The Republican Party is a Fifth Column.

 

     To paraphrase the late Rodney Dangerfield, Republicans scream about how lousy the government is then they get elected and prove it. 

     And in the past two decades since I'd first begun blogging about politics, hardly a day has gone by when I haven't puzzled over why the Beltway pundits, especially the corporate mainstream media, hasn't come out even once to call the Republican Party out, in unmistakable, unambiguous terms, as being a fifth column. It seems they get the dry heaves at the very thought.

     However, even though they swaddle themselves in the American flag and call themselves staunch Constitutionalists, the Law and Order Party, it's screamingly obvious by now, or should be, that such patriotic posturing is just that- empty bumper sticker slogans they dust off and trowel out every election year tp cadge votes from the rubes stupid enough to take those campaign mottoes at face value.

     And, with the rise and resurrection of Trump, the most unAmerican insurrectionist and traitor since Benedict Arnold, they've gotten more brazen. The only wonder is not so much why the MSM haven't called them out for being the Fifth Column terrorists that they are but that the GOP hasn't leaned into it and embraced it.

     For decades, Republicans have been trying to get rid of government agencies such as the Department of Education, the Postal Service, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, the EPA and they've been trying, since it was first created in 1965, to dismantle Medicaid and Medicare. Since 2010, they've added to their baleful focus the Affordable Care Act, which they cynically rebranded "Obamacare" and fooling gullible, ignorant and just plain stupid voters into believing was different from the ACA.

     Add to that ever-growing list the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Department of Energy, the CFPB, etc. Because it's moved well past the right wing mantra of smaller government, it's already progressed past the point of going after government that actually works for the people.

     It's bad enough they've almost completely corrupted the federal judiciary from the Supreme Court on down. Realizing what a pack of corrupt criminals they are, Republicans decided long ago not to clean up their act but to get rid of any enforcement mechanism available to that judiciary. Which is why they want to get rid of the FBI despite it historically being one of the most right wing agencies the government can offer. The "Back the Blue" crowd actually views law enforcement as a threat.

     Trump's picks for his Cabinet are as dangerous as they're ridiculous. It's tough to see what qualifications any of them have for these very important posts or in deciding which ones are more ridiculous. In the end, one has to conclude that it's not really about how qualified they are but in how successfully they can destroy or at least undermine the agencies and departments they'd be tasked with running.

     And as more clowns come streaming out of the stationary clown car of Trump's brain, we also realize that he's removing any degree of separation or the merest hint of plausible deniability between the GOP and a Fifth Column.

     The first four years of Trump's "presidency"  showed us in stark terms that he views the government and anyone in it as mere actuators of his will, not public servants who are bound by the law to honorably fulfill their duties. Witness all the times Trump referred to "my generals" as if they were mere plastic toy soldiers that h e could move around a board. 

     Remember the time he blurted out, "Where's my Roy Cohn?!" when his first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from any DOJ probe into Trump's obvious collusion with Russia. Because Trump, who's completely blind to the very concept of public service, looks at the Attorney General and the entire Department of Justice, as his private law firm. He looks at the Department of Defense as his personal goon squad. This is the same guy who once asked John Kelly why "my generals" can't be more like Hitler's generals.

     I'm planning on writing a long series of articles on just how manifestly unfit each and every one of these clowns are but let's just use as a springboard the rationale that Trump thinks the government is just part of the Trump Organization and that its entire reason reason for being is to protect him from the consequences of his endless criminal actions and to enrich him.

     Let's start with perhaps the most dangerous nominee: Pete Hogsbreath of Fox & Frauds.

     Not too long ago, he went on a Christian Nationalist podcast and outlined his vision for the future. Here's what Petey said:

"That's what the crop of these classical Christian schools are gonna do in a generation. Policy answers like school choice, while they're great, that's phase two stuff later on once the foothold has been taken, once the recruits have graduated boot camp.

"We call it a tactical retreat. We draw out in the last part of the book what an educational insurgency would look like, because I was a counterinsurgency instructor in Afghanistan and kind of the phases that Mao wrote about. We're in middle phase one right now, which is effectively a tactical retreat where you regroup, consolidate, and reorganize. And as you do so, you build your army underground with the opportunity later on of taking offensive operations in an overt way.

"Obviously, all of this is metaphorical and all that good stuff."

     Then he and the host had a good laugh over it.