Charlottesville "Unite the Right"
Republican Senate and House members, Republican politicians generally, conservative pundits appearing on the “fair and balanced” Fox News, and evangelical pastors with their faces at once beatific and doleful, all joined in expressing unctuous concern over Speaker Pelosi’s intention to move ahead Monday with the impeachment of Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, for “Incitement of Insurrection.” The politicians, pundits, and pastors seem united in their opinion that impeachment will “further divide the country.”
For myself, I find this another example of Republicans and their constituencies lacking what I refer to as an “irony gene.” They seem immune to the fact that what they say is the exact obverse of what they do. Republicans have been going about dividing America at least since Newt Gingrich made a science of combative, take no prisoners, partisan politics. Gingrich is remembered for a 1978 talk he gave to young Republican activists at college in Georgia in which he said, “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.”*
Republicans have been led for the last 4 years by the “Divider in Chief,” Donald J. Trump. They have followed him slavishly, and parroted his divisive, crass, insulting dialog and Twitter feed. They have refused to criticize him even when his behavior is beneath contempt and his policies are contemptible. There weren’t “very fine people on both sides,” but Republicans, fearful of losing a significant portion of their constituency, were loath to call out white supremacists. And when Trump told them to "stand back and stand by," these Republicans said nothing, until they began saying, "they stole the election from you."
Well, at least most of these irony-challenged Republicans aren’t saying that incitement of an insurrection isn’t impeachable. They’re just concerned that actually impeaching the son of a bitch that did it will “further divide the country.
Insurrection, January 6, 2021
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* Mitch McConnell is said to have “transformed from a moderate Republican who supported abortion rights and public employee unions to the embodiment of partisan obstructionism” as a result of observing the effectiveness of Gingrich’s tactics (Alec MacGillis, “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell,” 2014).