Cheney versus Crazy

February 1, 2021

America’s democracy is no longer a two-party system. The Republicans divide into the warring, disparate ideological camps they cynically invited into their big tent for many years.

For those of us who are independents, and like options, this is sad but hardly surprising. In 2016, Donald Trump hijacked the Republican nomination and its brand, then invited extremists to join, and legitimized them.

Today the Party’s tent remains so crowded with irreconciliable factions that the Republican brand, minus Trump, is blurred. Is it the party of gun-toting militias, anarchists, zealots, buttoned-down business types, Cold Warriors, or white suburban soccer moms?

Currently, at one end of the Republican spectrum is Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick who, as Vice President to George W. Bush, concocted a reason to start a disastrous war in 2003 with Iraq, then supported wholesale deregulation on Wall Street that nearly ended capitalism in 2007. The two debacles handed the Presidency over to Barack Obama twice.

On the other end of the spectrum is the Party of Crazy, personified by newbie Marjorie Taylor-Greene of Georgia, a QAnon wacko who has spread conspiracy theories that Hillary Clinton murdered a child during a satanic ritual and drank her blood, and that the mass murders at schools in Newtown Connecticut and Parkland Florida were conducted by anti-gun activists to overturn the Second Amendment. In her social media account, she also apparently “liked” a violent comment that read “a bullet to the head would be quicker” than removing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by parliamentary means.

These two Republican women now delineate the party’s chasm. Liz Cheney voted to impeach Trump in the House for inciting a riot at Capitol Hill on January 6. She labelled his rally rhetoric as the “greatest betrayal a President has ever done in history”. Marjorie Taylor-Green admires Trump and boasts that he has her back. Many colleagues want her head. Smart money bets that she’s not going anywhere soon except to Mar-A-Lago to sit at the feet of the Maestro occasionally, all expenses paid.

Reaching Republican consensus is unattainable in the House so GOP leader Kevin McCarthy zig zags while, at the same time, places his thumb on the crazy side of the scale. He blamed Trump for inciting the riot during televised proceedings, as did Cheney, then walked it back privately. His idea of supervision was to publicly disagree with Cheney’s “betrayal” statement while altogether ignoring Taylor-Green’s lunacy. To boot, he assigned her a seat on the Education Committee in spite of her wacko beliefs about the tragic school mass murders. On the other hand, he defended Cheney’s position as number three Republican in the House.

Last week, McCarthy trekked to Trump’s lair, Mar-a-Lago, for private talks at the same time as Trump ally Matt Gaetz went to Wyoming to attack Liz Cheney as unfit to represent her electoral district. McCarthy decried public spats in general, but did not scold Gaetz for this high-profile hit job.

The party now implodes into the pieces that lurked beneath the Republican banner of convenience: The Dick Cheney neo-con hawks; the Mitt Romney moderates; the Ron Paul libertarians; the Mike Huckabee Christian Right-wingers; the Steve Bannon isolationist, anti-immigrant economic nationalists; the Ted Cruz Tea Party anti-government loonies; and a stew of Klu Klux Klan, white power, apocalyptic militia, neo-Nazi, and misogynist zanies.

Trump wasn’t the cause of this colossal unbundling. The Republican coalition has, like the Democratic one, often been the culmination of decades of appeasement, cynicism, and moral compromises. The most toxic membership drive occurred in the late 1960s with the Southern Strategy, a political marriage arranged by Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater that absorbed tens of millions of white southerners who followed bigots like Alabama’s George Wallace. An unsuccessful third-party Presidential candidate in 1968, Wallace championed American Apartheid.

Today Trump remains in control of Republican outcomes unless he is convicted in the Senate trial on impeachment. He’s apparently musing about launching a MAGA Party, but third parties started by guys like Wallace don’t fare well. However, just musing is enough to bully or threaten Republicans and Senator Marco Rubio is Trump’s current MAGA lab rat experiment. “Little Marco” shamelessly came out against impeachment conviction, before hearing any evidence, in the hopes of averting a bruising re-election contest for his Florida Senate seat in 2022 against Ivanka Trump or Matt Gaetz.

This is what Trump’s boast — “we will be back in some form” — looks like, words uttered minutes before Trump’s incompetent Presidency ended at noon on January 20.

Today the Grand Old Party is becoming the Grand Old Partition. Trump waits in the wings, Republicans are in disarray, and the show must go on. If Joe Biden Democrats work with moderate, sane Republicans on an issue by issue basis they can govern for a very long time … or until the Republican Party can also offer a viable alternative.

Cartoons from: Milford Daily News in Massachusetts and The New Republic

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