Fall in behind
Define “moderate.”
Republican moderate refuses to disown Trump over constitution threat
It doesn’t seem very “moderate” to me to give tacit support to a reckless self-serving criminal bully who says we should tear up the constitution and make him dictator.
“Whoever the Republicans end up picking, I’ll fall in behind” them, Dave Joyce of Ohio told ABC’s This Week, adding that he thought Americans did not want to look back to the 2020 election, the subject of Trump’s lies about electoral fraud and demand for extra-constitutional action.
We don’t want to “look back” at things that happened a few hours ago?
Joyce said: “I will support whoever the Republican nominee is. And I just don’t think that at this point [Trump] will be able to get there because I think there’s a lot of other good quality candidates out there.”
To the host, that was “a remarkable statement. You’d support a candidate who’s come out for suspending the constitution?”
Joyce said: “Well, you know, [Trump] says a lot of things. You have to take him in context. And right now I have to worry about making sure the Republican Governance Group and the Republican majority make things work for the American people. And I can’t be really chasing every one of these crazy statements that come out … from any of these candidates.”
Yes, Trump does say a lot of things, many of which are rock-solid reasons for never voting for him and for doing everything possible to consign him to oblivion. The fact that he does that is not a reason to shrug indifferently and continue to support him.
With so many GOP devoted to “making things work for the American people”, why the hell is it that they always vote for things that do the opposite? Oh, wait, i know. Because the “American people” to them are their donors, especially the corporate donors. And, of course, making sure the rich pay fewer taxes than the poor.
It’s not like Trump has a track record of lying, cheating, assaulting, and generally being an all-around horrible person and piss-poor president. Also, gas prices are going
up(uh, never mind…).Kevin McCarthy says that the first thing the gop is going to do when he takes over is read the Constitution* into the House record, I guess as a requiem.
*The whole thing, presumably including the 3/5ths clause.
As much as I hated (!) George W. Bush, I think it was still possible to be a Republican and a moderate at the same time during his presidency. At the very latest* it ceased to be a possibility after the party made it into its official policy to embrace the Big Lie about the stolen election in 2020. By all means, be against the Democrats all you like. But if you want to be considered a “moderate”, supporting a party that doesn’t accept the most basic rules of the democratic game (and it doesn’t get much more basic than accepting the outcome of elections) is not among the options available to you. Every vote for the GOP is now a vote for the death of democracy, and dictatorship, and every Republican has to at the very least be willing to accept this as the price they’re prepared to pay in order to force their policies on everyone else.
*And arguably as soon as it became clear that Trump would be the Republican candidate in 2016.
* Every vote for the GOP is now a vote for the death of democracy
, and dictatorshipDoes the “I’m just supporting the party’s nominee” feel like the Nuremberg defense to anyone else?
This is a good example of moving the Overton Window when Bjarte was able to identify Bush as a moderate. He wasn’t. The last moderate Republican president was Ike, though Bush the First had some claims to that. The only reason we can see Bush 43 as moderate is that the Republican Party has become so extreme.
iknklast
In my feeble defense I think there is a relevant difference between saying that it was still “possible to be a Republican and a moderate at the same time” during the Bush era and describing Bush himself as a moderate.
Okay. Just wanted to make sure no one thinks Bush was moderate; he was the direct result of Ronald Reagan and his shifting everything.
Because Reagan was pleasant, affable, and charismatic, he got away with shit that moved us so far to the right that we now can think of people like Hillary Clinton as a foaming at the mouth liberal (I don’t think anyone here does that, of course, but the nation as a whole seems to think that).
Nullius, yes.