Tag Archives: Party of Lincoln

Racist senator earns condemnation

Wow! That was my first reaction to reports of what a U.S. senator said during a Donald J. Trump political rally over the weekend. He sought to label Black Americans as criminals.

It was as blatantly racist a statement as anything I’ve heard since the 1960s.

This came from the pie hole of Sen. Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican, according to Yahoo.com:

As Republicans press crime as an election issue, Tuberville contended Democrats back reparations for descendants of slavery because “they think the people who do crime are owed that.”

“They are not soft on crime,” Tuberville said. “They’re pro-crime. They want crime. They want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.”

Holy … crap!

GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville promotes racist narrative about Black people, crime at Trump rally (yahoo.com)

This is an individual elected from a state with a population that is 26% Black. He was elected in 2020 to the U.S. Senate with zero experience in elective politics. He is a former football coach who worked with dozens of Black athletes.

Still, he said this. At a Trump campaign rally. Oh, and get this: The crowd that heard it clapped and cheered the speaker.

“They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed. that.” I just felt the need to repeat that statement. It defies logic. Or humanity. Or anything resembling decent thought from someone elected to the U.S. Senate.

This is part and parcel of what has become of the Republican Party. It saddens me to say this, given that the party once held the key to enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Remember the “party of Abraham Lincoln?” It’s gone, man!

It’s been replaced by and large by something quite different, as exemplified by the mutterings of individuals such as Tommy Tuberville.

Black people are criminals, he says. Democrats demand reparations because those who “do the crime are owed that,” he says.

The English language cannot do justice to what is stirring in my gut at this moment.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Party of Lincoln becomes Party of Cowards

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Ah, yes. Here we are with the Party of Lincoln now standing tall as the party of cowardly fealty to a fraud posing as one of their own.

That’s all I can surmise now that the Republican Party leaders in Congress have torpedoed a bill that would create a bipartisan commission to study the causes, effects and consequences of the Jan. 6 insurrection that could have toppled our democratic government.

Congressional Republicans have stonewalled a move by Democrats to create a commission comprising members of both major parties that would have sought to lay bare all the events leading up to the insurrection.

The GOP is now the party that is beholden to the cultist who sat as president for a term that ended in January. Donald Trump has bullied, blustered and bellowed his way into the skulls of politicians who now do not dare do anything to anger the ex-POTUS.

We are witnessing a shameful abrogation of the oath they all took when they assumed office.

These men and women signed on to a once-great political party that used to fight for equal rights for all Americans. It now fights to protect the backside of a politician foments the Big Lie about alleged electoral “theft.” Donald Trump doesn’t want a bipartisan commission to examine the intricate details of an event that threatened the safety of politicians doing their constitutional duty, which was to certify the results of a presidential election.

The Republican Party has become a haven for cowards.

What happened to GOP?

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

This question needs asking: What in the world has happened to the Republican Party?

It was hijacked decades ago by conservatives who grew weary of the party’s longstanding tradition of liberal thinking, of outreach to racial minorities, even of reasonable fiscal restraint and limited government interference.

It now has become a cult of personality. A once-great party is driven by its belief in the lunacy of the Big Lie, that an election was stolen through something they call “rampant vote fraud.”

The cultist who leads this moronic notion is Donald Trump, a former one-term president who actually incited a mob of terrorist rioters to overturn an election he lost.

As CNN’s Fareed Zakaria has noted in a special on his cable network, “Trump is gone” but his movement lives on.

Yes, this is the party that Trump once led even though he lacked any knowledge, let alone experience, in political life.

In an odd way, today’s GOP has switched places with what used to constitute the bulk of the Democratic Party. The old Democrats — particularly in the South — was populated by segregationists who resisted efforts to grant equal rights to black Americans. That version of the Democratic Party did not adhere to the loony notions of an individual, however, the way that the current Republican Party has glommed onto the imbecilic notions pitched by The Donald.

It is distressing for me to watch this devolution of a once-great political party. I say that as someone who hasn’t yet voted for a Republican for president. I go back a ways, having cast my first presidential vote in 1972.

Now that I am older, I could be persuaded to vote for a Republican for the nation’s highest office — except that the party is an extension of what is now being called “Trumpism.”

It is a horrible — and horrifying — fit, to be sure.

Trump alienating his own party

The Lincoln Project has risen to speak out.

So has a coalition of staffers who once worked for Republican President George W. Bush.

Ditto for any number of conservative thinkers/pundits/commentators.

There might even be some hidden Republican members of the U.S. House and Senate ready to bolt.

What do they have in common? They are speaking collectively against a man who calls himself a Republican, but who has no affiliation, understanding or appreciation of what used to be considered basic Republican Party principles.

Donald J. Trump’s re-election appears to be in trouble … at this moment! Yes, that could change. I mean, this guy has managed to survive some of the more hideous faux paus in recent memory. He has held on to that base of support. He told us he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue” and not lose any votes; many of us cringed when he said that, but there is a distressing belief that he might have been correct.

The Lincoln Project, of course, is named after President Lincoln, one of the nation’s great Republican presidents. They used to call the GOP the Party of Lincoln. It has become the Cult of Trump.

The party that once was the champion of civil rights for all Americans, whose senators enabled a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, to push landmark civil rights legislation through Congress, has become unrecognizable to President Lincoln. It has coalesced behind an individual with no discernible moral compass, no philosophical guidepost.

Thus, tried-and-true real Republicans are locking arms in the hope of defeating this GOP imposter. Whether they belong to an actual organization such as the Lincoln Project, or are a loosely held gang of former GOP presidential aides, they seem to stand for a single cause: defeating Donald Trump.

What’s more — and this is truly astonishing — they are standing publicly and loudly in favor of a Democratic candidate, Joseph R. Biden Jr. One finds occasionally during every election cycle a notable partisan or two who might abandon the candidate of his or her party, but who cannot endorse anyone on the other side. That’s not happening these days.

My biggest concern at this point — given my own often-stated loathing of Donald Trump — is whether any of this will translate to tangible support when the election rolls around.

I merely want to caution everyone that Donald Trump was losing badly to Hillary Clinton at this point of the 2016 campaign. Then the wheels flew off the Clinton campaign. If there’s a lesson for the Biden team to glean from that effort it is that the 2020 Democratic nominee needs to avoid repeating the goofs that doomed an effort that fooled every political pundit in the land.

Party of Lincoln, then of Reagan, now of Trump

The Party of Lincoln morphed over time into the Party of Reagan.

Now it has become the Party of Trump.

The first men, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, both defined Republicanism to conform to the spirit of their respective times. President Lincoln sought the party to become a more inclusive body and he fought to preserve the Union. President Reagan instituted a contemporary form of conservatism, one that saw government as part of the problem that afflicted the nation.

Donald Trump? Well, he has taken it somewhere else altogether. It’s an angry political party. He calls himself a “populist,” but flaunts a garish, glitzy lifestyle every weekend he jets off to Mar-a-Lago or to Bedminster. He panders to the religious right while having to live down a past of philandering and obscene behavior.

Now he has gone against traditional Republican policy favoring free trade to something called “fair trade.” He has imposed punishing tariffs on imported goods, prompting our international trading partners to respond with tariffs of their own on goods they import from the United States.

American farmers are getting pounded.

Congressional Republicans, particularly in the Senate, are incensed with the president’s punishing policies. The GOP is at war with itself. House members are backing Trump, seemingly out of some kind of fear that he’ll strike back at them. Senators aren’t so reticent, to which I say, “Good on ya.”

Donald Trump is not your “normal” Republican. I will continue to declare that he is not a Republican at all. He stands only for himself. He demands credit he doesn’t deserve and pushes aside blame that he does deserve.

The president has redefined every parameter one can imagine. His followers say that’s a good thing. The rest of us just shake our heads.

Politico has posted a story on the GOP divide. You can read it here. It will open your eyes.

What has happened to the GOP?

The Party of Abraham Lincoln has become …

The Party of Donald J. Trump. The “Party of Child Abuse.” The Party of Demonization. The Party of Insult and Innuendo.

So it appears as longtime Republicans of stellar standing are calling it quits on their party.

Perhaps the most notable recent defection came this week as Steve Schmidt, Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign adviser and GOP “strategist” renounced his party and said he intends to start voting for Democrats. He calls the Republican Party “vile” and said it no longer represents the high and noble ideals that produced its founding in the mid-19th century, which was to end slavery.

There have been other well-known Republicans. Former U.S. Rep. — and current TV talk show host — Joe Scarborough is one; Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Will is another.

Geraldo Rivera, whose own Republican credentials at best are a bit suspect, told his fellow Fox News colleagues that the GOP has become the “party of child abuse.”

U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who’s leaving the Senate at the end of the year, referred to the “cult” that is developing within the GOP. Other Republican officeholders and office seekers are reluctant to cross the president for fear of being skewered by him.

U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford of South Carolina criticized Trump, who then endorsed his GOP primary opponent. What happened? The opponent won and Sanford will be out of office at the end of the year, if not sooner.

Yes, it’s fair to ask: What in the world has happened to the Grand Old Party, which once was known as a great political party?

It’s been co-opted by a guy who before he ran for president had no political experience. He had no public service experience. He still has virtually no knowledge of how government works or how it requires teamwork that involves players from both sides of the aisle.

Heaven help us.

Despite it all, GOP nominates Trump

Donald Trump gestures while speaking surrounded by people whose families were victims of illegal immigrants on July 10, 2015 while meeting with the press at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, where some shared their stories of the loss of a loved one. The US business magnate Trump, who is running for president in the 2016 presidential elections, angered members of the Latino community with recent comments but says he will win the Latino vote. AFP PHOTO / FREDERIC J. BROWN        (Photo credit should read FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images)

A woman with whom I am acquainted has had a lot of fun in recent months sticking the proverbial needle into my backside.

She is an ardent Donald J. Trump supporter.

I … am not!

She has chided me for being “wrong about Trump.” I concede the point: Yes, I have been as wrong as one can be wrong. So have many other political junkies been wrong about this guy.

He now is the Republican Party’s nominee for president of the United States of America.

The Party of Lincoln is now the Party of Trump. It’s almost more than I can handle. It’s also more than many actual Republicans can handle, and by “actual Republicans” I refer to those who have fought the good fight on behalf of their party for longer than they care to admit.

Trump’s fight for Republican principles? It began about a year ago when the escalator at Trump Tower carried him down to the spot where he announced his presidential candidacy.

I’ll concede also that Trump has defied every conceivable expectation.

His countless insults all along the way have baffled me. He denigrates John McCain’s status as a war hero; he pokes fun at a reporter with a serious physical disability; he insults a respected news anchor who had the temerity to ask him tough questions; he calls journalists “sleazy”; he says voters in certain states are “stupid” because they voted for someone else.

Throughout all of that — and more — his ardent supporters cheer him on.

He has never run for elected office until now. His public service record does not exist. Trump has boasted about his extramarital affairs and still he wins the votes of evangelical Christians.

He plasters his foes with epithets.

Trump has tossed innuendo out like candy. He wondered out loud whether Ted Cruz’s father might have been complicit in JFK’s assassination; Trump tossed out the suggestion that Hillary and Bill Clinton had their friend Vince Foster murdered; and, of course, he has continued to suggest that Barack Obama is not a legitimate president, questioning his birth, his religious faith and just recently has implied he might be in league with the goons who shot those police officers to death in Dallas and Baton Rouge.

Yes, I was wrong in my belief that this buffoon could ever be nominated by a major political party to run for the presidency of the United States.

However, I continue to be baffled by the very idea that those who support him can still stand by their guy.

Big week looms for Republican Party

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I’m not yet sure how much of the Republican National Convention I’m going to watch.

Keynote speech? Sure. Except I don’t know who’s giving it.

Presidential nominee acceptance speech? Absolutely, if only to see if Donald J. Trump veers too wildly off script.

This I do know: The Party of Lincoln/Reagan is going to become the Party of Trump.

God help ’em.

I’m still trying to figure out how the Republican Party establishment plans to speak glowingly of the man they’re about to nominate for the presidency of the United States. He has spent the bulk of the primary season hurling insults in every direction, including at the Republican Party brass! Political memories often become surprisingly short, but they also have this way of retaining insults for an amazingly long time.

Which leads me to believe that the establishment types are going to have little time on the podium during the four-day event in Cleveland.

It’ll be left to the assorted celebrities who’ve lined up behind Trump’s insurgent candidacy. He’s been crowing all along how he doesn’t “need” the power brokers who run the GOP. We’re about to learn whether his boasting will come true.

Just suppose, too, that absent any public service record that the Trumpkins can tout, what will be left for them to say from the convention podium.

Oh! I think I know. They’re going to unsheathe the long knives and plunge them into the Democratic nominee, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

She will be portrayed as the daughter of Satan. They’re plan — in the words of the late GOP chairman Lee Atwater — “peel the bark” off the Democrats’ presidential candidate.

Yes, indeed. Given that the Republicans are going first in this year’s political nominating convention cycle, they’ll get to set the tone for the campaign for the White House.

Rest assured, Democrats have their own burdens to bear with Clinton. So, they’ll be loaded to the teeth when they convene their convention in Philadelphia right after the Republicans adjourn their convention in Cleveland.

Get ready, folks, for a heck of a wild ride beginning next week.

Texas Democrats already are ‘demolished’

mechler

I consider Tom Mechler to be a friend. I’ve known him for about a dozen years and we have a nice relationship — even though we disagree politically on just about, oh, every single issue.

Still, I was glad to see the dedicated Panhandle Republican re-elected chairman of the Texas Republican Party this weekend. He survived an attempted coup by a fringe wing of his party that sought to topple him because he’s supposedly too friendly with LGBT elements within his party.

I’m going to take issue with something Mechler said in a statement after his re-election as party chairman had been assured.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/05/13/mechler-wins-re-election-texas-gop-chairman/

According to the Texas Tribune, Mechler said this in a statement: “Our Party is strongest when we are united and I look forward to working each and every day to keep the RPT the most dominant state party in the country. Today the work begins to demolish the Democrats this November.”

Demolish the Democrats?

You mean, Mr. Chairman, that you’re going to wipe them off the face of the state map?

By my way of thinking, the Texas Democratic Party already is demolished. Good grief, dude. You guys occupy every statewide office there is. Democrats can’t field a credible challenge in any of them.

Has the chairman really considered just how dominant his party is these days?

I’ve long been a supporter of a strong two-party state. Before you accuse me of wanting to see Democrats come back, I assure you that I’ve said the same thing back when Democrats stood over the landscape. I once lived and worked in a Democratic bastion — the Golden Triangle — and I witnessed plenty of political arrogance there.

Texas is a one-party state. There can be no doubt about that.

What the GOP must concern itself with, though, is what is happening at the national level. The Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Trump. Mechler and his fellow Texans cannot control what the probable GOP presidential nominee is going to say as he stumps the nation. If anyone is capable of making Texas competitive this fall it’s Donald J. Trump.

Mechler need not worry about demolishing Texas Democrats. He needs to focus his concern about whether the party’s presidential nominee’s statements about Hispanics and women will breathe life into an opposing party that’s already been given up for dead.

Good luck with that, Mr. Chairman.

 

GOP fears its presidential frontrunner

untitled

So help me, I cannot remember the last time a leading major-party presidential candidate has stoked so much fear among those within the very party he wants to lead into the next election.

Donald J. Trump’s emergence from the ranks of unthinkable presidential nominee to a possible nominee has been a sight to behold — not that I have enjoyed beholding it.

Fellow Republican, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, has tossed out an idea that (a) won’t go anywhere but (b) has some within the party actually considering it.

Ticket formation could come early.

Graham suggests that Ohio Gov. John Kasich and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida ought to declare themselves a “ticket” to head off a Trump nomination. Graham — once a presidential candidate himself — doesn’t care which of them would head the ticket. He just wants two of the remaining five GOP presidential candidates to form an alliance to blunt the Trump charge.

There have been other “insurgencies,” to be sure.

Did the Democrats conspire against the candidacy of Sen. Eugene McCarthy and then Sen. Robert F. Kennedy when they challenged President Johnson in 1968? What about the 1976 GOP insurgency of former Gov. Ronald Reagan, who sought to wrest the nomination from President Ford?

This is different.

The very idea that the Republican Party could actually nominate someone with Trump’s background — as a reality TV celebrity, real estate mogul, and someone who’s boasted about his sexual exploits with women who were married to other men is sending the GOP “establishment” into apoplectic spasms.

As someone said only recently, the Party of Lincoln is becoming the Party of Trump.

Take a moment. Roll that around for a bit and consider what it really means to a once-great political institution.