The MAGA war on truth will be likely be waged forever, even if (or especially if) the espionage criminal defendant lands behind bars. It’s a virulent illness that attacks the very lifeblood of our beleaguered democracy, and it can be subsumed only if we vigilant patriots continue to administer strong doses of sanity.
But sometimes, fortunately, the MAGA attacks are so pathetic that our best defense is contemptuous laughter. Exhibit A occurred earlier this week when the Trump-Putin puppets in the Republican House voted to censure – to formally rebuke – Congressman Adam Schiff for leading the first Trump impeachment and telling the truth in granular detail about how Vladimir Putin had successfully helped to elect Trump in 2016 with the Trump team’s full awareness.
With Biden in the presidency and the Democrats running the Senate, MAGA House members don’t have the clout to achieve any legislative goals (do they have any legislative goals), so instead they’re focused on warring against truth and stuffing facts down the Orwellian memory hole. They ginned up a bare majority to censure Schiff, soiling themselves in the process – much to Schiff’s amusement. He called the censure “a badge of honor that I will wear proudly,” justifiably so.
I was reminded of a line of dialogue in An Enemy of the People, the Ibsen play where a town doctor is scorned by a mob for daring to warn about poisons in the local water. The doc mocks them, “Oh yes, you can shout me down, I know! But you cannot answer me. The majority has might on its side – unfortunately. But right it has not.”
Or, as Schiff said to the House MAGA mob in response to the censure, “Why did you not stand up to Donald Trump, why did you not reject his immorality, why did you not condemn his dishonesty, why did you not speak out when his horde attacked this Capitol, when he treats the nation’s secrets with such carelessness, lawlessness and disdain, why did you hide from efforts to hold him accountable, why were you silent, afraid, unwilling to do your ethical, constitutional duty, why did you cower, why did you cower – and why do you still?”
Did anyone have an answer to that? George Santos did. The shape-shifting fraud said that he voted to censure Schiff for this reason: “We must preserve the integrity of the House.”
I kid you not.
It’s a waste of space for me to detail all the ways that Trump’s MAGA liars dwell in denial. Suffice it to say that Schiff’s critiques of the Trump-Russia nexus were strongly confirmed by a 1000-page Senate Intelligence Committee report released in 2020, when the Republicans ran that committee. It detailed “a direct tie between senior Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.” It detailed all the ways that the Trump team knew it was getting Russian help, that the Trump team was fine with getting the help, and that the Trump team tried to cover up evidence of the Russian help: “The Trump campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia, and was indifferent to whether Russia and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.”
If you prefer plain English, here’s Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican strategist who has bailed on his former party. He tweeted yesterday: “It’s impossible to overstate the utter insanity & treachery of a major American campaign being contacted by Russians & not immediately calling FBI. Trump campaign had over 100 contacts. No previous R or D campaign in history would have done this. Putin helped Trump win & what did he get? Greatest success of covert op in history. Pro-Russia element of US politics is now in GOP.”
Hence the House GOP censure of Schiff. The puppets can’t handle the truth. They’re the ones who should be censured, for refusing to condemn Putin’s covert op, for endorsing their puppeteer’s lie about a stolen ’20 election, for refusing to impeach him after the Jan. 6 insurrection. And hilariously, they’ve now given Schiff’s public profile a huge boost as he continues mapping his ’24 bid for a U.S. Senate seat. Nice work, dopes.
Or, as Ibsen wrote in An Enemy of the People, “A party is like a sausage machine. It grinds up all sorts of heads together into the same baloney.”
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An historical factoid:
On June 23, 1972 – 51 years ago today – Richard Nixon ordered his aides to cover up his re-election campaign’s ties to the Watergate break-in. The order was recorded on what came to be known as “the smoking gun tape.” The public learned of this recording in the summer of 1974; within days, a contingent of Capitol Hill Republicans trekked to the White House and told Nixon that he was toast.
Those were the days.