Republican Hypocrisy category archive

Will Bunch looks at newly released evidence of Republicans’ efforts to undermine the power of the polling place. A nugget (emphasis added):

If you’re thinking that hidden ads on Facebook alone couldn’t have caused this (the 2016 results in Wisconsin–ed.), you’re right. Experts also found that Wisconsin’s strict voter ID laws kept thousands more at home in November 16 — another implement in a giant Republican toolbox that is broadly labelled as “voter suppression.” Simply put, with its white and increasingly working-class base of supporters shrinking every year, GOP strategy increasingly relies on finding ways not to win over a diverse electorate but to find ways to keep those folks from voting at all.

“Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity (sic) are,” Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee wrote on Twitter Thursday, as the formerly silent part of voter suppression is now becoming a roar. “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

At the Bangor Daily News, Jack Nobel makes the case that Donald Trump is antithetical to America’s founding values (however sporadically and imperfectly those values may have been manifest in the past). A snippet:

There are thousands of small town memorials to American veterans who went to war and died to defeat German Nazis who marched, wore swastikas and chanted in torch-lit parades. Today, we have an American president who is supported by marchers who proudly display those same symbols as did the Nazis in World War II. What does that say for our promise to honor the deep sacrifice of our fathers and grandfathers who risked their lives to fight that hatred?

At the Hartford Courant, Dahleen Glanton reviews Republican voter suppression strategies and concludes that

(t)he GOP has become the biggest threat to our elections, and thus democracy.

Follow the link to see how she makes her case.

The Arizona Republic’s Laurie Roberts find herself in a state of skepticism regarding Donald Trump’s claim that he downplayed the virulence of the coronavirus because he did not want to cause a panic. (Follow the link for her list of for-instances of Trump’s frequent frenzied fomenting of frenzy.)

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump explained why he lied to the public in the crucial early days of the pandemic, publicly proclaiming the novel coronavirus no more dangerous than the flu while privately warning that it was “deadly stuff.”

(snip)

Trump’s entire political career is built on sending people into a frenzy, if not a full-blown panic . . . .

Meanwhile, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Tony Norman offers his own interpretations of Trump’s motives for misrepresenting the mortal nature of the menace.

The truth is that Mr. Trump subordinated the interests of the American people to his own narrow interest — avoiding at all costs a situation that would slow economic activity and diminish his re-election chances. The lives that would be lost by such a cold-blooded calculation meant nothing to him.

You can’t make this stuff up.

At the Bangor Daily News, University of Maine Professor Amy Fried recalls that, after the U. S. Senate acquitted Donald Trump refused to act on the impeachment of Donald Trump, Maine Senator Susan Collins opined that Trump had learned his lesson. Professor Fried agrees that he did.

. . .the lesson Collins taught Trump is that she, along with nearly all Republicans in Congress, will not stop his law-breaking and corruption . . . .

Follow the link for her reasoning.