As public polls indicate American citizens are becoming more and more inclined to prosecute former President Trump for his activities aimed at overturning the 2020 Presidential election, on the right, which I’ve admittedly avoided of late, there seems to a concerted effort to dissemble and distract. Erick Erickson, one of the leading pundits, had this to say today, in the context of President Obama’s premature Nobel Prize and Trump’s Abrahamic Accords:
Today, you can call Israel from Dubai, learn about Israel in books in Dubai’s libraries, and now fly to Israel from Dubai.
This would not have happened but for Donald Trump. He deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.
A false equivalence, of course. While I felt Obama’s prize[1] was, at best, premature, it would have been more accurate to have given it to the American people for voting a war-mongering Party out of office – and that may have been the real message, sotto voce.
Meanwhile, I note that the situation in the Middle East is quite fluid and may have come to the point where dropping existential enmity made sense. Too, there are other possible factors to consider, such as out and out bribery.
Back on point, Erickson wants to keep his base stirred up and not paying attention to the disaster happening in their own philosophical backyard, so the news of the overturning of Roe v Wade drew this response:
It is official. The United States Supreme Court, with an opinion written by Justice Alito, has ended the terror of Roe v Wade, sending the issue back to the several states.
My bold. Oh, the horror of women controlling their own bodies. But he’s not done yet with the mad distractions:
Democrats keep screaming that Republicans are fascists who want to destroy America. They keep encountering an issue that should give them pause.
In the January 6 hearings, in society, in the polling — there are a lot of Republicans who have moved on from Trump or never liked Trump and they’d still vote for him over them. There are a lot of Republicans who don’t think 2020 was stolen and who condemn what happened on January 6, but they’d still vote Trump over Democrats. But Democrats have never been willing to self-reflect and wonder what about them makes so many reject them. [And then off to his radio broadcast, which I skipped.]
I’ve written about the problems of the Democrats before, but to this I can only say this: Yet, these Didn’t like Trump, never will Republicans still voted for him, supported him, and refused to recognize his many failures. And now many MAGAites are the nominees of the Republicans for the November election for many positions as the Republican continues to accelerate to the right.
And extremist and disgraced Eric Greitens is positioned to win the Missouri nomination for the open Senate seat for Missouri.
Erickson is frantically trying to separate the Republican base from the cesspool that is Trump, because if he acknowledges that the culture of evangelicals, gun rights absolutists, out and out paranoiacs, and endemic distrust of liberals, who happen to be fellow Americans, that is the foundation of the conservative movement, in combination with the culture of toxic team politics of the Republicans, then he’s acknowledging that the conservative movement is a toxic, dead-end philosophy. And that might break the movement. Well, not because of little old Erickson – but he would be another brick falling out of the wall.
So he’s avoiding giving the hearings any credence, as it appears everyone else on the right is doing. Last night’s Fox News review of yesterday’s hearing boiled down to Nothing new, very dull.
I found the hearing fascinating, myself.
1 Obama’s Nobel was for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples“. Notably, at least one clip of his acceptance speech could be read as a rebuke of the Nobel Committee, whether he meant it that way or not.
