Inside the GOP Rationalization Chamber

By JOHN YOUNG

I can’t believe what I’m saying here, but Stephen Colbert miscalculated.

Of the abominable act of sending children to chain-link big-box jails at the border, he said: “Either you could be horrified or you could be working for Donald Trump.”

It was unclear if in his calculation Colbert considers Fox News personnel to be salaried Trump employees. However, we sadly must acknowledge: Quite a few Americans were totally fine with this terrible deed.

Nearly one in five polled by CBS News – 17% – said they supported the policy. One wonders: What else would they endorse for brown-skinned little ones? Enhanced interrogation?

After all, we’ve separated non-white children from parents before — on the slave auctioning block, in the parceling of space for Japanese internment camps and more. See? Nothing new here.

These apologists for an off-the-rails president have scored a 100 – a perfect score — on a new rating system we will call the Unconscionability Index.

These are the very ones of whom Trump said that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” and they would explain it away with candy-apple impunity.

And let’s face it; as president, Trump has done just about everything this side of a shooting spree.

He has lied at a rate that’s staggering even for a bankruptcy king. In his first 500 days, the Washington Post Fact-Checker credited him with 3,251 misleading or wholly false claims. Of course, there are petty political lies, and there are lies to save one’s political life.

He lied – dictating it on Air Force One — to cover for Don Jr. about a Trump Tower meeting with a Russian contingent, one which had every marker of the thing Team Trump says never happened: collusion.

He ordered his staff to lie about the pretext for firing James Comey before committing the truth, off the record, to two Russian emissaries and, for good measure, on the record, to NBC’s Lester Holt.

He changed his story multiple times in explaining why he fired former national security advisor Mike Flynn.

Flynn’s real firing offense was that criminal thing, that collusion thing – assuring the Russians that the not-yet-president would lift sanctions imposed on Russia for its efforts to sabotage the 2016 elections. And we are to assume Trump knew nothing about that.

Sure, just as Trump knew nothing about the $130,000 hush payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

He lied when he minimized Paul Manafort’s role in his campaign, saying the indicted, Russian-connected wheeler-dealer “worked for me for a very short period of time – for what, 49 days or something?” Manafort was Trump’s campaign manager for 145 days.

In 2016, Trump supporters issued hyena screams alleging conflicts of interest involving the Clinton Foundation in its work to combat global poverty and illness.

However, the Rationalization Chamber has nothing to say about the Trump Foundation’s serving as Trump’s personal and political piggy bank. The New York attorney general had something to say in a new lawsuit: that the Trump Foundation, much like Trump University, is nothing but a scam.

Back to Russia: Even if Trump never colluded with the Russians, the degree to which he pooh-poohed a concerted foreign attack on our elections is impeachable unto itself.

Oh, and back to Fox News: John Dean, whose words were central to the impeachment of a president, has theorized that if such a network had been around in 1974 to serve as a rationalization chamber, Richard Nixon might have finished his second term despite his crimes.

True or not, you know Nixon wished he could have a 24/7 mouthpiece to plead his own “witch hunt” case. Sadly for him, cable news had yet to be invented.

John Young is a longtime Texas newspaperman who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. Email jyoungcolumn@gmail.com. See johnyoungcolumn.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2018

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