When I left the Republican Party years ago I learned how quickly "friends" can turn on you once you suddenly are dreamed "other" or the opposition. I went from being respected for "doing my homework and never going off half-cocked" to being dragged through the model not the least for the "lifestyle" I had chosen. It was ugly and save for one of my "friends" in the Virginia Beach delegation to the Virginia General Assembly I never received an apology - not even after Ed Schrock was "outed" by Mike Rogers, something all of them, including Bob McDonnell had been told about in advance. Now, on a much grander scale it is Robert Mueller's turn to feel the wrath of Republican more concerned about protecting their own or their own ties to power than the best interests of the nation or simply morality and the rule of law. And what drives such vicious attacks? Personally, I suspect that many know that Mueller is on the verge of exposing crimes committed by the Trump/Pence campaign and/or are fearful that their own prior knowledge of such crimes may come to light. Andrew Sullivan looks at both the data that shows a majority of Americans oppose the GOP backed cancer and the vengeance Mueller is under unjustified attack. Here are highlights:
I have three sites tucked away to check when I’m having a bad Trump day. There’s the Gallup approval chart, FiveThirtyEight’s poll of polls, and Real Clear Politics’ graphic of Trump polling. They sit there like little squares of visual Xanax whenever the anxiety of living in a country run by a delusional rage-aholic gets a bit too much. And they’re all looking good. Squinting at Nate’s blurry orange and green, it looks to me as if the gulf between approval and disapproval is widening still further. . . . And then Virginia and now Alabama. And the Democratic flood of potential candidates for 2018, especially women.
And yet this still feels like a phony oasis. A huge majority of Republicans stuck with Moore and Trump last Tuesday. And we’ve learned one new and sickening thing this past month: Republican tribalism demands that the Mueller investigation be aggressively smeared in advance, its findings preemptively discredited, and its lawyers smeared for political loyalties, even when there is no evidence that this is affecting the special counsel’s work. In much of Trump media, Mueller’s alleged corruption and bias are fast becoming an article of faith. Night after night on Fox, it’s an endless diatribe against the special counsel, a constant drumbeat of propaganda about a “tainted probe.”
The House Judiciary Committee’s grilling of Rod Rosenstein this week also revealed a near-universal Republican consensus that the investigation is rigged. E.J. Dionne recently noted “the statement of Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, that if every member of Mueller’s team who was ‘anti-Trump’ were kicked off, ‘I don’t know if there’d be anyone left.’” Jordan also declared that “the public trust in this whole thing is gone.” Ben Wittes is rightly worried that the House Republicans “are braying for actions inimical to the very idea of independent law enforcement. They are doing it about someone, Mueller, with whom they have long experience and about whom they know their essential claims to be false.”
The best news from Alabama is that the right’s strategy of constantly upping the ante, of mainlining tribalism so that the completely indefensible becomes a badge of honor, has reached an apparent limit. It took an alleged teen predator with contempt for the Constitution and nostalgia for the Confederacy to get us there, but we now know there is some kind of backstop. And so if Trump decides to wage war against Mueller, and pits his own ego against bedrock principles of the rule of law, there’s a chance he won’t quite get away with it. About a 51–49 chance. Our system of government — whatever today’s polling numbers — is hanging by roughly that margin. And they say Alabama was a nail-biter.
For now, the majority of Americans seem to recognize the cancer in the GOP and White House. Let's hope that continues and that November, 2018, sees a historic bloodbath for the GOP. A blood bath that will set the stage for the removal of Trump and Pence and a decades long permanent minority status for the GOP.
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