Lee Butters: (Roughly arresting Chinese guy in a case of mistaken identity)You have the right to remain silent, so shut the fuck up! Okay!? You have the right to an attorney! If you can't afford an attorney, we'll provide you with the dumbest fuckin' lawyer on Earth! But if you get Johnnie Cochran I'll kill ya!Chinese Waiter: Johnnie Cochran! He fight for me!
~From Lethal Weapon 4Yesterday, during the opening day of Trump's second impeachment, I found myself repeatedly thinking, RE: Trump's lawyers "Where did they manage to find the dumbest fucking lawyer on Earth?" and "Who did you blow to get this job? I mean, I guess you get what you pay for, but from what I hear one guy was Epstein's lawyer and the other one was the prosecutor who refused to bust Bill Cosby, so there's also clearly an overwhelming lack of ethics involved, too.
But there's more to it than that, when faced with video of the insurrectionists storming the Capitol, lots of Republicans acted as if this was the first they'd seen it, some seemed genuinely shocked, others, principally Cruz, Hawley Rubio and the other co-conspirators and conscious enablers, couldn't or wouldn't look at what they'd done.
Rick Scott made a big show of reading a book about the Civil War.
My question is what's even the point of obsessively studying that conflict if these fucking people refuse to learn the lessons of it? Why make a big show of reading a history book if you don't really care about what happened or why it happened?
The entire point and the primary cause of the Civil War in all respects was racism and slavery. Even the Lost Cause "State's Rights" argument falls flat when you realize that the primary "right" these fucking people were concerned about was the "right" of their elites to own other human beings as property and to profit from their forced labor.
And the vast majority of the people who fought for that system in the Civil War or who idolize it now, are people who would never have been able to afford to partake of it. Think about that for a second. Just the same as the Trump era, the vast majority of the people who supported this shit would never actually benefit. Yes, the cruelty really is the fucking point.
And when these people, even the Senators who backed and encouraged Trump's play for ultimate power, are faced with the actuality of what happened, they can't face it. Or maybe they just don't want to. Republicanism these days is all about being terrible people and having shitty beliefs, but then denying it, hand-waving it away, making excuses and not making eye contact when questioned. Like, seriously if you can't even own up to something or show some courage of your convictions, why believe it? Why do it?
Why waste even your own time claiming all these economic policies and so-called social conservative values and talking up all this other shit when you have no intention of ever following through?
What's even the goddamned point? Why bother?
In the beginning, God was nothingness. So he started making stuff. He made the dirt, he made the sky, he made the water, he made things that swim, things that slither, things with legs. I mean, God turned himself into a big shot. Then, in a couple of days, or a couple of million years, he breathed life into man. And he's been sucking the life out of us ever since.
~Augustus Hill, from the HBO Series Oz, Episode 3 "God's Chillin.'"
I mean, I'm so old that I can remember even as recently as 20 years ago when at least some Republicans still had beliefs they could discuss openly with the rest of the world, when they still had a decent chance of punishing their own for illegal or immoral acts. Now? Everything is in some sort of a code because they know if they said what they were really thinking they'd get punched in the face. Trump really could shoot a Republican Senator in the halls of Congress and most of the rest would blame the victim and excuse their murder, or cower in pants-shitting fear and be glad it wasn't them that got shot.
Seems like a hell of a way to live, if you ask me.
It's a hell of a thing to find out at 47 years old that something you dedicated two thirds of your life to, that you philosophically supported on an ethical basis for reasons that sounded valid at the time, and that you abandoned only under duress because it was the elements of those beliefs that you valued the most...in my case equality in general and equality of opportunity in particular...that were the most under attack by your fellow travelers and by methods...in my case conspiracy theories...and for reasons (racism) that I detested. That I had, in point of fact, been taught to be against by people that were Christians and conservatives and a majority of them were Republicans themselves.
In the intervening 30 to 40 years since I was taught this stuff, Republicans have abandoned every single belief or value that they or their system taught me I should have.
While I'm at it, many if not most of the positive aspects of all that have been picked up by the Democrats.
"You can’t ride with the cops and root for the robbers." When Jamie Raskin can unironically quote Antonin Scalia and it doesn't register with these fucking people anymore, it's a goddamned safe bet we're not really dealing with conservatives now, if we ever really were, in a lot of these people's specific cases.
And, to be honest, I'm really, really fucking tired of this shit. Burn the whole rotten edifice to the ground and we can sort it out after Democrats have been in power for maybe a couple decades. The Republican party needs to go. It's been there way too long for any good it may have done, and now exists only to perpetuate itself...and the people within it are not happy unless they are perpetuating it and themselves specifically at the expense of other people. For fuck's sake, I don't think even Ronald Reagan would be welcome in today's GOP. His vice president certainly was not.
But then, if you think about it, Evangelicals and Republicans have thrown out Jesus, and replaced him with Donald Fucking Trump.
How any of that can be considered Christian or conservative, I don't know and I'll never understand.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like tears...in rain. Time to die. ~Roy Batty, Blade Runner.
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