The GOP's moral rot is the problem, not Donald Trump Jr. - By Jennifer Rubin

[DonViejo]

(Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Post, offering reported opinion from a conservative perspective.)

The key insight from a week of gobsmacking revelations is not that the Russia scandal may finally have an underlying crime but that, as David Brooks suggests, “over the past few generations the Trump family built an enveloping culture that is beyond good and evil.” (Remember when the media collectively oohed and ahhed that, “Say what you will about Donald Trump, but his kids are great!”? Add that to the heap of inane media narratives that helped normalize Trump to the voters.) We now see that, sure enough, the Trump legal team (the fastest-growing segment of the economy) has trouble restraining its clients, explaining away initial, false explanations and preventing self-incriminating statements. (The biggest trouble, of course, is that the president lied that this is all “fake news” and arguably committed obstruction of justice to hide his campaign team’s misdeeds.)

Let me suggest the real problem is not the Trump family, but the GOP. To paraphrase Brooks, “It takes generations to hammer ethical considerations out of a [party’s] mind and to replace them entirely with the ruthless logic of winning and losing.” Again, to borrow from Brooks, beyond partisanship the GOP evidences “no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code.”

Let’s dispense with the “Democrats are just as bad” defense. First, I don’t much care; we collectively face a party in charge of virtually the entire federal government and the vast majority of statehouses and governorships. It’s that party’s inner moral rot that must concern us for now. Second, it’s simply not true, and saying so reveals the origin of the problem — a “woe is me” sense of victimhood that grossly exaggerates the opposition’s ills and in turn justifies its own egregious political judgments and rhetoric. If the GOP had not become unhinged about the Clintons, would it have rationalized Trump as the lesser of two evils? Only in the crazed bubble of right-wing hysteria does an ethically challenged, moderate Democrat become a threat to Western civilization and Trump the salvation of America.

Indeed, for decades now, demonization — of gays, immigrants, Democrats, the media, feminists, etc. — has been the animating spirit behind much of the right. It has distorted its assessment of reality, giving us anti-immigrant hysteria, promulgating disrespect for the law (how many “respectable” conservatives suggested disregarding the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage?), elevating Fox News hosts’ blatantly false propaganda as the counterweight to liberal media bias and preventing serious policy debate. For seven years, the party vilified Obamacare without an accurate assessment of its faults and feasible alternative plans. “Obama bad” or “Clinton bad” became the only credo — leaving the party, as Brooks said of the Trump clan, with “no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code” — and no coherent policies for governing.

We have always had in our political culture narcissists, ideologues and flimflammers, but it took the 21st-century GOP to put one in the White House. It took elected leaders such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and the Republican National Committee (not to mention its donors and activists) to wave off Trump’s racists attacks on a federal judge, blatant lies about everything from 9/11 to his own involvement in birtherism, replete evidence of disloyalty to America (i.e. Trump’s “Russia first” policies), misogyny, Islamophobia, ongoing potential violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause (along with a mass of conflicts of interests), firing of an FBI director, and now, evidence that the campaign was willing to enlist a foreign power to defeat Clinton in the presidential election.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/07/14/the-gops-moral-rot-is-the-problem-not-donald-trump-jr

[elleng]

1. It takes generations to hammer ethical considerations out of a mind and to replace them

entirely with the ruthless logic of winning and losing.” Again, to borrow from Brooks, beyond partisanship the GOP evidences “no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code.”

[Bradical79]

2. So true

Trump is where they'd been heading for awhile now. The groundwork for Trump's rise in the GOP goes even as far back as the Southern Strategy.

[loyalsister]

4. Farther....

George Mason, Milton Friedman, James McGill Buchanan among others were the early cultivators. George Mason was a contributor who did not sign the Constitution.

"Buchanan was a very smart man, the only winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics from the US South, in fact. But his life's work was forever shaped by the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. He arrived in Virginia in 1956, just as the state's leaders were goading the white South to fight the court's ruling, a ruling he saw not through the lens of equal protection of the law for all citizens but rather as another wave in a rising tide of unwarranted and illegitimate federal interference in the affairs of the states that began with the New Deal. For him what was at stake was the sanctity of private property rights, with northern liberals telling southern owners how to spend their money and behave correctly."

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41206-misinforming-the-majority-a-deliberate-strategy-of-right-wing-libertarians

[Cosmocat]

3. T H E. M O S T A C C U R A T E A N A L Y S I S

I've seen.

Cannot recommend enough.

[Me.]

5. OMG This Is An Amazing & Powerful Piece

I loathed her when Romney ran against Obama and the things she wrote and said about PBO. Lately, however, I have been astounded by her willing honesty and perception about what is/has happened/happening with the Republicons. And the following sentence practically made me want to yell “YES” out loud…

“Let’s dispense with the “Democrats are just as bad” defense”

Kudos to Ms. Rubin for her bravery.

[gratuitous]

6. Ms. Rubin has much to atone for

But I, too, am glad to see her analysis comport more with reality.

[Me.]

7. Indeed She Has

But I will give her this, in the past months she has gone some distance to that end. She has been especially good on AM Joy. Further, this is the most honest assessment of 45/GOP, I have seen to date.

[Solly Mack]

8. K&R

[moondust]

9. Heavily armed barbarians.

Greed, bigotry, and corruption without conscience.

[oxbow]

10. The GOP is officially unfit to govern

From the last paragraph:

"If the Trump children became slaves to money and to their father’s unbridled ego, then the GOP became slaves to its own demons and false narratives. A party that has to deny climate change and insist illegal immigrants are creating a crime wave — because that is what “conservatives” must believe, since liberals do not — is a party that will deny Trump’s complicity in gross misconduct. It’s a party as unfit to govern as Trump is unfit to occupy the White House. It’s not by accident that Trump chose to inhabit the party that has defined itself in opposition to reality and to any “external moral truth or ethical code.”"

[TomCADem]

11. Spot On. If the GOP Had Any Sense of Duty...

...they would have addressed Donald Trump yesterday. Instead, they happily accept the bargain of his racist appeal among the GOP's working class supporters in return for their support for tax cuts and cuts to programs that benefit the working class.