GOP lays waste to "party of ideas"

by Tom Maertens

Former Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal is famous for labelling his party the stupid party. To demonstrate his point, Republicans elected Donald Trump president, surely one of the dimmest people ever to occupy the White House, not to mention the most dishonest.

Former Russian intelligence officer Yuri Shvets told Craig Unger (“American Kompromat”) that the KGB file on Trump listed his most important characteristics as “low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity.”

Republicans used to claim they were the “party of ideas,” by which they usually meant the party of tax cuts for the wealthy, eliminating health care and destroying environmental protections.

As Fareed Zakaria wrote, they quickly realized the public was utterly opposed to that agenda. “Ever since then, Republicans have gotten comfortable lying to their voters.”

Their real platform is anti-immigrant hysteria, voter suppression, gerrymandering, anti-Semitism, racism and the “southern strategy.”

One of the GOP’s favorite vote suppression tactics is to claim voter fraud and then demand voter IDs as a response. This is a red herring to keep poor and minority voters — who tend to vote Democratic but who may not have drivers’ licenses, for example — from voting.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University has written that “voter fraud is extraordinarily rare.” Nonetheless, since the election, Republicans in 33 state legislatures have introduced over 160 bills to restrict voting.

Those measures, such as banning drop boxes, limiting mail-in voting, barring the state from sending out mail ballot applications and limiting early voting periods, would make voting more difficult.

It is telling that the Republican Party did not approve a platform before the last election, but instead voted to approve whatever Trump wanted to do. That’s not a political party, that’s a cult.

It is also the party of treason and sedition. Harvard law professor and constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe has said that Republicans committed treason as cited in Section 3 of Article 3 of the Constitution.

Even after the Jan. 6 attack, more than 130 House Republicans voted to invalidate Biden electors, supporting Trump’s seditious effort to overturn the election and stay in power illegitimately.

Conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin thinks the Republican Party is now the crazy party, a party that is still repeating the “big lie” that Trump won the election.

Stuart Stevens, a Republican campaign operative for 40 years, in his book “It was all a Lie,” called racism the GOP’s original sin, and labeled the GOP nothing but a white grievance party.

In 2021, nothing says crazy like QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy group (My View, Sept. 2) that overlaps with the Trump cult.

Exhibit A is Rep. Marjory Taylor Greene, who has been stripped of her committee assignments as a result of her nuttiness. Among other things, she has claimed that the school shootings at Sandy Hook (26 dead) and Parkland (17 killed) high schools were fake, carried out by government actors.

There is footage of her following and taunting one of the Parkland survivors. She has claimed that Jewish space lasers have started fires in California, and endorsed a comment that “a bullet to the head would be quicker” to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

The Department of Homeland Security identifies American extremist violence, particularly among white-supremacist groups, as the country’s “most persistent and lethal threat.” That describes the violent Trump cult that participated in the Jan. 6 riots, including the Boogaloo Bois, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, neo-Nazis, the Three Percenters, and Q-Anon.

More than 260 rioters have been arrested and the government is now alleging a conspiracy involving the Oath Keepers and others.

At least 70 congressional candidates promoted QAnon last year, all members of the crazy party. Their latest crackpot story is that Trump will be inaugurated on March 4.

A USA Today/Suffolk poll of Trump voters show that 58% believe the lie that the Jan. 6 insurrection was “mostly an antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters.” Almost the same percentage believe that they might have to use violence to “rescue” the country.

Similarly, an AEI survey found that a majority of Republicans agreed that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”

White evangelicals are even more credulous: two-thirds believe Biden was not legitimately elected and were “especially prone to subscribe to the QAnon movement’s conspiracy theories.”

This is despite an FBI warning about “fringe political conspiracy theories,” specifically mentioning QAnon, that would likely motivate extremists to commit violence.

Tom Maertens worked as a national security advisor in the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.