I am 76 years old and I don’t care if he is dead, I still want to impeach Richard Nixon.

So, understand that’s where my little grey head is.

But, Henry Kissinger is a whole ‘nother story.  I hate Henry Kissinger with a rage reserved for Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and Vlad the Impaler all combined and put in a five pound sack with two cobras and a really pissed off chihuahua.

This morning I was comforted to read that Jeff Tiedrich hates Kissinger almost as much as I do.  Except he does it so much better than I do. I will warn you that Jeff is what I call colorful and Momma called vulgar.

Dante said there were nine circles of hell.  As of this morning there are ten.

“I can be someone else’s and still my own.” — Shel Silverstein

When right wing cable networks and right wing internet silos relentlessly send a barrage of hate and misinformation to their followers’ eyeballs it is not enough to speak the truth once and let it be. It must be repeated and reinforced with the same ferocity or it will die on the vine. A large part of that is in understanding what exactly is being sold.

The concept of being someone else’s missing piece seems so foreign to us. The idea that we could be there to support someone else seems like crazy talk. The idea that we can keep our individuality while also living as a part of the collective is antithetical to anything we have heard before. That is exactly what they are working against. They have us believing that words like “collective” are communist. They are steadily working towards a world where anything involving “we”, “us”, or “the group” is also communist. That is why it sounds so foreign.

This past Sunday was the last Sunday of the liturgical year. It was the story of Jesus separating the sheep and goats. The sheep fed him, gave him drink, clothed him, comforted him, and visited him when they visited the least of these. The goats did not. The challenge is realizing that the biggest enemy to Christianity does not come from outside Christianity. It doesn’t come from Muslims, Buddhists, or Hindus. It doesn’t come from secular humanists, atheists, or agnostics. It comes from people that call themselves Christians, but have lost the script.

Those same people that call themselves Christians would take a message like that of the Missing Piece and call it communist. The idea of helping another is foreign. They need to pick themselves from their bootstraps. They can’t be be given anything. They need to earn it. I would simply like to introduce those folks to a person that called himself Jesus. He fed the hungry. He healed the sick. He brought hope to the hopeless. He didn’t ask for their insurance card. He didn’t ask for identification or papers. He didn’t check for attendance at the synagogue. He just gave of himself.

I know this seems like a radical concept, but the antidote for hate isn’t hate. It is love. It is relentless love because that hate can seem relentless. It is sustained and repeated love. It is unequivocal and it is undying love. It is unqualified. The forces of evil want you to think you are alone. They want you to distrust the institutions we used to rely on. They want you to think your neighbors are out to get you. They want you to arm yourself to the teeth and shoot first. They don’t want you to even ask questions later. They tell us  that the world hates you. They say that the world wants to take what is yours and the only thing that can stop it is you and your hate.

You don’t combat that by hating that messenger. You don’t combat that by simply saying once that this is wrong. You defeat it by repeating it every chance you get. You defeat it by pouring water on that out of control brushfire. That fire is hate. The water is love. Love means that we have to give of ourselves. It means it will come back to us. We have to believe that. We have to know that. We have to share that with the world.

Project 2025 has a ton in it. There is a mention of detention camps for certain people. I will simply quote his own words from his crappy little app and let them stand on their own.

“2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we wll expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!”

It gets worse from there. I could go on and I’m certain we will hear more in the coming weeks and months, but instead I wanted to ask a series of rhetorical questions. This isn’t just for conservatives or just for liberals. Everyone needs to be asking themselves these questions.

Are we taking him seriously?

The answer for most is likely no. He is a known liar and for those that follow him they will talk about the fact that we really can’t take everything he says seriously. He is inartful in his speech. He doesn’t use precise language.

Admittedly, there is an aspirational nature to it all. He wouldn’t be competent enough to do this. Some people might consider it more than aspirational. Some people might want to do it and not just talk about it. Would a second administration have the constraints of the first?

Would he do that to me?

The quick and easy answer is no. I’m a white guy. Obviously, he’s not talking about me right? The trouble is that there is frequent talk of vanguishing enemies. Who exactly are those enemies? Are we talking about just recent immigrants? Are we talking about all non-white people? Are we talking about anyone in the LGTBQ+ community? If you don’t think someone would be perusing these pages to find people aligned against him you’d be nuts.

If I don’t want that to happen to me then what am I prepared to do? This is the scary part. Do I buy a red hat and a bumpersticker just so I can pass as an ally? Would more be required of me down the road? Would I need to help round up “undesirables” for these camps?

What do we do now?

Most people are not evil. Even if there are people we don’t like, few of us would ever dream of doing something like this. So, hearing someone else talk about this has to be somewhat jarring. Even if we acknowledge that he is most likely not serious, there is some stuff you just don’t joke about. You certainly don’t do it in public speeches in front of people. So, there is an element of honesty here woven within the lies and farce.

This is quite literally a fight or flight situation. If we are not prepared to fight on the political arena or maybe even the real one then we better be prepared to find a new home. Obviously, in the political world it means beating Trump at the polls. This is where we get a ton of disagreement. Is Joe Biden the best fit to beat him? Are there any other options at this point?

The worst thing we can do right now is divide our forces. A vote for Joe Mancin (for instance) only works if it were someone that would have voted for Trump but decided not to. He has a solid 35-40 percent ready to vote for him. So, you only beat him by uniting behind one man (or woman) that can get more than that.

Okay, so something or other is happening in the Republican Party and it’s become a nightmare that makes you giggle.

They are torturing each other. They are fighting, physically assaulting each other.  It’s more fun than recess in heaven.

I’m going to take a while telling this story because it’s such a damn good one.

It brings to mind for me a trial my youngest son was in recently. The opposing counsel lost three motions in a row, fair and square, because he hadn’t bothered to understand the very basics of civil court rules.  The unprepared  lawyer became enraged, not at himself for failing to do his homework, but at my baby boy who had done his homework. His rage grew to the point of yelling and snarling until the judge stepped in and issued a warning.

However, after the judge left the courtroom, Mr. Unprepared, Attorney at Law, went wacko, waving his arms, yelling, and shooting the bird at my son, and then doubling his fists. This was stoopid for many reasons. You know reasons like the fact that my son was the youngest of three good-sized brothers so he had to fight if he wanted to eat, he played football in high school and rugby in college, at 6 foot tall he was the shortest of the other three lawyers on his team in the courtroom, and – probably most damning, there were two professional cameras – HBO and the Law and Crime Network – on opposite sides of the courtroom recording the whole damn thing. It was then that Bill, one of my son’s partners who looks like he ate a buffalo for breakfast, stood up. Bill doesn’t stand up as much as he unfolds because there’s so damn much of him.  Bill didn’t say a word but his eyes said, “You may get the first punch, but I’m going to get the second 8 punches.” Things suddenly got better.

Republicans don’t have a Bill.

They just threaten each other and fight.

It’s beginning to look like everyday is a new skirmish between Republicans.  I remember Adam Kinsinger claiming that Kevin McCarthy punched him on purpose and now Tim Burchett got a McCarthy elbow to the kidney punch.

Senator Markwayne Mullin told the head of the United Brotherhood of Teamsters to get his butt out of his chair and fist fight in the pit of the hearing room. Had it not been for Bernie Sanders being horrified that a United States Senator wanted to go a few rounds of a no rules fight in the United States Senate, no telling what would have happened.

I know I could go on and on with other examples, but there will be others before I even get this posted.

One more thing – I’m getting kinda worried about Mike Johnson. Something’s not right about that guy. I’ve got myself a creepy feeling about him. Real creepy.

Most people are familiar with the old expression that when you are a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I suppose that is why when you elect a former MMA fighter you are libel to see them use their skills in the halls of Congress at some point. Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma did just that when he challenged a witness to a brawl in the middle of a hearing. To his credit (or not), the witness seemed willing to go. They have often called politics blood sport, but I don’t think they meant that literally. Of course, in this day and age it becomes increasingly important to define our pronouns. We need to define exactly who “they” is. Mullin seemed to lean into that behavior as he signaled to a time when Andrew Jackson supposedly won nine duels.

Andrew Jackson was born in 1767 (eight years before the first shots of the revolution) and would survive somehow to 1845. My math is a little fuzzy, but I think that is more than 150 years ago. I’m not a huge fan of basing our rules of decorum on maybe the most uncouth guy in presidential history to sit in the White House. Of course, he held that distinction before the last occupant begrudgingly left in January of 2021.

There are two separate conversations to be had here. First, we need to ask why people continually elect these jackasses to the House of Representatives and the Senate. At a certain point it becomes a question of whether they are too stupid to realize they are jackasses or lack the moral compass to care. Eventually, when you elect enough jackasses then we cease to be surprised when the whole institution devolves into jackassery. When you continually elect jackasses then we become convinced that either the people electing them are also jackasses or they don’t seem to mind that they are being represented by people worse than themselves.

The second consideration are the jackasses themselves. Donald Trump’s oldest sister resigned from the federal judiciary in 2019 when she became embroiled in his scandals. There were questions about how an intelligent woman would get caught up in all of that. Yet, there was some level of admiration for her minimal human standard of recognizing that her position on the bench was no longer tenable.

Rage immediately followed. Why are we praising someone for that minimal standard? So many of our politicians can’t even be bothered to meet that bar. We could include people like Clarence Thomas, George Santos, and Bob Menendez. It seems one party has more than the other, but Menendez’s presence is a sign that it is not just a Republican problem. It is a problem of both political parties holding the people that represent them to a higher standard. It is a problem for voters that blindly pull the blue or red lever without caring who is behind that label. It is a problem for our media that focuses on the horse race mentality and not to the horses actually running the race.

More importantly, it is time to start being more specific. Both parties have crooks and jackasses in them, but not every politician is a crook or a jackass. Some are honorable people simply trying to do the public’s business. Others are crooks and jackasses. When you wave a wand and call all of them the same thing you cheapen the threat that those crooks and jackasses pose. If your conservative representative or senator is a jackass then find someone that is conservative and not a jackass. If you can’t then maybe that should tell you something.

We haven’t seen this in awhile. In fact, unless someone has unlocked the key to immortality, no one has seen this. The Republican party is dead. So, this is an important time in our country just like the last time this happened. Abraham Lincoln created a new party that was desperately needed at that point in American history. The Whigs went the way of the doodoo bird.

The two-party system is unique in the world. Most democracies around the world operate under a kind of coalition government. So, parties are pure and they have to reach across the aisle to multiple groups to get things done. In that world, it is easy to operate as a party. Your views can be more narrow and your orthodoxy can be consistent.

The Democratic and Republican parties have been coalition parties amidst themselves. They appeal to groups and those groups shift. As groups shift then believes and planks shift. So, to say the GOP is dead is not an ideological critique. Someone somewhere will appeal to those groups. There will be an uncomfortable period where allegiances will shift, but it is ultimately something that has to happen.

Why has the GOP died? Simply put, they have abandoned democracy. Their standard bearer has gone full on Nazi. Full stop. When you start including the term “vermin” in your campaign stump speech you are flat out giving a nod to Hitler. Whatever you feel about that kind of acknowledgment, the brand is now about full on election denialism. The GOP in Ohio wants to deny their recent results. Imagine a sports team that never acknowledged defeat and sued the league every time they lost. At a certain point, the league would have to expel them so that normalcy could return.

In that vain, people like Joe Mancin are touring the country to see if they can forge a new way forward. For the time being, we will assume he is on the up and up. There are a number of things that make me question that, but we will leave that aside for now. When there is a Nazi on the ballot you do anything you can to defeat the Nazi. That is of course unless you are a Nazi yourself.

So, there will be time for a new center-right party to form. It absolutely needs to happen and it will happen. One party government is not real democracy. I’m a Democrat and have always been a Democrat but more than anything else I am an American. I am a progressive. I will ultimately be wherever those folks end up going. Many of my friends and family are conservative. They aren’t crazy. They aren’t Nazis. They aren’t white supremacists. They are just conservative.

So, I salute any group that wants to forge a new way forward. They need to wait until we defeat the Nazi. A large part of the issue is that the GOP is dead. They are incapable of policing themselves. That is one of the signs you know they are dead. Trump will likely go to prison and it won’t matter. They have had numerous opportunities to police themselves. They haven’t.

So, the American people will have to do that for them. They will need to overwhelmingly vote Democratic until that menace goes away. They will need to serve on juries and vote guilty. Judges will need to have the courage to send him to prison. Everyone say goodbye to the GOP. They had a good run. It’s time for a new conservative party to take its place. However, we need to save our democracy first.