I'm being cheeky but only a little bit. Ron Johnson's "secret society" charade fell apart when ABC News got the one text that mentions "secret society." It appears to have been snark, but Johnson ran with it, taking it literally.
Then when asked how he knew a "secret society" was planning to take down Trump based on this single ambiguous message that may have been an attempt at humor, Johnson gave a classic cop out: "That's Strzok and Page’s term."
I'm trying to understand how a US Senator can legitimately think that's an adequate defend for doing in the past 24 hours what Joe McCarthy couldn't do over years: bring conservative America to a fever pitch. Lou Dobbs said it was time for war.
Indeed, so many of us have been scratching our heads: how is it possible for the Republican Party to have so thoroughly lost its mind? How is it that it can bankrupts itself, morally and intellectually, in order to maintain power? I have a thought.
It's not an original thought. I knew that Barack Obama's election radicalized the GOP, making it so they were no upside to working with her in any way. Scorched earth was the only way forward. No matter how much they were told they gotta get right with the 21st century.
I knew it was about racism, but Steven Levitsky and @dziblatt offer a sharper focus in their new book "How Democracies Die." (h/t @PatBlanchfield) They argue that norms holding us together were rooted in racial exclusion, as if
There was an unwritten pact between the parties. With blacks and others pushed to the margins, the parties could act with a measure of toleration and forbearance, they write. The former is "understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals."
The latter is "the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives." But after Barack Obama's election, all bets were off. Blanchfield suggests this was a decisive breaking point. There was no return.
There was no reason, because electing Obama was probably seen as an act of betrayal, as if the parties were spouses who agreed to the terms of marriage, legal and religious and moral, but the one of them cheats, shattering the agreement.
And once the agreement has been shattered, why exercise restraint and forbearance? Why not just abandon all values and go to the wall for power?
I don't know if I'm convinced about this racist compact idea, but it does explains why a sitting senator has the gall to pass off an ironic text as a literal plan among clandestine agents to usurp the president of the United States.
In another time and place, such a stunt would jeopardize Johnson's credibility and reputation, but that is clearly not the case. Indeed, he can offer a cop out so weak he'd make the dumbest undergrad blush but he's not the worse for wear.
Some more thoughts. The greatest yearning temptation is to ridicule Johnson and other troglodytes, and they deserve to be raked over the hot coals of contempt, but we really have to understand something about this mindset.
It's not just ridiculous. It's dangerous. The Republicans do not appear to believe that ANY view, ANY fact, ANY procedure can be legitimate. In other words, EVERYTHING is now seen through the party lens.
How do you make deals with such people? It's like bargaining with hostage takers. Liberals complain about bad faith in the GOP but there is no such thing as good faith, because good faith would require a theory of mind that does not see Dems as deserving of annihilation.
