Republican Duplicity and the Hollow Threat of Remembering
Republicans in Congress are actively avoiding doing their damn jobs, even when they are given everything they say they want, at the command of a national traitor and criminal, and it’s probably going to benefit them, because Americans are so goddamn stupid.
A vulgarly huge “aid package,” funding wars and border militarization, struggled to make it through the Senate, and may not make it to the floor of the House of Representatives, because Trump doesn’t want it to, and Congressional Republicans don’t want it to either. Not for reasons of ethics, morality, intelligent logic, or any of that fluff, but because then something might be accomplished.
The only things that Republicans have going for them are fear and hate. Their base is cowardly and hateful, so they serve them things to be afraid and hateful of. Because their base is astoundingly stupid, so too are the things they’re taught to fear and hate. The perennial favorite scapegoats for the Right’s fear and hate are foreigners, any aspect of culture that is not embarrassingly white, and anything at all queer. Nothing gets them going like the threat of a brown-skinned gay refugee living within the contiguous borders of this crumbling empire.
The problem is, when the Democrats, because they are as pathetic and weak as Republicans are soulless and fascistic, make the mistake of making compromises with the Republicans, often doing far more harm than good and alienating their own supposed base in the process, it doesn’t work. In order to fund the country’s current and near-future wars, dumping money into the bloody furnace of Ukraine’s war of resistance against Russia, Israel’s war of extermination against Gaza, and Taiwan’s ultimately unwinnable but inevitably devastating war of continued independence from China, the Democrats, behind Genocide Joe, offered to throw away billions more dollars militarizing the southern border against the ravenous hordes of homeless families and orphans driven from their homes by dictatorships and gangs that our foreign policies helped create and empower.
A noble cause: funding murder abroad and imprisonment and persecution here at home.
But despite how myopically stupid and evil that sounds, it somehow didn’t appeal to the Republicans. This isn’t because it wasn’t what they wanted so much as it was what they said they wanted. If they get what they want, then they can’t complain about not having what they want. They can’t campaign on a problem if it doesn’t exist. Well, that’s not true. They’ve made a perverse art of campaigning on problems that don’t exist. But the border is Trump’s thing. The crux of his first campaign was all lies and hyperbolic racist fear mongering about the border and how he would fix it. His second campaign was still about it, despite having four years to do anything more productive than jam some ugly and very-climbable metal girders in the desert, and kidnap thousands of children from their refugee and immigrant parents. He needs it to continue to be a plausible mess for his third campaign.
Republicans have no aptitude or interest for productive governance, and they relish doing destructive and cruel things whenever possible. Naive Democrats and their supporters huff impotently and make grave statements about how history will remember the Republicans who block or push bills based on petty political gain. History won’t remember. No one remembers what random senators and congresspeople voted on, or refused to vote on, decades ago. Few people are aware of what they vote or don’t vote on on a weekly basis. And the politicians being threatened with negative remembrance are the same ones participating in the movement to actively rewrite or erase history. All that matters to the gaggle of sub-average jackoffs that comprises a plurality of this country’s active voters are the most convincing talking points they heard most recently. Doesn’t matter if it’s a lying disgraced former president or a no-name tool on Tiktok. It’s a duplicitous and short-sighted approach designed for short-term gain at any cost, that has been, and likely will continue to be, effective for them.