A Convenient Amnesia

In early 2016 Lindsey Graham, the thoughtful but doggedly Conservative Senator from South Carolina, described Donald Trump as a “kook” and pointedly wrote that he was “not fit to be President of the United States”. He said this after his own prospects for the Republican nomination had dropped to zero. As Trump secured the nomination, Graham announced that his own Party had gone “batshit crazy”.

Make absolutely no mistake about one undeniable reality: Trump the Presidential candidate is exactly the same as Trump the President. The only difference I can perceive is a marginally increased ability to read a teleprompter. Yet for the past year Lindsey Graham (along with 99.3% of Congressional Republicans) has taken no meaningful overt, public stand to reign in the “batshit crazy” we have witnessed for the past 13 months. Why?

It’s too easy to simply discount the negligent ambivalence on the part of Republican lawmakers as self-interest. The desire to retain power by securing seats in Congress has always been a significant modus operandi regardless of Party. Yet the reality that the Public interest is often their best interest as well, could, like olive oil over vinegar, still occasionally float to the surface.

Now, something has changed, yet Donald Trump, with all his mental incapacities, is not the cause. He is merely the tumor caused by this Nation’s long time exposure to a social carcinogen.

The great schism of the 21^st century began with Barack Obama. As a society we are closer to 1860 than we ever have been over the last 100 years.

Obama would likely have never become President had George W. Bush not been the second worst President in modern history. Obama rose to office on a populous wave that was made possible by his own talents and intelligence.  He was not a flaming Liberal and he proved that as President, a fact which would undermine the Democrats in the 2010 election. As a center-left President you would think he could govern as Bill Clinton had, with reasonable support from the loyal opposition. Of course, that did not happen.

 Before the music had faded from the inauguration balls, the famed Tea Party was gearing up to oppose his Presidency. Not oppose what he did, mind you. Rather simply to oppose him. Under the guise of being an army of fiscally responsible patriots, they organized a certain large sub-set of Americans with the classic use of fear…fear of people who were not them.

The laughable hypocrisy of their “fiscal responsibility” has been made obvious by their conspicuous absence during the Republican’s 2017-2018 continuing assault on our National Debt.

No, forget the excuses. The biggest problem with Obama for the Tea Party and their minions was that he was black…and the Republicans knew it. When McConnell stated that the primary job of the Republicans in Congress was to remove Obama from office, he was feeding fish to the seals.

The fears that have pervaded and handicapped America since the mid 1800s, have divided the Nation between White America and Black America, or as Chris Hayes has put it; a Nation and a Colony within that Nation.  We have over the decades chipped away at that division successfully, until the moral imperative to eliminate discrimination became more or less accepted…in theory.

In practice however, those latent fears of losing security (physical, financial, and egotistical) surfaced with a vengeance in 2009, even in the midst of a historic economic crisis. The dark side of American White Supremacy erupted like the angry creature that shot from the space traveler’s chest in the movie ‘Aliens’. An apt analogy indeed, considering that all types of non-European, alien minorities have been combined with African-Americans as outliers in the “Patriotic” White America.

 The Republican’s spent 7 years stoking the fears of their constituencies. They did it by systematically undercutting every move Obama made to affect legislation.  Obama, with his painfully professorial approach to governing, would not or could not rise sufficiently to confront his opposition. In plain language, the lesser educated, Conservative, white males could not stomach the idea that a black man was President, and Republican Conservatism did everything it could to make them feel justified.

This is Trump’s core support and the Republican’s Frankenstein’s monster.

Too many times I would hear reasonably intelligent men state that Obama was the worst President in the history of this Nation. What?!? Pulling us from fiscal collapse, eight years of increasing economic prosperity, ending a disastrous war, leading the world in ecological efforts, leading the world in curbing Iranian nuclear proliferation, and on and on makes their conclusion about Obama as illogical and non-sensical as their support for Donald Trump.

The Republican Party and American Conservatism now operate on pure emotion, as does Trump TV (aka Fox News). You can check your brain at the door when entering the RNC; conspiracies in every branch of Government, roaming gangs of bloodthirsty aliens in little towns everywhere, unending lies from every information source except Conservative talk radio and Fox News, herds of feminists looking to destroy good people and murder unborn babies, Gestapo Liberals ready to enter your home, empty your gun closet, and force you into third world health care, and the underprivileged not knowing their place.

I believe most of Trump’s supporters don’t love the guy, they’re just scared shitless by the alternative…made all too real by the election of a black man as President.

When Republican lawmakers and leadership are asked the question ‘why’- why Donald Trump, why the passive support, why the acceptance – they get a convenient amnesia. They didn’t know, they hadn’t heard, they are unaware, they don’t recall.  They may never remember how they used the darkest part of American society to split that society in two.