Yes, it’s amazing how much calmer life is now that we don’t have to listen to Donald Trump all the time. And it’s simultaneously amazing that Republicans continue to stick to the crazy at such a head-spinning rate that we can’t keep up.
Lauren Boebert and her guns. Mary Miller and her “Hitler was right.” Marjorie Taylor Greene and exhibits A through double-Z. Kevin McCarthy and his bottom that knows no bottom. McCarthyism used to mean guilt by association. Now it means providing cover for fascism, which is worse if you ask me. At least Joe McCarthy wasn’t one of his party’s top two national leaders.
Which brings us to someone who’d like to be a top dog, and who you might have lost track of amid all this insanity. Remember when Josh Hawley was top of the pops? Well, he’s just provided another reminder of why we should never forget that he’s around. He’s playing the old false moral equivalence game in a particularly disgusting and dishonest way.
He’s out there trying to fundraise off of Trump’s impeachment trial. No, they don’t all do that. To do that, you have to decide that the precipitating event of the impeachment, the Jan. 6 terrorist riot on the Capitol, was an event that you can and should exploit for personal gain. They don’t all think that way. Even Republicans.
But Hawley does. And that’s only the beginning. What’s worse is the way that he does it, with a sleazy lie about Joe Biden that tries to make Biden sound as if he, too, advocated violence against political foes:
“Even chasing President Trump out of office isn’t enough for them. They have to impeach him AGAIN. They are going after Trump, and they are still coming after me — both of us for the same sin: Instead of protecting the elites, I stood up for the people and now I am being threatened every day by Democrats calling for me to be expelled from the Senate, and Joe Biden has echoed that I should be ‘flat beaten.’ ”
Flat beaten?? Whoa! Joe Biden said that?! That is kind of gross. How could he imply that he wouldn’t mind if some group of, say, antifa hooligans tracked Hawley down and roughed him up? That would be pretty terrible.
Needless to say, however, Biden didn’t say it. What he said, on Jan. 8, was that Hawley and Ted Cruz “should be just flat beaten the next time they run for reelection.”
Oooohhhhh. You see, there was nothing ambiguous at all about Biden’s comment. The next time they run for reelection. In fact, Biden’s position was an unusually soft one on Hawley and Cruz for a Democrat to take. He was asked whether the pair should be expelled from the Senate, per the resolution that Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and others drafted. And he said no. Leave them to their voters.
Imagine what a dishonest piece of garbage you have to be to take the words “the next time they run for reelection” out of that email.
Hawley’s not alone here. Over the weekend, Rand Paul went on TV to say that if the Senate is going to convict Trump over his words on Jan. 6, then it should also expel Chuck Schumer for what he said about Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Schumer, in March of last year, did use intemperate language about the two justices. He said that if they ruled to restrict abortion rights on a Louisiana case, they “will pay the price” and added, addressing them: “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
That was over the line. I could hear how their wives and children, say, could hear those words more ominously than I heard them. But here’s the thing. Schumer apologized. The next day. The. Next. Day. Paul, of course, somehow forgot to mention this part in his television appearance.
So this is the next phase in the GOP’s war on reality: to make the Democrats seem like the party of violence. Because their only defense on all these offenses against democracy is projection: to take examples of Democrats doing kinda-sorta-but-not-really similar things and distorting them to try and argue that the Democrats are the real culprits. They do it on everything. The Democrats are the real gerrymanderers, the real liars, the real power-mad extremists. And now that they are increasingly accused, and accurately so, of condoning or even promoting violence, they have to turn around and accuse Democrats of it.
And Hawley is quickly proving that he’s in a league by himself. I remember when he first got to the Senate, some friends of mine on the left would tell me that this Hawley is interesting, that he’s against monopoly power and talks tough about the tech giants. That he did.
But a) it’s increasingly looking to me like his anger at the tech giants wasn’t so much on anti-monopoly grounds as on the grounds that he believes they muzzle conservatives, and b) the guy’s a fascist. I hope all the anti-monopoly activists on the left, whom I admire, will refuse in the wake of Jan. 6 to accept this dangerous man as a comrade in any way, shape, or form.
And let us beware of Republican attempts to play the false equivalency game on violence. And yes, Democrats, don’t be stupid and give them any excuse to play it. There’s only one member of Congress who put together an ad showing herself with a semi-automatic weapon aimed in the general direction of three of her colleagues, and she wasn’t a Democrat. We must make sure America sees these people for who they are.
