He’ll be shocked
These people can drive you crazy with their hypocrisy. It makes you want to scream.But there’s no margin in trying to fight them on that basis because they are shameless and they just don’t care.
This piece by Tom Nichols speaks to this shamelessness. An excerpt:
The new American right, however, has blown past the relatively innocuous populism of the past 40 years and added a fetid cynicism about almost everything related to public life. Not only are the MAGA Republicans seemingly repelled by the idea of voting for someone better than they are; they support candidates who are often manifestly worse people than the average citizen, so that they may slather their fears about their own shortcomings and prejudices under a sludgy and undifferentiated hatred about almost everyone in public office.
These populists not only look past the sins of their candidates but also defend and even celebrate them. Let us leave aside the cult around Trump, which has now reached such levels of weirdness that the specter of Jim Jones is probably pacing about the netherworld in awe. Instead, consider how many people cheer on unhinged cranks such as Marjorie Taylor Greene or allow themselves to be courted by smarmy opportunists such as Vance and Ted Cruz.
This new populism, centered in the modern Republican Party, has no recognizable policy content beyond the thrill of cruelty and a juvenile boorishness meant largely to enrage others. The GOP’s goals now boil down to power for its elected royalty and cheap Colosseum pleasures for its rank and file. Republicans, therefore, are forced to lower their—and our—standards for admission to public office, because the destruction of dignity is the only way they can find the candidates who will do what decent men and women will not, including abasing themselves to Donald Trump.
The same Republicans who claim to venerate the Founders and the Constitution have intentionally turned our politics into a scuzzy burlesque. Last night, Fox News—home to some of the loudest carny barkers on the freak-show midway—played a snippet of a 2018 phone call from Joe Biden to his son Hunter. The message revealed a father’s love and worry; the Fox host Sean Hannity tried to make it seem scandalous. Meanwhile, GOP leaders continue to defend the Georgia candidate Herschel Walker, whose callousness to his own children (and their mothers) is on full display. They ridicule Biden—a decent and good man who was worried that his son was going to die from addiction—and make excuses for Walker, who seemingly forgot about multiple children he’s fathered and has made incoherent responses to charges from the mother of one of those children that he financed an abortion for her. She has also said that he later asked her to undergo a second abortion; Walker continues to deny all of these claims.
I’m an adult. I get it. Our elected officials aren’t saints, and only rarely are they heroes. But must they now be a cavalcade of clowns and charlatans, joyously parading their embrace of vice and their rejection of virtue? The Republican Party seems to think so.
They’re nihilist. Nothing matters but gaining power by any means necessary. There’s no agenda, no real goals other than domination.