The soul-crushing, infuriating, crazy-making duplicity of the modern Republican Party knows no bounds and can find no bottom, and this we’ve known since before the Needlefish existed, before Donald descended from Billionaire Valhalla on his golden escalator, before Mitch McConnell stonewalled Obama’s Supreme Court appointment, back through the Bush years (hey W, find those weapons of mass destruction yet?), hell, all the way back to Nixon and Watergate, the Southern Strategy, and the deceitful machinations of the legendary scoundrel Lee Atwater. All my life, the GOP has been about nothing but lies, misdirection, phoney culture wars, and, increasingly, misogyny fuelled by religious extremism, all while gerrymandering, suppressing the vote, and pulling off every other dirty trick they can imagine in an effort to rig elections and secure White minority rule, the better to build an America more congenial to the billionaires who pull their strings.
Yeah, I know, it’s the same old song and dance, right? You’ve heard this from me a million times, and perhaps it begins to sound like deranged invective. Does it, dear reader? You think? Well, it isn’t. It is not. On the contrary, the objective evidence in support of my view has been piling up for years, to the point that it’s neck-deep, but if you want even more – if, indeed, you want the quintessential example of everything that’s vile and pernicious about the goddam GOP and thus proves me right – take a moment to look at what the Republican leaders in Congress are up to this very minute. It’s happening right now. Honestly, they’re putting on a clinic.
This latest festering example of the GOP’s utterly unprincipled partisan gamesmanship has to do with the admittedly awful situation at the border with Mexico, and the steady stream of overwhelming numbers of people emanating from the many troubled countries to the South, desperate to get to America. You know, the Republicans’ favourite wedge issue. For them, border security is bigger than critical race theory, bigger than diversity, equity, and inclusion, bigger than trans athletics, bigger than Black Lives Matter and Antifa, perhaps bigger even than female reproductive autonomy, from which they’re starting to back away. Other obsessions come and go (well, except for the female reproductive autonomy stuff), but the horrors of the Open Border are forever. For years now, we’ve been suffering the shrill, shrieking, withering sonic onslaught of Republicans screaming about border security and illegal immigration. They always circle back to it, as part of their disgusting propaganda campaign to sell White America on the the horrifying implications of their Nazi-adjacent Great Replacement Theory, and the urgent need to thwart the Democrats’ conspiracy to import masses of brown people – all of whom vote for the Dems, as is well known – to secure one party socialist rule forever and ever.
Lee Atwater would have whistled in admiration.
The GOP’s relentless fostering of border paranoia and existential terror of the brown-skinned Other is what’s stymied meaningful immigration reform for decades, what got us Trump’s ridiculous border wall and the dreadful child separation policy, what prompts cruel PR stunts like the loading of asylum seekers on to buses and private aircraft bound for Blue State cities, and what made any sort of humane treatment of the “Dreamers” politically impossible. Let’s be clear: the Republicans are willing, even eager, to hurt people in pursuit of their lying populist agenda, and couldn’t give a flying fuck about the humanitarian impact of their ugly cynicism. If you doubt it, look up what Texas Governor Gregg Abbott has been doing with razor wire along the Rio Grande. Here, I’ll make it easy for you; this is a link to the Google result for “Texas Abbott razor wire”:
I’m not saying there isn’t a godawful mess at the border that needs to be addressed. Of course there is. I’m saying the Republicans couldn’t care less about doing anything about it. In fact, they’re secretly and determinedly opposed to doing anything about it, at least as long as there’s a Democrat in the White House. They need the ongoing shit show to perpetuate their oh-so-useful wedge issue. If they move to work with the hated Dems to fix it, they’ll be throwing away the keystone of their entire 2024 election strategy. After all, as far as we’ve seen so far, they have no other policy prescriptions to run on, really, except maybe the vague pledge to fight the profoundly threatening societal impact of wokeness in all its forms. Oh yeah, and seek revenge. Mostly, though, the platform is Trump is God. If they stray into anything resembling traditional public policy for a bit, it’s all BORDER BORDER BORDER!!! They need the problem to fester until it helps them regain power, after which only God knows what they’ll do, but they sure won’t do anything now if it makes Biden look good.
Every time one of those smarmy, smirking Republican bastards steps up to a microphone and decries the crisis at the border, blaming it all on the Dems, it’s bullshit. Pure bullshit. The latest gambit has been to link progress on the federal budget, including vital aid to the Ukrainian war effort, to progress on border policy. It gives them a twofer. They get to please Donald, who in turn wants to please Putin by stifling support to Ukraine, and they also get to whine about the border problems they have no intention of solving, and how awful it is that nothing’s being done.
Recently, unexpectedly, in the midst of all this deeply cynical maneuvering, something strange started happening in the upper chamber. Senators started reaching across the aisle in an effort to actually do something constructive, and craft a bill that would go a long way towards improving border security while simultaneously flowing funds to Ukraine. For days now, there’s been talk that the passage of such a bill was imminent, and there was hope that if the Senate passed it, Republican House leadership might feel pressured into putting it to a vote too.
Not so much. I discussed a few days ago what House Speaker Mike Johnson, the insufferable little Jesus Freak, had to say to his caucus about that:
Now, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, to date an advocate of doing everything possible to aid Ukraine, has decided to pull a quick 180 and put a stop to all that bipartisan work in the Senate. What can you do? It’s politics. The Tribe of the Elephant must win. All other considerations secondary. Of course; it was a sad display of almost comically wide-eyed naïveté to have hoped for anything except this:
So it looks like there won’t be any bill coming out of the Senate to impose moral suasion on the Republicans in the House. Donald doesn’t want it. It helps Biden. That’s that.
Mike Johnson was privately articulating his refusal to do anything about border security even as he was looking straight into the cameras and telling the reporters there’d be no help for Ukraine unless it was linked to meaningful action on the border, which he dearly hoped could be achieved, if only the Dems would come to their senses. Mitch will probably do something similar in the coming days, or blame the Dems for killing the Senate bill, or something equally disingenuous. The lies are what the press will report, and what the people will hear. Few will know that the Republicans don’t care at all about Ukraine, and don’t want anything bipartisan to fix anything, however far it goes toward addressing their supposed concerns, if it might get in the way of blaming the Dems for the ongoing mess.
Those miserable, conniving, lying, Trump-appeasing bastards. It’s never anything but lies, 24/7. Lies, lies, lies, then some more stinking lies. They’re driving me insane. That tens of millions never see through them is doing likewise. Worse yet, McConnell knuckled under to pressure from a monster who isn’t even the nominee yet, technically, let alone President. Trump, unequivocally, runs the GOP. He is the GOP. I’m losing my frigging mind, dear readers. It may soon be time to turn off the TV, power down the computer, stow the tablets and phones, and curl up in the fetal position for the duration.
If postings to the Needlefish stop coming, that’s likely what I’ve done.
the needlefish 