausible he wasn't informed as soon as Pence was moved. This was a shocking moment (1/x).
Not only did the Secret Service undoubtedly inform the White House in real time that the VP was in trouble, and the Capitol was falling, but Senator Tuberville confirmed that he told the President the VP had been moved.
After GOP let Trump go last Jan we saw a year of epic malevolence - COVID disaster, economy crashes, assault on election/USPS/Census, domestic crackdown, attack on Congress.
What happens if GOP lets him go again?
My bet - Trump assumes clear leadership of violent insurgency.
Rather than contrition, apologies from those who worked with Trump to push the Big Lie and a domestic insurgency, if anything we are seeing the seditionists dig in, and grow in case some cases more radical, extreme.