The Witness Chronicles, September 18, 2024
Trying to capture the craziness
The Republican Party is Losing its Collective Mind
Looks like full-on panic mode
It’s getting really challenging to figure out what is going on minute by minute in this race, from the Republican perspective. After Trump melted down at last week’s debate, we have watched seemingly everyone in his party melting down and grasping at anything they can find to stay alive.
There is no cohesive strategy or message so what we are getting is a mishmash of lies, rumors, and fights over policy; they are basically fiddling while Rome burns. And it looks like Republican voters are getting more and more uncomfortable by the minute. It’s chaos and their candidates are not helping, at all.
JD Vance is stubbornly doubling down on the crazy while acting as though that is totally acceptable and normally. But in the process he looks just as nuts as his boss. And that disease has now infected all the party’s leaders right at a time when they need unity.
The infighting is ugly, as is the overt racism that has become the norm in the party. For one thing, they are headless. Trump took over the party and molded it in his image. The problem is his image is a mentally disturbed man living in a world where everything he says and does is perfect.
I’m not even sure the party scares me anymore because they are so dysfunctional at this point. It’s pretty obvious Mike Johnson has lost whatever control he had over his own people in the House of Representatives, just as they need to take action to keep the government open.
Today, in the Washington Post, writer Dana Milbank details just how crazy the House has become and how widespread the crazy is. It’s a long piece because there are so many examples just over the past few years, since Trump’s loss in 2020.
If they allow a shutdown it is going to backfire spectacularly in their faces and they cannot rely on Trump to do anything sane about it. He seems to think a shutdown is a good idea, if he says anything about it at all. They wanted to tack on a law that would require voter IDs as part of the deal, but they waited too long.
It’s too late because early voting and mail-in voting has already started. And that amendment would never have gone anywhere in the Senate. The logical thing to do would be to pass a resolution keeping things open until a new President is sworn in. But logic has no place in the party.
A group of hardliners in the House will accept nothing less than a complete shutdown. That has always been their goal. And if Speaker Johnson works with Democrats to keep the government open, they will throw him out. And we will end up dealing with a party with no effective leadership one month before a presidential election.
Meanwhile the Republican candidates are out there trying to drum up a manufactured panic about Haitian immigrants and the wackos are coming out of the shadows with guns and bomb threats. Their de facto leader and chief messenger is the Republican candidate for Vice President, JD Vance, who openly admits he makes stuff up to get on the news.
Two of those crazies with guns have taken potshots at Trump, contributing to the decline of his mental state. And they are not Democrats or progressives, they are just nuts. The attempts to blame this on Harris and Biden are falling flat because a lot of us are not the idiots they seem to think we are.
I honestly cannot imagine where this is all going. We may see the Republicans losing everything, which explains a lot of the panic.
There have been some interesting side stories to this. One Republican pollster said that the Taylor Swift endorsement wasn’t affecting things because only six percent of undecided voters said it might affect their vote.
Six percent might tip the scales for Harris. So much for expert opinions.
And then there is the aftermath of the election. If things seem out of control now, who knows what happens then, but it will not be fun.
It’s going to be a long six weeks.
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