The Feeding Frenzy Begins

All seismic defeats (and any expected seismic victory that fails to materialize is a seismic defeat) are followed by an inescapable series of aftershocks:

1. Seeking out the guilty.
2. Punishing the not guilty.
3. Rewarding those who made no contribution.

For the Republicans this last week, that has meant:

1. Blaming anyone but Trump.
2. Threatening to get rid of Mitch McConnell.
3. Promising committee seats to people like Boebert and Taylor-Greene.

If the other highly anticipated event of this November takes place as expected (and we must accept that it remains likely), Trump will announce he is running for president again. Seven years ago, lots of us thought his candidacy was absurd (not me; I predicted he would win, but no one listened). Today, of course, we know better. But what is interesting to see on the other side is that, finally, some of them are admitting that Trump is becoming a liability.

In this remarkably candid piece, columnist and past president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, Everett Piper, says the colossal flop of the expected Red Wave last Tuesday was all the fault of one man: Donald Trump. His logic is simple: after listing a lot of reasons why this should have been a perfect storm for Republicans (inflation, gas prices, and a number of other things that are all the result of capitalism, but which conservatives regularly con Americans into thinking are liberals' fault), he points out that Trump's choices, based on his own "petty selfishness," just could not win seats Republicans would ordinarily have won.

He concludes with this unequivocal prediction:

The take-home of this past week is simple: Donald Trump has to go. If he‘s our nominee in 2024, we will get destroyed.

I can't say I'm as sure, but I certainly hope he's right. Because if the Republicans wise up and run Ron DeSantis, he will win, and that would be worse than Trump.

[NOTE: I don't have the time it would take to do the drill-down on all the long lists of bullshit Republicans spout as fact, but I did check one from Piper's essay. He says, "Democrat open border policies have led to 100,000+ fentanyl/illegal drug deaths in 2021, mainly because the Mexican cartels are using the open border to import their ‘death pills’ from China." The Cato Institute disagrees, saying, "fentanyl is overwhelmingly smuggled by U.S. citizens" and "Just 0.02 percent of the people arrested by Border Patrol for crossing illegally possessed any fentanyl whatsoever."]