It’s time for us to raise the bar again
The cynical manipulation of public sentiment by the Republican Party has become blatant. It’s been a long time since they have even tried to disguise what they are up to. There was a time, for instance, when somebody would have been in charge of keeping up the appearance that Republicans really did care about the alleged crimes revealed by the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. No sooner was the election over, however, was the whole thing dropped.
Not even a cricket can be recruited to maintain what was once the most “shocking scandal” in American history. The Hunter Biden “scandal” failed to fool a sufficient number of fools to get Trump re-elected, so it was insouciantly, cynically dropped — and never referred to again. Lest we forget, it was dropped along with “Obamagate,” that other greatest scandal in American history, also never mentioned again.
Of course, I already know what some Republicans would say about that. They have a new, far more serious bit of treachery to concern themselves with. The “theft of the election from Donald Trump.” Sorry, that’s not how it works in the real world. We have the same thing to worry about, too, by the way. Only it’s not the theft of the election from Trump, it’s the current, cartoonish, Keystone Cops attempt to steal an election fairly and squarely won by President-Elect Joe Biden.
But we are also still able to worry about children in cages. We are also still able to worry about more than a quarter of a million Americans dead from coronavirus. We are also still able to worry about the rampant murder of innocent people of color by the police. We worry about those things because they’re real, and when it comes to calling out crimes against humanity, we can multitask. We do not forget about any of it because they’re real problems that really exist and really need to be solved.
But nobody in the White House cares about any of that. They’re too busy with their own invented scandals, their tailor-made controversies contrived exclusively so they can mug for the cameras, clutch their pearls and shake with counterfeit outrage. I’m sick of the lot of them.
I’m heartily sick of being talked down to by that evacuated husk of a human being, Kayleigh McEnany, that make-believe Christian, that sparrow fart humanitarian, that cross-wearing phony pretend patriot of a press secretary. I’m sick of the whole lot of them. I’m sick of the hate-driven bile that issues daily from the White House. I can’t wait to see the back of them. I can’t wait for the final judgment of history on them. I can’t wait for the handcuffs and jail sentences and the astonished looks on their mobster-innocent faces.
It’s time to raise the bar. America needs to shuffle off this awful veneer of lies, manipulations and conceit and return to what she once was. I’m not deceived, America was never perfect. But neither is the rest of the world, and there was a time when America had an edge. There was a time when Americans were the good guys.
I still remember what that was like. I can still close my eyes and recall my first visit to England, three months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. We had the world on our side back then, and I felt the genuine regard and sympathy of every Briton I met. I felt respect, encouragement and real international camaraderie. It took George W. Bush very little time to squander all of it.
Republicans have become poison, and Donald Trump is the final expression of that poison. The poison has become so toxic, in fact, that many Republicans are becoming publicly ill.
By accusing Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp of election fraud, even Trump lawyer Sidney Powell went too far, by Republican standards. Republicans are even beginning to notice that Trump lawyers who so blatantly accused Democrats of voter fraud in public are reluctant to use the same language in a court of law. They know there are consequences for lying to a judge about fraud for a corrupt purpose, and those consequences include loss of licenses and even prison time.
America has a chance to recapture some, or even most, of her lost reputation in January. My sense from abroad is that the world is ready to return to that ideal. I hope for our sake we are able to make the most of this second chance we’ve been given. It’s very possible we won’t be given another one. So let’s raise the bar again. Then let’s keep it there. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.