Great
opinion piece by Max Boot here at the Washington Post with this
headline:
“Trump may be running the sleaziest presidential campaign ever”
The GOP has become the party of pseudo-scandals.
The big GOP change occurred with the efforts of Newt Gingrich, then a Republican backbencher, to bring down then House Speaker Rep. Jim Wright (D-TX) in the late 1980s.
Casting about for dirt he could use, Gingrich focused attention
on the fact that the speaker had published a book that was bought in bulk by
lobbyists.
While the book deal looked
bad, it was not against the law or House rules. But it didn’t matter: Gingrich
thundered that Wright was the most corrupt speaker in the 20th century and compared him to Mussolini.
Wright was pressured into
resigning, Gingrich soon became speaker himself, and the GOP was off to the
races.
Lately, QAnon seems
to be a winning GOP ticket – cite:
Congressional Republicans came a step closer recently to
welcoming into their ranks a promoter of the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose adherents believe
President Trump is battling a cabal of “deep state saboteurs who worship Satan
and traffic children for sex.”
Marjorie Taylor
Greene (pictured above), has endorsed the baseless theory and made a slew
of other racist remarks on video and now has won a GOP primary runoff in
GA 14th Congressional District. Her victory sets her up to become
QAnon’s first devotee in Congress.
Trump hailed Greene as a
“future Republican Star,” tweeting that she is “strong on everything and
never gives up - a real WINNER!”
Ever since the Gingrich days, the Republican Party, in cahoots with media
partners such as FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, et al has manufactured one
pseudo-scandal after another – a few well-known examples:
2.
Whitewater
3. Mena airport
4. John Kerry’s Swift Boat service
5.
Barack Obama’s birth certificate
6.
The Bill and Hillary Clinton Foundation
7.
Hillary Clinton’s emails
Those are few among many others whipped up by the GOP.
That process now has been
turbocharged under President Trump, who is even more ruthless and
unscrupulous than Gingrich.
The former reality-TV star won the 2016 election by defaming
a former secretary of state and first lady as “Crooked Hillary” (and still
calls her that every chance he gets) – then by demanding to “Lock her up” for unspecified offenses.
Now Trump is trying to run the same playbook on Joe Biden.
Trump got himself impeached by trying to blackmail Ukrainian
officials into accusing Biden and his son Hunter of wrongdoing. That didn’t stop
Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani from working with shady Ukrainian contacts —
including a lawmaker described as a Russian agent by Trump’s own Treasury Department —
to produce dirt on Biden. Until recently, this had resulted in a few audiotapes of interest only to One America
News Network (OAN)
My 2 cents: More is discussed
and outlined in the
Washington Post article – check it out… good historical review and
handy reference material.
Will this Trump dirt hunt be
effective and matter in this election cycle? We are about to find out.
Thanks for stopping by.
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