Two days after our national election at about 9:00 P. M. Eastern Standard Time a national embarrassment embarrassed the nation further while undermining American democracy. Let's face it, when our Orange Führer opens his mouth he embarrasses everyone in the nation and most of the world except for himself and his family and his cadre of grifters, yes-men, white supremacists and just scumbags that form the Republiscum Party. He came forth to meet reporters in a house that he never should have occupied in the first place because he was and is unworthy of the office that racists, lunatics, fascists and stupid "reality" television show fans elected him to in 2016.
The Orange Führer and the Republiscum Party have never been thrilled with the messiness of democracy. In Republiscum ideology they know what's good for the nation and they have to tolerate, at least, and manipulate, usually, the "great unwashed" so that democracy doesn't get too "uppity" and try to do positive things for the poor and middle class. In Republiscum ideology fascism is the object; they just don't like to be up front about it.
William F. Buckley, looking at the problems of the Republiscum Party in the 1950s and 1960s, offered the formula that Republiscum could be as fascist as they wished in private as long as they pretended to patriotism and gave lip service to democracy in public. Buckley's formula began to degrade with the election of Richard Milhous Nixon in 1968. Once Nixon and the Republiscum absorbed the white supremacists in the "Southern Strategy" at the urging of dyed-in-the-wool racist, Strom Thurmond, the marriage of fascism and native racism brought both a bit too far out in public. It was the equivalent of the drunk relative at the family gathering who forgot to zip his fly though he was still tucked in.
Since the Reagan Administration, however, what once was trucked in has (there isn't any good adjective for this) increasingly hung out to the disgust of many. A lot of revisionists in politics have tried to find positive things in the Reagan Administration. I lived through it. The only positive things about the presidency of corporate spokes clown, Ronald McReagan, were the positive brakes imposed on him by Tip O'Neill and a Democratic Congress.
What Reagan did manage to do was upset the Democratic coalition of working class Americans by convincing millions, with no evidence but empty rhetoric, that the Republiscum Party really had the interests of the middle class at heart. It doesn't and never has had but as Abraham Lincoln put it, "you can fool some of the people, all of the time and all of the people some of the time...." Thus, for 40 years the Republiscum, with the complicity of many Democrats, have cut taxes on the wealthiest few in America while also cutting services to the poor and middle class. This farrago has the effect of making the middle class angry at the poor, who do get a small and shrinking safety net, while adoring the rich which they delude themselves into thinking they can be with the correct lottery bet.
Very few understand that the taxes "cut" were providing them with essential services and reliable ways out of poverty and debt for themselves and their children. Those tax cuts that have disproportionately benefited the small percentage of the wealthiest Americans have brought on higher tuition at public colleges and universities, stagnant wages, greater personal debt and decreased upward mobility for themselves and their children. Meanwhile phony "news" services like Faux, Sterling and NewsMax con the unwary into hatred of those who are worse off than themselves so that few of the middle class understand that they are being fleeced by the wealthy.
This election saw the Republiscum Party and our Orange Führer move from their ambient fascism to full totalitarian Nazi mode by undercutting democracy itself and inciting violence against even their own elected officials, those who had the temerity to break with the Orange Führer's party line and tell the truth for once.
American democracy has evolved over the last 233 years. That evolution has seen us move to a greater and greater inclusiveness in our electorate which is a good thing as long as that electorate is informed by actual facts and genuine concern for the broad education of the public. That is what our Freedoms of the Press and of Speech were intended to promote. When those freedoms are perverted into the spouting of lies in the guise of news our democracy breaks down into camps of those who can be fooled "all of the time".
For the 7 weeks since the national election the Orange Führer and a majority of Republiscum office holders have lied, obfuscated and generally undermined our democratic institutions in order to promote the false claim that the Orange Führer actually won an election that he lost by 7 million votes of the people and 39 Electoral College votes. Even a U. S. Supreme Court heavily weighted with Republiscum ideologues could not stomach the Orange Führer's false claims or the lunatic conspiracy theories of his unethical lawyers.
According to legend, as Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention in 1787 a person in the crowd outside of Independence Hall shouted, "Dr. Franklin, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" To which Franklin replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." It is the job of every American to keep it. The self-styled "patriot" militias, Proud Boys, Bugaloo Bois, white supremacists, Ku Klux Klansmen, "Patriot" Prayer members and right wing evangelicals that make up the Republiscum Party are not keepers of our republic. They seek to undermine it with every foul breath they take. They are abetted in their treason to their nation by the right wing extremist television and radio media that trumpet nonsense instead of news, conspiracies instead of facts and idiocy disguised as opinion.
Thanks to the Orange Führer and the Republiscum Party we are on the verge of not being able to keep the republic we have and of losing the democracy that we have won at great cost over the last 2 centuries.
