Ah, but I went on: “If you had any sense, you would start using our tactics against us. After all, you have a few lawyers on your side. Sue us. File frivolous ethics complaints against all our elected officials until, like Sarah, they go broke from defending themselves… Let slip your own journalistic dogs of war, assuming you have any… Of course, you won’t. You’re too nice, too enamored of history and tradition to realize that the rules have changed. Not for nothing is one of our mottos, ‘By Any Means Necessary.’”
Needless to say, such counsel was then and continues to be studiously ignored by the Republican establishment, which preferred Paul Ryan’s wonkism then and prefers Joe Biden’s wokism today. It’s not just that the party of Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy likes to lose, it’s that they want to lose. To fight back, or even God forbid win, would be rude.
Meant to harm gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin in his race against former governor Terry McAuliffe, it involved lining up identically clad, tiki-torch carrying “conservatives” standing on guard near a Youngkin campaign bus while evoking the media-crafted “memory” of Charlottesville.
The problem was that several of the “supporters” were quickly identified as Democrat activists, whereupon the disgraced Lincoln Project, hoping that someone (in other words, the mainstream media) would still tumble for their scam, volunteered to take the fall—because, after all, even with the hated Trump defeated and gone, “our democracy” still requires saving.
And what did conservatives do about it? Did they strike back, try to embarrass McAuliffe in some way, launch strikes in New Jersey against Democrat incumbent Phil Murphy, put up a fuss about the continuing embarrassment of the Biden “presidency,” do anything to help extract the remaining hundreds of American citizens left behind in Afghanistan, protest on the floor of the House or the Senate the administration’s bruited payments of $450,000 apiece to illegal aliens who were “separated from their families” by the Trump administration, the choking off of the American energy industry while handing the begging bowl to Russia and the Saudis for help, unsnarling the chaos at West Coast ports that have disrupted the American supply chain, or—and I’m still waiting for this one—doing their best to countermand the very idea of a vaccine passport/ universal mandate advocated by Biden and the fascist Democrats?
Don’t be silly, Brandon.
A society that won’t fight back, that refuses to defend itself, is doomed, its people deserving of scorn and contempt. And yet when has the GOP establishment ever fought back? They hated Trump and did their best to sabotage him at almost every turn. (The rest of the sabotage he accomplished by himself, on the advice of Jared and Ivanka, aka Javanka, aka “the Democrats,” as they were known around the White House.) They wouldn’t kill Obamacare, they wouldn’t build the wall on the southern border, they wouldn’t even try to stop illegal immigration, they wouldn’t join the president in his trade war against China—why would they, since so many of them are in Chinese communist pockets?
The days of Republican “dirty tricks,” which in the modern era date back to Watergate, are long gone. Merry prankster Roger Stone, a Nixon-era veteran, found himself arrested at predawn gunpoint by the FBI during the “Russian collusion” investigation for alleged witness tampering and lying to congressional investigators about something that never happened.
When Democrats get caught red-handed, on the other hand, they take a page out of Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky playback, grin sheepishly, and deny, deny, deny. Although Clinton was impeached, the Democrats decided that rather than ever come clean, they would double down on recalcitrance, and since then nothing ever happens to them even when they’re guilty as… well, Bill Clinton.
This is what organized crime does and has since the heyday of the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition. “I didn’t do nuthin’ and you can’t prove it” has been their motto for a full century now. They run a smooth operation, with pet politicians, pet judges, pet investigators, and a federal police force that might as well be on the take for all the even-handedness it exhibits.
Fleets of handsomely retained lawyers see to it that, when and if caught, their clients’ lives are as little-inconvenienced as possible, their bank accounts protected, and their reputations quickly refurbished.
All the while, the Republicans—the Washington Generals to the Democrats’ Harlem Globetrotters—dutifully play their assigned roles as chumps and stooges, voicing fake outrage, then pratfalling on cue while the media yuks it up and the war on real America takes another left turn. They’re the real clowns in the room—but the joke’s on us.
