For me, it’s quite one thing when one side of an argument, whether it be polite or or political, critiques another, and quite another when a side critiques itself – especially when the critique is more or less a final condemnation. While the former can have a certain informational and analytical value, the latter, benefiting from insider access and knowledge of how the alleged ethical system is being violated through the actions of that side, can deliver revelatory broadsides which the constituents should find troubling.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, an adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, delivers a middlin’ editorial in USA Today on just such a theme:
Republicans in Congress are avidly denying the obvious truths about President Donald Trump’s serial criminality. Though they lack the votes to stop impeachment in the House of Representatives, they are poised to acquit Trump in the Senate, where they easily can block the necessary supermajority of 67 votes required to evict a president from the White House.
The facts of the case are damning. Not only is Trump on record, in a document released by the White House itself, of engaging in extortion and bribery, but his conversation with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky was the culmination of a plot months in the making. Yet no matter the facts of the imbroglio, the Republican legislators either baldly deny them or interpret them in phantasmagorical ways. …
Acquittal in the Senate, when it comes, will be an example not of democratic deliberation, of the careful sifting and weighing of facts to arrive at some approximation of truth, but the exercise of raw political power. …
This exercise of political power in raw fashion could prove to have profound consequences for the future of human freedom. As the possibility of reason and compromise are destroyed, a venerable constitutional democracy, once the beacon of hope around the world, is coming undone.
Another problem, of course, is that many folks don’t pay attention to the national political news, being far too busy keeping body & soul together, and those that do inevitably see it through the prism of whichever news purveyor they happen to favor, whether it be a traditional network broadcaster such as CBS, a cable site such as the enormously popular yet deceitful Fox News, or an out and out silly website such as the discredited InfoWars, Breitbart, etc.
That’s what makes Schoenfeld more interesting. A Republican adviser who’s not just attacking some rival Republican, but condemning nearly an entire party for forgetting its way. Like I said, if Schoenfeld was a Democrat, it’d be easy to ignore him; as a Republican (perhaps former, I cannot tell), his words are infinitely more important, and as they echo those of many other Republicans, current and former, it should be a message to the Republican base: Something’s gone seriously wrong with the President and his bodyguard of Senators. Your parents and grandparents would never have put up with this dishonorable behavior. Why are you?
