Reality has been ruptured. The Republican Senate is a superorganism – a massive amoral jellyfish that floats in a sea of incoherence. It seeks to redefine reality with the toss of such baffling red herrings that their arguments no longer resemble thought at all. They use rhetorical card tricks – from Allan Dershowitz, with his steepled fingers and stentorian manner, arguing that impeachment is merely a figment of our imagination and not a tangible feature of the US Constitution – to Pat Cipollone, presenting the argument that, if senators vote to remove Trump from office, they would deny Americans’ right to choose their president. He asks Republican senators: “Why tear up their ballots?”
And not to be outdone by the illogic of his fellow defense attorneys, Jay Sekulow throws his red herring entirely out of the water altogether with the declaration that John Bolton’s manuscript and confirmations of Trump’s guilt are irrelevant, saying: “You cannot impeach a president on an unsourced allegation.” This, notwithstanding the fact that those very Senators refuse to hear John Bolton testify to them under oath.
A stunning close to a bizarre defense of the purpose-built imaginarium of the guilty-as-hell, Donald J. Trump.
This is another train wreck that Democrats will have to clean up, just like they did after the train wrecks orchestrated by previous Republican presidents: W. Bush’s warping of reality with hysterical lies to justify the invasion of the wrong country in the Iraq War, thus destabilizing the Middle East; Reagan’s warping of reality with his lie that Trickle-Down Economic Theory will lift all ships, while knowingly leaving the row boats of the middle class high and dry onshore.
Americans are far too often the collateral damage of the Republican Party and its habit of warping the truth with implausible arguments.
Is Donald Trump’s hubris disguising a Noble Lie, an effort to put hair on the chest of America – or is it a deliberate effort to destabilize democracy itself? When lies or half-truths are used to justify grand plans to reorder a complicated system like ours, it doesn’t matter whether the motive was heroic or malign. It is simply intended to mislead.
When standing before the law, one is required to swear an oath. “Do you solemnly swear that you will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” The oath specifically forbids the use of “half-truths” like those cited above. And each Republican Senator in Donald Trump’s trial has sworn to this oath. The whole truth; not half-truths.
But one wonders, how much stress a document written in 1787 can withstand if this reality-bending Republican Party continues to maintain its power over its most valued constituency in the outback of rural America: Trump’s beloved “uneducated”. A constituency that has been so exploited by Republican newspeak over decades of talk radio and extremist conspiracy theories that they have finally surrendered their own critical thinking skills on the altar of a new social order that will inevitably replace democracy with authoritarianism.
Republicans,
We Democrats remind you that democracy requires truth, and truth instills trust. But you have lied to the voters who will keep you in office. You have told them that they will not pay for your tariff regime, while farmers in the heartland continue to go broke; you have cultivated paranoia by telling them that government cannot protect them from attacks by America’s enemies, so they must bear arms to protect themselves; you have told them that taxes on corporations will make America less competitive and that there is full employment, while many Americans have to work two jobs to make ends meet.
So, be careful what you dream of, Republican Senators. In failing to convict this illegitimate president of yours – one who has and continues to cheat to win – you will leave a terrible legacy for the future. While you may get what you have dreamed of, you may also get what you deserve: an empty chamber in which to preside. Your moral spinelessness and unwillingness to lead with truth will leave you bobbing aimlessly in the sightless sea of an indifferent universe.
Image: wikimedia commons
Note: The title of this essay is taken from Ursula Le Guin’s 1971 novel of the same name.
Deborah Long is a Principal at Development Management Group, Inc. and founder of several non-profit charitable organizations. If you find her perspectives interesting, provocative, or controversial, follow her at: https://www.facebook.com/debby.long.98499?ref=br_rs
Deborah Long is a Principal at Development Management Group, Inc. and founder of several non-profit, charitable organizations. If you find her perspectives interesting, controversial, or provocative, you can follow her at: https://www.facebook.com/debby.long.98499?ref=br_rs