The GOP and the Bore Wars
"They're the lesser of two evils." It is the common pyrrhic refrain of conservative citizens who hold their noses every election cycle to vote for Republican candidates.
While it is true that (R) Mitch McConnell isn't as egregious as the execrable (D) Chuck Schumer, and (R) Kevin McCarthy is nowhere near as fetid as the suppurating canker sore that is (D) Nancy Pelosi, conservatives who vote for the Grand Old Party (GOP) this midterm should be under no illusions about what they'll be getting in return.
Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley might not be a man of action, but he is a latter day Man of Letters. In a gallant attempt to show his base he's doing "something" about the latest progressive provocation, Grassley sometimes pens an old fashioned letter, occasionally even a sternly worded missive, and sends it to the Department of Justice (DOJ) or the FBI. The bemused recipients use these letters as they would a roll of Charmin.
Show hearings are another GOP classic. Remember what the GOP did about the Internal Revenue Service's systematic abuse of conservative groups and citizens?
The IRS destroyed most of the incriminating evidence, their hard drives all "crashed" simultaneously, and Obama era flunkies like Lois Lerner, Douglas Schulman, and John Koskinen all floated away on their golden parachutes. The GOP shrugged in response, and the IRS remains unreformed and unaccountable today, and is poised to metastasize further, with a new blitzkrieg against conservative taxpayers expected.
Were the Big Tech show hearings in 2018 any different? The GOP was in the majority when Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter's Jack Dorsey, and Google's openly racist CEO Sundar Pichai all denied under oath that they were broadly censoring and deplatforming conservatives, and manipulating algorithms to achieve those ends.
Did the GOP congress charge any of them with perjury or use the power of their office to coerce better behavior from Big Tech? No. The GOP did what it does best -- nothing.
Lindsey "We're going to get to the bottom of it" Graham, who vigorously defended the Capitol police officer who shot and killed unarmed retired military veteran Ashli Babbitt on January 6th, typifies the "all talk, no action" GOP.
Many past and present GOP officeholders view their own voters with raw contempt. Former President George W. Bush, for example, thinks conservative voters were on the side of the angels when they voted for him; when they voted for Trump, however, millions were suddenly transmogrified into white supremacists and DVEs (domestic violent extremists, in the FBI's lurid imagination).
In exchange for defaming voters from his own party, the former Bushitler turned useful factotum was briefly welcomed to a prime seat at the progressive roundtable, where he basked in the temporary applause and adulation.
It proves the adage that if you scratch most any elected Republican officeholder behind the ears and rub his tummy, he'll out-McCain Mitt Romney as he rolls over, chases his tail, and woofs on command to please his progressive masters.
Some elected Republicans rightly point out that America's permanent governing bureaucracies are staffed almost exclusively (more than four million personnel by some estimates) by committed progressives -- and since personnel is policy, it is a Sisyphean undertaking to reduce the size and bloat of government, or force bovine bureaucrats to learn to code or do something useful with their lives rather than be expensive wards of the welfare state.
Yet, the GOP has done nothing to downsize or correct the grotesque bureaucratic imbalance, or defend any conservative turf. As a result, even when they are in the majority, the GOP always gets rolled by the Left.
When conservatives are fired by their corporate employers for not pledging undying fealty to Black Lives Matter, or for being conservative, or Caucasian, or pro-life, or forgoing the COVID vaccine, the GOP does nothing -- legislatively or otherwise -- about it.
Conservatives know that if they dare question the sacred integrity of the 2020 election while using Mark Zuckerberg's insipid and time wasting product, Facebook's progressive goons will snitch them out to the Feds. 2000 and 2016 election deniers, on the other hand, along with Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams supporters, can deny election results all they want without being reported to the Feds.
The GOP yawns and remains indifferent.
A pitiful handful of brave FBI whistleblowers recently came forward to divulge inconvenient truths about widespread FBI abuses of conservative citizens, whether concerned parents (terrorists!) at school board meetings, random pro-life citizens, and even fellow FBI agents being purged from the Bureau for their political beliefs.
For their trouble, those agents were stripped of their security clearances and faced government retaliation. Does the GOP have their backs? If past is prologue, it seems more likely the agents will be hung out to dry by the GOP.
Most conservatives just want to obey the law, mind their own business, and be left alone by the government. But the government has no plans to leave you alone.
Conservatives know their banks, their credit card companies, or PayPal or GoFundMe will rat them out to federal authorities if they buy a handgun for protection or donate to a conservative group like Judicial Watch or try to contribute money to the legal defense of a Project Veritas or Kyle Rittenhouse. The GOP says its hands are tied, there is not a thing they can do to thwart such disparate maltreatment.
Many conservative commentators claim the government, the bureaucracies and their progressive functionaries and drones, the courts, the media, the culture are all persecuting the American people.
Such claims badly misread the situation. The government and society's institutions are not targeting the "American people" or the entire electorate per se; they are specifically targeting only one half of the electorate -- conservative citizens, and white male conservatives in particular -- for their sociopolitical beliefs. For who they are, as the Left would say.
Since at least the Obama era, the GOP has done nothing to protect its constituents from government persecution. For example, the names of conservative citizens who donate to the GOP are in an IRS database, exponentially increasing the odds of an audit or government frame-up.
Will the GOP come to your aid when the IRS targets your bank account and other assets due to your conservative beliefs or the FBI rams in your front door and arrests you because you have a "Don't Tread On Me" flag in your yard?
When you post an innocent meme online poking fun at the Delaware Doofus in the White House and the FBI responds by adding your name to their terror database and watch list, think the GOP will send the cavalry to defend you? Better think again.
The government's ghastly, sadistic treatment of January 6 defendants -- solitary confinement, documented allegations of outright torture, absurdly long prison sentences wildly disproportionate to the crimes of "parading" or trespassing at the Capitol -- none of this has elicited any meaningful pushback from the Republican Party.
Trump supporters protesting at the Capitol didn't kill anybody (none of them even had a firearm), yet most elected officials in the GOP unreservedly defend the DOJ and its nationwide dragnet, along with various entrapment schemes cooked up by the FBI to destroy innocent lives over mere political differences.
Progressives, on the other hand, have free reign to shoplift at will, coldcock strangers in public, murder innocent people daily with near impunity, or firebomb churches or pro-life clinics.
Many media and institutional defenders claim progressive killers or rioters are merely leveling the playing field; "privileged" white victims had it coming to them, or the target was a Republican "extremist" and so deserved what he or she got. Progressive cheerleaders offer endless nonsensical justifications for progressive violence.
If the Republicans somehow overcome the margin of Democrat cheating (is it now 3% of the total Democrat vote? 5%?) this November and reclaim one or both houses of congress, they will have an umpteenth opportunity to "do something" other than write letters or bluster on cable news.
Yet, don't expect the GOP to seriously tackle Biden family corruption, or election fraud, or criminal misconduct on the part of the DOJ or FBI or IRS, or social media companies that suffocate conservative speech. Show hearings, the usual stagecraft to mollify the GOP base, are possible, but the GOP itself will remain the abused, silent, enabling partner of the Washington DC uniparty.
Many voters will hold their noses, again, and vote for the lesser of two evils, and pray that the GOP will finally grow a backbone. Yet, after all the Republican capitulation since at least the Obama presidency (do the names John Boehner and Paul Ryan ring any bells?), few voters are naive enough to think that a Republican majority will have the vision or courage to rescue a nation in extremis.
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by Todd Gregory & Erik Gregory
The authors are brothers on the west coast
