Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Saturday, March 3, 2018

Deeply Stupid Or Wretchedly Cynical

Trump's lawyers introduced the idea that he can't testify, because it would be a "perjury trap."  A perjury trap is when police or prosecutors get someone to lie about something only tangentially related to the matter at hand.  You could make a case that Clinton's lying about Monica Lewinsky was a perjury trap, because it was only marginally related to the specifics of the Paula Jones lawsuit.  More directly, if I get you to lie about your recreational drug use, I can use that to flip you on your money laundering.  It's unethical.

That's not how Trump's lawyers define "perjury trap."  For them, Trump is so fundamentally incapable of telling the truth in any given moment, that he is bound to lie at some point within the first 20 minutes of questioning.  He can't help it.

Now, we have GOP House members saying that the Democrats completely set up poor Hope Hicks by asking her if, you know, she lied on behalf or to Donald Trump.  "Hey, Hope, are you a liar? If so, how often do you lie?"  This is roughly the concept of oversight, checks and balances.  It's important to know if the White House Communications Director lies a lot.

Republicans, however, have increasingly had to contort themselves to defend the indefensible.  They have had to embrace all sorts of bizarre ideas and behaviors in order to defend Mango Mussolini.

The Republican Party has always been more hierarchical and top-down than the Democratic Party.  It has allowed them to win elections and break norms (think Merrick Garland) in ways that the Democrats never could.  However, I think we are seeing how Trump's manifest and myriad incompetencies, idiocies and infamy are dragging down the whole party,

The question is: Do Republicans even really have a choice?  Are they doing this because they believe Trumpism or because that's just the way they do politics?

No comments: