Republicans have created an alternate universe. In it Trump is the political equivalent of Jesus Christ on the cross instead of a serial scofflaw and liar; Climate change is nonexistent even though our planet is experiencing the hottest days ever recorded and in places like Arizona people who lie on the pavement, even briefly, come away with third degree burns and hay is spontaneously combusting and burning because of the heat; Black people who were slaves got great free job training so what are they complaining about?! And Biden and his son, Hunter, are criminal masterminds who have engaged in financial fraud even though there’s no evidence of it.
Republicans keep choosing to live in a fact-free world of revisionist history. They might like living in la-la land, but it isn’t helpful for them or for the Republican Party. How do we know that? Well, let’s see…Trump lost in 2020, the red wave expected in 2022 was a ripple that left the House at odds with the wishes of most Americans by empowering the MAGA wing of the GOP, and Trump’s Supreme Court appointments have resulted in a court that over-represents the will of extremists and Christian nationalists who are not in the majority. When the Court shattered abortion rights with the Dobbs decision, it created a backlash across America that should help Democrats win elections for decades to come even in red states that are gerrymandered. Republicans have created a brand for themselves that doesn’t appeal to a majority of Americans: anti-human rights, anti-democracy, intolerant, racist, anti-climate change and anti-reproductive rights.
Here’s yet another example of how living in a fact free universe has hurt Republicans: People who believed vaccines were a bunch of hooey died at a higher rate than people who value science and got vaccinated.
THE LIES ABOUT VACCINES RESULTED IN MORE DEATHS FOR REPUBLICANS
Turns out being lied to and choosing to believe those lies was bad for your health.
Yale University researchers found that registered Republicans had a higher rate of excess deaths than Democrats in the months after vaccines became available for all adults in April 2021.
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Being a card-carrying GOP MAGA cult member was bad for your health when the pandemic happened on Donald Trump’s watch. As the pandemic took off, Trump shifted from being all in on helping Americans to stay safe and alive (rushing vaccines into production!) to promoting conspiracy theories about the pandemic being a Chinese plot, pushing the idea that the pandemic wasn’t a big deal even as body bags mounted outside of hospitals, and downplaying the need to get a vaccine or take other precautions to avoid getting Covid.
Most Republicans went along with Trump’s version of reality. Looking in the rear view mirror, excess death rate data paired with party registration information has exposed a significantly higher death rate for Republicans compared to Democrats once vaccines were available.
The take home lesson should be that faith in the Donald Trump/Republican version of reality is not good for you and might even be lethal.
People should extend that take home lesson to the issue of guns and gun control legislation. Republicans claim you will be safer if you possess guns. The reality is the opposite.
Yet another example of fantasy thinking that will ultimately not go well for Republicans is their threat to impeach Joe Biden.
Mc CARTHY IS OPENLY MUSING ABOUT IMPEACHING BIDEN
Speaker Kevin McCarthy last night raised the possibility of an “impeachment inquiry” into President Biden and compared him to Richard Nixon, Axios’ Andrew Solender reports.
- Why it matters: McCarthy has dangled impeachment against Biden cabinet officials. But this is the closest he’s come to making that threat against the president himself.
Between the lines: The House isn’t ready to vote on Biden’s impeachment yet — a move many swing-district moderates wouldn’t go for. But McCarthy faces significant pressure from his right flank to go full bore.
- Last month, the speaker went so far as to kill a right-wing effort to hold a House vote on impeaching Biden over his border policies.
But McCarthy told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Monday that the House investigation into business dealings by Biden family members “is rising to the level of impeachment inquiry, which provides Congress the strongest power to get the rest of the knowledge and information needed.”
- Citing testimony by IRS whistleblowers to the Oversight Committee, McCarthy said: “This president has also used something we haven’t seen since Richard Nixon — used the weaponization of government to benefit his family.”
The other side: Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte, in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), offered to make U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who led the investigation into Hunter Biden, available for testimony. Read the letter. (Politico)
What the government insists on is that David Weiss testify IN PUBLIC and NOT BEHIND CLOSED DOORS as Jim Jordan wants him to do. The reason is that if Weiss testifies in public, the truth will come out and it will become clear that Weiss was not pushed or influenced by Joe Biden when it came to the investigation of his son, Hunter. Americans should hear the testimony and decide for themselves instead of getting Jim Jordan’s fantasyland version of what was said. If Hunter Biden broke the law that’s on HIM and he should be held accountable. But Hunter Biden is not Joe Biden. They are different people, y’all.
THE REAL REASONS BIDEN IMPEACHMENT IS BEING FLOATED
The two real reasons the MAGA House Republicans are pushing for impeachment of Joe Biden are that:
1) Trump is urging them to at least start an investigation so he can argue (false) moral equivalency.
2) Kevin McCarthy needs to appease the MAGA extremists in the House if he hopes to stay in the role of speaker- the MAGAs want to impeach Biden to appease their red district constituents.
The MAGAs in the House have colluded with their constituents by insisting that Biden is a slimeball and they have vowed to go after him even though they don’t know what they would be impeaching him for. That, they say, will be the subject of their investigation. (Because that’s what they believe in the alternate universe.) If McCarthy doesn’t placate these angry MAGA extremists, he will be voted out. So, he has to throw them a bone. They claim that Biden put his thumb on the scale to help his son to get a sweet financial deal. They claim it happened when Biden was vice president, by the way. Even if it were true, it is hard to see how it could rise to the level of an impeachable offense.
At Trump’s urging, nonetheless, Kevin McCarthy is floating the idea. Trump wants to be able to claim that his impeachments were nothing to worry about. See, Biden is getting impeached too!
Trump also wants McCarthy to “expunge” his two impeachments. Which is not even a thing. There is no such thing as expunging an impeachment once a president has been impeached. We all heard the evidence. We all saw how the Republicans in the Senate refused to convict Trump after he was impeached on each occasion. This idea of expungement for him and impeachment for Biden is what Trump is pushing for with his usual monomaniacal focus: these are two of Trump’s current white whales. If Biden is being impeached, the thinking goes, then Trump’s two impeachments get normalized.
TRUMP LEADS THE PARTY IN THE WRONG DIRECTION AGAIN AND AGAIN
Trump has pushed many other self-serving ideas on the Republican Party, a party which has devolved into a cult devoted to Donald Trump instead of a political party that thinks for itself. Republicans must at least claim to believe and pursue Trump’s every whim. As Trump pushes this party to accede to his bad judgement and flawed goals, he is seriously damaging and possibly destroying what used to be a reasonably law-abiding political party that at one point realized that to win future elections they needed to appeal to a larger base. Trump cast that idea off and doubled down on the white supremacist/evangelical/Christian nationalist/ rightwing minority base, the MAGA base.
Someday in the future, when historians look back on this period of time in America, they will shake their heads and wonder how normally sane Americans could have fallen for this deeply flawed man, Donald Trump, and allowed him to turn the GOP into a shadow of its former self. They will point to Trump’s terrible judgement and self-serving goals and ideas, his refusal to accept defeat which gave rise to the claim that he had actually won and was being cheated out of a second term.
Trump’s delusional, obsessive personality creates in him a powerful need to micromanage and control everything around him for his own benefit which underlies much of his criminal activity which is now being charged in indictments in New York, Georgia, and by the DOJ in DC and Florida. His overbearing nature is both the reason his cult loves him and wants him to be their president, and the reason he is being indicted for his actions leading up to the insurrection. After losing in 2020, he pursued every possible way to stay in power without regard for the law. He was well informed of the law by his advisors. He chose to disregard the law because it got in the way of his goals. Trump is the first president-mobster we have ever had to endure. All of that will be exposed in the coming trials in Washington, DC, Georgia, New York and Florida once those trials commence.
IMPEACHMENT OF BIDEN BY THE MAGAs IN THE HOUSE WILL HURT REPUBLICANS
When Trump is indicted for the 3rd time, he will most certainly call on the House to impeach Biden. If McCarthy does open an impeachment investigation into Biden to appease Trump, it will be another failure of judgement visited on the GOP by Trump. Insisting that Biden has committed an impeachable offense when he hasn’t will backfire on House Republicans. So far, the House has failed to present any credible evidence in their so-called weaponization committee led by Jim Jordan. They have been trying to prove that our government was weaponized against the Republican Party and the rightwing. If anything, threats coming from Trump’s cult base have shut down other more moderate voices that don’t agree with them, terrorized election workers, and damaged everyone else’s first amendment rights.
Until there is evidence that Biden has done something that deserves impeachment, this impeachment ploy will backfire.
Everyone should remember that Republicans have been pursuing this idea about Biden abusing his power for years now. Remember when Trump was impeached for trying to make up stuff about Biden in Ukraine? Trump was trying to get Zelenskyy to claim there was some kind of investigation into Biden going on so that Trump could dirty Biden up before the election. That failed because Zelenskyy refused to give in to Trump’s pressure campaign. That got exposed in the impeachment trial of Trump. This current effort is a continuation of that failed attack on Biden that led to Trump’s impeachment. If there was any credible evidence of Biden doing corrupt stuff in league with his son that it would have surfaced by now because the rightwing has been working really really hard to find something, anything at all they can use to GET him with. It must be frustrating for the MAGAs that Biden has not committed an impeachable offense. Here is the definition of an impeachable offense:
Article 2, Section 4 states that the “President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” This describes an abuse of power by a high-level public official.
WHY EVEN AN IMPEACHMENT INVESTIGATION INTO BIDEN WILL BACKFIRE ON THE MAGAS
The American people do not like it when their elected officials waste time and taxpayer money trying to impeach presidents like Bill Clinton for horsing around in the Oval Office.
Despite the fact that he was only the second President in U.S. history to be impeached by the House of Representatives, President Bill Clinton received a 73% job approval rating from the American public after being impeached which was the highest rating of his administration, and one of the higher job approval ratings given any president since the mid-1960s.
The backlash from this coming wild goose chase will benefit Joe Biden’s bid for re-election instead of hurting him. It is remarkable that the MAGAs don’t understand that.
If the GOP wants to help Biden win in 2024, they should definitely impeach him.