After Joe Biden’s fiery speech in defense of democracy last week, most of the Washington press responded with another stream of absurdly false equations.
“The two sides have finally agreed on something: American democracy is in danger,” Kan the address in New York times. Washington Post editorial announce The president was “wrong in conflating support for the rule of law with a partisan agenda, which he dubbed the ‘action of democracy’.”
In his wonderful new book, Post columnist Dana Milbank offers none of the soft judgments that most of his Washington colleagues have unfortunately become addicted to.
He got straight to the point that eluded the authors of that Times story and Post editorial: “Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy. There is a perfectly rational, albeit highly cynical, reason for this. Democracy is working against Republicans” who have won the popular vote only once in eight presidential elections. Since 1988.
Milbank writes that while “America is approaching majority-minority status”, “…white grievances and white fear” have pushed “republican identity more than any other factor—and pushed tribalism and dysfunction into the American political system.”
Working as a political columnist for the past 16 years, Milbank has had “a front-row seat to the worst show on Earth: the cracking of the Republican Party, and the resulting cracking of American democracy.”
The book has four roughly equal sections: On the Clinton presidency (“defined in cut style [Newt] Gingrich”), the presidency of George W. Bush (“defined by Karl Rove’s dishonesty”), the Obama presidency and the Trump era.
This is an accurate history, illustrating how Republicans have spent a quarter of a century “piercing the foundations of democracy and civil society,” waging their “war on truth, their growing exploitation of racism and white supremacy, their subversion of the institutions… of government, the dehumanization of opponents and their fueling of violence.”
Milbank traces Republican love’s relationship with racism back to Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy in his 1968 presidential campaign, dating the beginning of government dysfunction to the disastrous four years from 1995 to 1999 when Gingrich did everything in his power to blow up the federal government. When he was Speaker of Parliament.
Milbank, by showing in minute detail “the extent to which Republicans and their allied donors, the media and interest groups have been pulling the threads of democracy,” makes clear that Trump’s presidency has been far from an aberration. He represented the true Republican Party, without any disguise of merciful conservatism.
There was nothing new about Donald Trump 30573 documented lie as chief. Gingrich’s Republicans have been “imbued with wild and often unfounded allegations. Whitewater. Soldier. Travelgate. Filegate. Furniture. Webb Hubbell, Clinton aide whose father, Chelsea Clinton, fell … Commerce Secretary Ron Brown dies in A plane crash…it was a blow arranged by Clinton.” and so on.
It was Gingrich, Clinton’s special counsel Ken Starr, his aide Brett Kavanaugh, Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh who showed Trump “the political power of an endless repeat lie.”
The filth also started with Gingrich.
“I think one of the biggest problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be bad,” Gingrich told Republicans in college in 1978. It’s a war for power.”
Eleven years later, Gingrich told reporter John Harwood (who last week left CNN After calling Trump a “demagogue”) Democrats were “horrible”, “crazy” and “stupid”.
Milbank is particularly strong about Ralph ReedA decisive figure in the distortion of the religious right into a ‘right-wing’ entity rather than a ‘religious’ entity. There is also an extended version of Giant pressure scandal It centered on Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, a former senior aide to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Scanlon and Abramov “scammed Indian tribes out of the tens of millions of dollars” by telling them they were promoting their casinos. They also pushed Reid to mobilize evangelical Christians to oppose gambling ventures that would compete with his own gambling interests.
Another long section reminds us that the George W. Bush administration has done more damage than Trump, by promoting the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and leading America into an entirely unnecessary and catastrophic war in Iraq.
Millbank’s book follows a fine tradition It’s worse than it looksNorman Ornstein and Thomas Mann’s 2012 book was the first to point out the futility of the Washington Press Service’s attempts to be “fair” to both sides.
Milbank quotes him: “The Republican Party has become rebellious - an ideological extremist. Disdain for the inherited system of social and economic policy; disdain for compromise;
Herein lies the tragedy of the Washington press. Ten years after Ornstein and Mann made those clever observations, Milbank is one of the few reporters who have incorporated their wisdom into his work. As a result, he is almost alone in treating GOP statements with the contempt they always deserve.
like Ornstein chirp Saturday: “Tragically, our mainstream media has shown that it is either uninterrupted in this fight or that it has chosen the side of autocrats by normalizing their behavior and downplaying their intentions.”
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The Terminators: The Twenty-Five Year Collapse of the Republican Party, Ho Published in the United States by Doubleday