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.

Primarily, Twitter was a place for like-minded people to come together and talk about shared interests. It wasn’t necessarily political unless you wanted it to be. I came for Astros talk, Houston sports in general, and a little politics on the side. I am not a right wing person. I have many of those in my life. There are some I love very dearly. One of the great things about life and about Twitter is that I had the power to control my exposure to those ideas.

Musk removed that power. He set up the app to switch us from our own feed to something he called “For you.” Ostensibly, the idea seemed to be to share other ideas and profiles that they thought you would be interested in. That concept seems fair enough. I enjoy reading new perspectives and finding new friends. That is clearly not what “For You” became. It became a way to project right wing hate and trolling behavior. This is not an indictment of right-wing beliefs or people. Remember, some of them are my friends and family. I have no desire to censor ideas or remove people’s platform to project those ideas unless they are promoting violence or promoting insurrection or revolution. In many instances, those are the same thing.

My only desire was to limit my own exposure to those ideas. I want the power to choose what I watch, read, and listen to. I don’t want my television randomly changing the channel to Fox News or Newsmax because it is obeying an algorithm called ‘For You.” I may not be the smartest man on the planet, but I think I am reasonably intelligent enough to choose what I want to read, watch, and listen to.

Instead, I get one woman that calls herself a terrorism survivor but somehow a lover of everything Trump. She posts pictures of him wearing camo, colonial gear, or worker clothes and asking us why we don’t appreciate everything he has sacrificed for us. Maybe it is because he is nowhere remotely close to any of those things. I see other profiles that continue to harp on the obvious election fraud in 2020.

So, the development of Twitter afforded me a few unappealing options. I could keep my profile and simply not go. However, that would leave even just a few people hanging. I could go and engage with those bozos, but again that would grow their brand and accomplish what they are out to do. I could simply read and not respond and seethe about it if even for one minute, or I could pull the plug.

My joy comes first. There is so much going on in our lives that I don’t want to waste one minute doing something that doesn’t make me or the people in my life happier. Good people will sacrifice their happiness for others. Great people will sacrifice so much more than that. Contemptible people purposefully go out of their way to suck joy out of life. I don’t want to silence them. I just don’t want to hear it if I don’t want to.

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Rick Santorum put up one of those statements on Newsmax that was equal parts brilliant and asinine all at the same time. Of course, it is only brilliant if he was fully cognizant of what he was saying. If he’s not then it is the most ironic statement of the year as it pertains to elective politics.

The video you see above summarizes the GOP in a nutshell. For those that don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, Santorum is essentially saying that the Democrats only won because they put sexy issues like abortion and marijuana on the ballot. That statement highlights the electoral issues that the GOP has in one sentence.

The first part of the statement basically admits that the GOP counts on low turnouts to win. So, a large part of the irritation is that they brought out voters by putting those measures on the ballot in Ohio. This is what all of the voter fraud stuff is all about. They can’t really justify taking voters off the rolls that they want to remove without a built in excuse. So, we will talk about fraud.

Absentee balloting has been a thing for over 100 years in this country. The states have combined to prosecute fewer than 1000 people for voter fraud. That’s in over one billion ballots cast. My calculator says that is somewhere around .01 percent of ballots cast. I’m overestimating it in fact. Voter fraud is not a problem. In other words, if you can’t get the voters to choose you then you choose your voters.

Of course, the issues themselves are obvious. He was admitting that a majority of the population is for abortion. We could parse out exactly what that looks like. It all depends on what conditions you put on it. The right always puts it in extreme forms. They always want to bring up partial birth abortion because that is the one form of abortion a majority is against. No one in the Democratic party is banging the drum for partial birth abortion. It really isn’t a thing in terms of a talking point on the left. So, when you boil it down to its basic level, a majority of the population wants some abortion rights.

A majority of the population wants marijuana legalized in some form. You could call it decriminalization. You could call it medicinal marijuana. You could simply say it is legally available but heavily regulated. Any way you slice it, a majority of the population is over heavy criminalizing marijuana use. So, Santorum is saying it is the fault of the Democrats for putting something on the ballot that the people find popular.

So, in that statement Santorum is admitting that the GOP is on the wrong side of those issues and that they only win if people don’t vote. Imagine the honesty and direct analysis that we are getting there. I don’t think he has the self-awareness that such a statement would say he does. He is blissfully unaware of what he just said.

If you look at Republican politics since 1980 they have been about two things: abortion and tax cuts. They have been remarkably successful at both. They have played the long game on both. They have packed the courts and played the grassroots game about as well as it could be played, but you are talking about two issues that are losers with the changing demographics in the country. That’s the whole point and the whole ballgame. Thank you Rick. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

As is my longtime practice, I never stay post election day at the family homestead (just 9 miles west of The Pahk), so we left last night on an 8 pm flight to PDX. I just can’t be present when good things happen, like Obama being elected, or Joe Biden and Kamala Harris being elected. My poker face would have left the building. My happy dance would have gotten me banned from the house for eternity. And in 2016, I needed to be safe at my own home, overconsuming adult beverages while watching those results come in. We arrived back in the Gorge at 1:30 am PDT (4:30 EDT). I did NOT check election results during my wind down glass of wine (to counteract the effects of that coffee I had on the last beverage call so I could keep the mister awake for the hour drive home).

Imagine my complete delight to soak in today’s headlines. I hope all those negative polls keep on firing up our voters. In my old hometown, the mayor (completely disliked by my mother, I can’t say hated because hating is a sin) won her reelection. My mother did not bother to get an absentee ballot, and wasn’t going to vote for her anyway. I like that strategy. Please, don’t vote. Meanwhile, I’m going to find a nice little campaign button to sneak onto the damn Trump Bear in the living room, a gift from her caregiver. The one wearing one of her CROSSES around his neck. I am not kidding. The seven deadly sins apparently do NOT apply to him. During the 2022 election season, I stuck Penzey’s ‘I will vote 11.8.22, Remember January 6’ stickers on the back side of the long red tie and collar points, just for grins. Yes, that’s the cross under the tie. And yes, they were discovered and removed by the time I visited again. These days, Mom keeps track of ‘the trial’ (or should I say ‘trials’) via that reliable source Newsmax. Maybe I should knit up a little orange jump suit for him for my next visit.