Sunday, July 21, 2024

Unity Republican style: One land, one people, one Leader

By Political Editor David Bloviator with Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

The message of last week's Republican National Convention was summed up in one word by them and their faithful media stenographers:

Unity.

At least that's what you read in the papers:

Ms. Malloy was among a small minority of sentient beings who wasn't buying it:

Trump's RNC speech, far from being the dramatic pivot many in the media anticipated, largely adhered to his established rhetorical patterns. While the speech opened with calls for unity and healing, it quickly devolved into familiar territory of divisive language, attacks on political opponents, and controversial policy positions.

What's Parker complaining about?

He promised “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” he railed against “crazy Nancy Pelosi,” took swipes at transgender athletes, referenced fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, and falsely claimed that the 2020 election was stolen. This was not a speech built on “unity,” but on vengeance. This was a Donald Trump production, through and through. 

Oh.

Meanwhile, over at the weekly gasbag hootenanny known as Washington Week, conventional-wisdom dispenser McKay Coppins expressed amazement over how the Tangerine-Faced Grifter and his party of angry white supremacists promised unity but delivered the same old s***. To her credit, Laura Barrón-López expressed amazement that anyone could be amazed. Coppins tried to interrupt her, but she got her point across.

The surprise to us is that fossils like Coppins and other old white men are surprised by the age-old Republican combination of proclaiming unity while stoking hate and division.

In 1972, with the country torn to pieces by the Vietnam War, prolonged pointlessly by Republican Dick Nixon, not to mention the unfinished business of civil and women's rights, the Republicans, gathering in Miami Beach proclaimed Unity:

The great Republican unifier, 1972

MIAMI BEACH, Aug. 19 —.., Republicans moved sedately through the heat here today toward their tamest national convention in years.

The delegates gathered, partied and worked without any doubt about the harmonious renomination of President Nixon and Vice President Agnew at the 30th quadrennial Republican convention next week. Moreover, they found it Impossible to entertain even a doubt about their re‐election next November. 

....some conservatives....accept the dominant White House strategy for this convention: to portray the President as the spokesman for the vast majority of Americans in contrast to the “radical clique” that “captured” the Democratic party and nominated Senator George McGovern to oppose the President.

 Ah, yes, that radical clique that sought to end the pointless slaughter in Vietnam (proven right by history), show mercy to those who resisted the draft (accomplished by Jimmy Carter five years later), and secure reproductive freedom for women (enjoyed for 50 years until unraveled by a bent Republican Supreme Court).  

In his acceptance speech, Nixon, who had already committed numerous crimes to grease his re-election, called on all Americans to  join him, and then went on to attack George McGovern for supposedly advocating surrender in Vietnam.  (Nixon had already tabled a proposal in Paris to withdraw all American troops in exchange for POW's and a cease-fire, allowing massive North Vietnamese armed forces to remain armed in South Vietnam.  It was in effect surrender on the installment plan).

His own speech went on to decry the supposed evils of quotas and court-ordered desegregation, both intended to remedy 350 years of white supremacy, whose continuation he had embraced to flip Southern white racist voters.  It worked.

Twenty-four months later, Nixon, his criminality evident and the Supreme Court unwilling to pervert the law to benefit him (so unlike today!), he resigned in disgrace.

Twelve years later, Republican Ronald Reagan presided over a similar unity-fest at his convention.  He had perfected the Republican unity one-two.

First, shiny if kitschy verbiage designed to hide his divisive efforts to foster racism, and bust the deficit by financing tax cuts for the rich with borrowed money:

Recalling how he cast his 1980 campaign as a ''national crusade to make America great again,'' [Sound familiar? – Ed.] Mr. Reagan recounted the progress of what had once seemed a long-shot political agenda of reshaping national economic policies and initiating a huge military buildup in conjunction with a more muscular foreign policy.

Unity tastes smooth and mild, Reagan said

Mr. Reagan asserted: ''Now it's all coming together. With our beloved nation at peace, we are in the midst of a springtime of hope for America. Greatness lies ahead of us.''

(That muscular foreign policy led to the pointless sacrifice of 241 US troops blown to bits in Lebanon, a debacle that the Great Unifier managed to flush down the memory hole along with the brutal inflation and recession of his first two years in office.)

After the requisite paean to unity came the raw meat (including referring to the specter of an especially terrifying Democrat named Jesse Jackson) from his supposedly patrician moderate mainstream Establishment VP, some guy named George Bush (that name will come back later):

He affirmed the Administration's commitment to conservative issues such as school prayer. ''President Reagan and I think,'' he added, ''that it's time that we worried less about the criminals and more about the victims of crime.''

The Vice President continued as the party's challenger to issues raised by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader who sought the Democratic Presidential nomination.

''I heard that speaker in San Francisco last month exhorting his fellow Democrats with the cry: 'Our time has come. Our time has come,' '' Mr. Bush said. ''The American people have a message for the tax raisers, the free spenders, the excess regulators, the Government-knows-best handwringers, those who would promise every special interest group everything, and that message is this: 'Your time has passed. Your time has passed.'

Of course, had government squarely taken on pressing threats like global warming in 1984, when we could have done something about it, the Earth would not be boiling today.

Finally, to 2004, with the disastrous Iraq War collapsing into bloody pointless stalemate, great unifying Republican President George W. Bush brought the nation together by pretending to be a heroic wartime leader  and not the weak clueless fraud who had blundered the nation into war and failed to protect it from 9/11, while smearing his opponent, who bravely opposed the Vietnam War after returning from combat, was somehow a traitor and a coward:

Republicans ended their convention yesterday on a confident note, optimistic that they had framed the debate for the fall campaign around President Bush's strengths as a wartime president -- and that they had succeeded in raising significant doubts about Senator John Kerry with slashing attacks on the Democrat as too indecisive and liberal to lead. ...

Mission: unity.  Accomplished?  Not so much

But Republican strategists have succeeded, at the moment, in setting the terms of the debate, forcing Mr. Kerry not only into defending his security credentials but also into undertaking a tough and possibly risky attack on Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney even before the Republicans had left New York.

The Republicans clearly believed that their decision to hold their convention just four miles from ground zero, to hold it unusually late in the campaign year and to use it to cast Mr. Bush as a tested commander in chief for perilous times, opposed by an untrustworthy alternative, had paid off. 

 Meanwhile, on the convention floor, the Republican delegates, then as now fond of prop bandages, wore tiny Band-Aids with purple hearts on them, mocking the Purple Hearts John Kerry earned for his service in Vietnam (while their boy George earned his rails flying around Texas in his no-combat National Guard post). 

With precedents like this, why should anyone have been surprised when Republicans throw away the unity script and seek to divide the country along its traditional racial, ethnic, class, and religious fault lines?

There's nothing wrong with pointing out the differences between you and your opponents, although it would be nice if some of it were true.  But Republicans shouldn't be allowed to piss on our legs and then proclaim themselves as the party of the morning dew.

Indeed this whole unity bushwa seems like a crock when there are fundamental issues on the line.  As usual, you won't find our great pundits pointing out this obvious truth.  You have to go to the best source for rational political commentary in this time: comedians.

They're here for another 107 days. Try the democracy, one last time.

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