“Benedict” Donald and the United GOP Dis-loyalists vs. Joe and Jill Biden’s America

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whisper rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero 

“Behind the rise of Joe McCarthy to national power lay…five interrelated and interreacting lines of causation: a fear of radicalism which sometimes bordered on the pathological; the course of America’s cold war with the Soviet Union and its not-so-cold war with N. Korea and China; the singular character and abilities of Joseph McCarthy, the structure of power both within the Senate and between the Senate and the Executive, and the routine operation of American party politics.” – Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate, 1970

“However much one may hate to admit it, it is almost certain that between 1931 and 1940 the National Government (of Great Britain) represented the will of the mass of the people. It tolerated slums, unemployment, and a cowardly foreign policy. Yes, but so did public opinion. It was a stagnant period, and its natural leaders were mediocrities.” – George Orwell, ‘England Your England,’ The Lion and the Unicorn, 1940

“Politics is international, but repair must be local…The politics of inevitability tempted Americans to think that the world had to become like the United States and therefore more friendly and democratic, but this was not the case. In fact, the United States was itself becoming less democratic in the 2010s, and Russia was working to accelerate the trend. Russian methods of rule appealed to America’s would-be oligarchs. As in Russia, the risk was that fascist ideas would consolidate oligarchy.” – Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, 2018

“CNN reports: Republicans are creating a de facto country within a country. Civil War 2.0 is on: Red States are Building a nation within a nation.” Xanar, Daily Kos, 7/26/22

“…so long as the press is free and not corrupt, it has an enormously important function to fulfill and can rightly be called the fourth branch of government. Whether the First Amendment will suffice to protect this most essential political freedom, the right to unmanipulated factual information, without which all freedom of opinion becomes a cruel hoax, is another question.” – Hannah Arendt, Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers, 1972

“I learned that it is possible to write bills and publish newspapers without knowing what this country is about or who the people are.” – Bill Moyers, Listening to America, 1970

“The U.S House on Friday passed the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, with the bill now going to President Joe Biden’s desk to be signed into law. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates took to Twitter on Friday to express his views on the bill. ‘The Inflation Reduction Act’s passage through Congress is nothing short of extraordinary,’ the billionaire said. ‘The U.S. is taking a historic step toward the clean energy economy required to meet climate goals,’ he added. ‘The $369 billion investment,’ Gates said,’ will spark innovation, drive job creation, and reduce energy prices and emissions…It sets a clear example of what serious climate action looks like,’ the billionaire said.” – Shanti Rexaline, Benzinga, 08/13/22

“(Cara) Mund (Candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives [I-ND] told the (Bismarck) Tribune’s Jack Dura that her focuses will be abortion rights, and becoming the first woman from North Dakota elected to the U.S. House.” – Bismarck Tribune, 08/13/22

“Innocence is overrated.” – Anastasia Higginbotham, Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, 2018

Benedict Arnold was a competent Revolutionary War General who picked the wrong side (the British and the American pro-British “United Empire Loyalists”) when the going got tough for American patriots. His incompetent imitator, Donald Trump, has always been on the wrong side of patriotism, even when the going wasn’t particularly tough. In addition, Trump’s partner in nihilism, Vladimir Putin, is watching his fanciful “New World Order” come undone by a combination of Ukrainian willingness to fight for freedom, Russia’s monumental incompetence on the battlefield, and a recommitment of the Western Alliance and former Soviet bloc satellites to support of freedom and equity rather than Empire and hegemony, led by President Joe Biden.

Meanwhile, the treason of Republican Party leadership to its founding principles under Abraham Lincoln, as well as to the U.S. Constitution, continues. Despite GOP attempts to dismiss Trump’s coup attempt on January 6^th as a bumbling clownish event not likely to be repeated, such dishonest efforts to dismiss the historical record cannot be sustained. Hitler’s attempted Beer Hall Coup (Putsch) was clownish and bumbling, but there was nothing clownish about the malevolent violence demonstrated by Nazi Storm Troopers in 1923. There was also nothing clownish about the military-industrial-media elite of that time who hated democracy in Germany much more than they hated, or even feared Hitler. The same goes for American reactionaries, long lurking in our social, economic and spiritual body politic, who have taken over the GOP and still see Trump, or Trumpism, as their best bet to destroy democracy in the United States that they hate so much.

Now, however, the rubber hits the road with Trump in between, as Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS), Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY), and the January 6^th Committee bring together genuine Conservatives with Democrats, Independents, and other patriots to undo Vladimir Putin’s best hope for world power – a thoroughly treasonous Republican Party led by MAGA minions, dedicated to oligarchy on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to Congress, the Executive Branch, under the auspices of Attorney General Merrick Garland, is mounting a case that former President Trump is not only a threat to democracy itself, but to our National Security Institutions; which are sworn to defend that Democracy. Due to the resourcefulness of my renegade KGB trained Siberian Huskies and their friends in the insurrectionary animal kingdom underground, I have recently become privy to their wisdom, based on “secret” sources in the Kremlin and Republican Party circles in D.C. These revelations of malevolence describe how would-be Tsar Vlad’s and his GOP Boyars’ (Russian feudal nobility-like Moscow Mitch McConnell [R-KY]) plans to destroy orderly democratic government have gone awry, despite all of their efforts.

High Plains Reader: Dear friends: In calling Donald Trump a coward, in defense of his daughter, Liz Cheney’s [R-WY] reelection chances on August 16, 2022, former Vice President Dick Cheney made “official” what you’ve been telling me for years. Why would Vladimir Putin want to utilize a coward for his dark cause? So much has gone wrong for those two.

Rasputin: Vladimir Putin specializes in using any human weakness to accomplish his inhuman goals. Cowardice is merely one of them. He doesn’t know how to “fix” Russia, but he has been quite good for years at wrecking other countries like the U.S. in encouraging their worst elements and instincts, like Trump, racism and misogyny.

Jim Crow XV: Vlad Putin’s disastrous and genocidal war in Ukraine has shown what a fraud he has been, just as the Trump Presidency has revealed what a fraud the Republican Party has been, ever since they picked up America’s historical racism, after it was dropped by the Democratic Party and Republicans of conscience in the 1960s.

HPR: Do you think that Trump will spend any time in jail, which so many now deeply desire?

Rasputin: I don’t know about jail, but the Donald is spending some serious time “in Hell” right now, now that he finally realizes that the Attorney General of the U.S. “ain’t playin.’”

HPR: It took the Attorney General long enough.

Lena: Unlike most Americans when it comes to the intersection of the law and politics, Attorney General Merrick Garland is patient, meticulous and relentless. He proceeds slowly, but in a straight line, the shortest distance between two points. Wannabe gangster types like Trump and the current GOP leadership and opportunistic followers wouldn’t choose a straight line even if it were to their advantage. They have been living by lying too long. It is a habit as hard to break as any drug addiction.

Mr. Swamp Fox: The GOP has morphed into a mafia in Trump’s image; operated by gutless gangsters with glass jaws and greedy paws; a self-selected “elect,” dedicated to the fleecing of their followers. The latter – hapless souls fed to the Right-wing propaganda machine by willing executioners of mayhem at the microphone, are led to believe by appeals to racism, misogyny, religious bigotry, or just plain snobbery, that they also are “chosen ones.”

HPR: And as Trump falls, the GOP merely bickers over who should follow in his footsteps rather than look in the mirror to see their own myopia revealed.

Madame Inspector Chen: The GOP has had a lucrative oligarchic scam going on for over 50 years, since adopting the lucrative scams of the Confederacy, Reactionaries and other haters of diversity and democracy. Why would you expect them to quit being hate mongers; just because their former racist- and sexist-in-Chief is in for a very bad year?

Ms. Recovering Republican Lapdog: Since the Women’s March against Trumpism the day after he was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, the GOP has been confronted by a progressive populism – finally awakened to Republican Party and Dark Money depredations upon mankind and the planet. But Republican leadership in the House and Senate refuses to change its ways.

Becky Badger: The reckoning of American liberal democracy with the fascism that has metastasized within the Republican Party showed signs of being real in the elections of 2018 and 2020. Women and families around the country are seeing Joe and Jill Biden, and the Democratic Party they lead, as a conservative preservation of the best that Abraham Lincoln hoped for, and a progressive projection of diversity, tolerance, and empathy that a sizable majority of Americans, especially women of all ages, not only yearn for, but are beginning to demand at the ballot box.

Toto XIV: The women of Kansas, and the men who support them, with their 59% to 41% thumping of a deceitful GOP attempt to force anti-abortion legal language into the Kansas Constitution, have created anti-sexist tornadoes on the prairies of Midwestern Red States that have, among other events, swept a Dorothy of OZ northwards into North Dakota politics.

Brenda Bison: Cara Mund, Age 28, Miss America of 2017, Brown University undergraduate, Harvard Law School graduate, is campaigning as an Independent against two anti-choice men (a youngish Republican, and a middle-aged Democrat) who are clueless about what a majority of women might think about their roles as the mothers of us all, because these men, like the GOP, haven’t bothered to listen to them. Cara needs only 1000 signatures by September 6, 2022, and North Dakota’s election laws are by no means as regressive as its abortion or Covid legislation. As Mary Chapin Carpenter might sing: “I’m feelin’ lucky, lucky today!”

HPR: But Cara Mund calls the spineless North Dakota Senator, John Hoeven, for whom she once interned, “an incredible boss, an incredible leader.” Like Senator Kevin Cramer and Congressman Kelly Armstrong, Hoeven represents the heartless Republican Party. He’s not much use for Dorothy’s Cowardly Lion or Tin Man.

Brenda Bison: True enough, but Hoeven has enough brains to empower Dorothy’s Scarecrow, giving him a .333 batting average for the attributes needed by Dorothy’s friends. Senator Cramer and Congressman Armstrong are batting zero for North Dakota voters who would like more from ‘over the rainbow’ other than empty, insincere promises, and a male dominated Legislature that empowers “doctors” prescribing Ivermectin for Covid-19 rather than vaccines.

Mr. Swamp Fox: Given their habit of voting Republican in November regardless of who is at the top of the ticket, North Dakota voters in 2018 rejected a Democratic woman, Heidi Heitkamp, who has all the virtues required in the Land of OZ as well as in a healthy American body politic. Maybe, in 2022, they will turn to a woman from Republican Party ranks who, in running as an Independent, rejects what short sighted and insensitive men have done to it.

Chicago Dog: Like former Senator Heitkamp, President Joe Biden has all three attributes of heart, brains, and courage. He also has good reason to “feel lucky,” these days, but it ain’t luck that did it. Just hard work by Democratic politicians and public servants in the Executive and Legislative Branches who are serious about serving American people’s needs, not their fantasies or fears. Dramatic passage through Congress of major portions of his infrastructure and climate change agenda, cleverly relabeled the Inflation Reduction Act, in the teeth of toxic Republican rhetoric and resistance, bodes well for Americans who ache for adult behavior in their elected officials, and will have their chance to ratify such conduct this November.

Prudence Possum: Like Vladimir Putin’s military experts who fear the worst for their Armed Forces’ incompetency in Ukraine, GOP election experts fear the worst for their chances in Congressional races this Fall, despite all cheating and extra-constitutional devices employed in States like Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Agatha Alligator: Amidst self-inflicted wounds of MAGA minded candidates in key Senate races, and Trump worship gone awry most everywhere else, GOP operatives, and certain Amen choristers among pandering pundits of pessimism, must now cope with a Democratic Party that has concrete achievements to offer Americans, before Election Day. Not only is Joe Biden on top of his game as a successful deal maker in D.C., they fear that he and Jill might be at the top of the hill in the aftermath of electoral results on November 7^th. Then they might have to face the fact that his political skills and accomplishments matter more than his age…Maybe…Nah!

Annabelle Anaconda: A wag in Washington, who craved anonymity, left this note for one of our swamp creatures. It alters a nursery rhyme in order to pillory arrogant and mistaken assumptions of professional purveyors of doom about the extraordinary abilities of an ordinary married couple like Joe and Jill Biden, with a little help from their Democratic friends:

Joe and Jill Atop the Hill……………………………………….Headless Horseman

As Joe and Jill go up the hill of powr’,
They know that honey always has a chance
To vanquish vinegar; if they don’t flinch;
And “stay the course” in each and ev’ry hour.

An ordinary couple? Yes! Yet lights
To guide the better angels in our land
Of promise: Unfulfilled, but hopeful, and
An education to the doubters’ frights.

The Democrats in Congress backed their Joe
That he not fail; And fall and break our dreams
Of progress in a democratic realm.
Instead, the crown of tyranny met woe –
And tumbled with the cynics; amidst streams
Of legislation as our healing balm.