Flaked Out

                Arizona senator, Jeff Flake, became the most recent Republican to publicly break ranks with Trump.  He gave a couple interviews followed by a cliché ridden and overly dramatic speech on the floor of the Senate saying it was time to say enough.  Then he went off and voted to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations while raising them on the poor and middle class.  I guess decency has its limits.  The hypocrisy of Flake’s actions captures the fate of the Republican party.  Flake is a reliable vote for the Trump agenda.  He occasionally has a reflective moment that makes him criticize the way Trump and his ilk have abandoned all pretense of being interested in democracy or serving the people, but there is no daylight between them on critical issues.

                Flake, and others like him, make two things obvious.  First, they will never rein in, let alone get rid of, Trump.  Trump is the logical extension of a party that wondered off in to Rupert Murdoch’s fantasy camp and never found their way home.  Trump may not behave the way they think he should, but he’s their boy when it comes to driving the country back to the good old days of white supremacy and male dominance.  The reaction to the first indictments to come out of the Special Counsel say it all – silence.  Second, the problem facing the country isn’t just that we have a completely unstable and unqualified president, the problem is that he’s not alone in the way he looks at the world.

                The constitution assumes that if a tyrant ever became president that the congress would do its due diligence and remove him.  It assumes that there would never be a party so enamored with its own brand that it would put party before country.  Bad bet.  Not only have Republicans given up on following the constitution and performing their duty to govern, they have turned a blind eye to what amounts to treason.  It is more important to Paul Ryan to give his rich puppet masters a totally unneeded and undeserved tax break than it is to safeguard the country from an attack by an enemy.  Republicans are so far enmeshed in their own agenda that they have completely abandoned the notion that they have to protect the country, unless, of course, it involves another alleged misdeed by Hillary.  Instead of wanting to get to the bottom of what happened in the last election and prevent it from happening again, they sound like first-graders whining that “he did it, too.”

                Flake lives in the same fantasy world as the rest of the far right.  A world where there is no discrimination – except against white folks, of course – where people still mine and burn coal and the environment is run by God.  They are still believers in ‘supply side’ economics and are still saying that tax cuts will do more than just give the people at the top even more money to hoard.  They live in the conspiratorial echo chamber of Fox News and the more extreme fantasies of Steve Bannon.  They are not sane.  They make up whatever suits their purpose and never take responsibility.  If caught in a lie, they point their finger at someone on the other side and start screaming about what they did.  They are led by a pathological liar and malignant narcissist.  What could go wrong?

                So when Jeff Flake stands before the camera with every hair in place and his tie in a perfect Windsor knot, pardon me if I’m not impressed.  While he tries to summon something he imagines to be courage or decency, but is mere flatulence, the country is dissolving.  Until he and other Republicans join the real world and take real action to help ordinary people, address climate change, fund education or any number of obvious and critical needs, it doesn’t matter.  Maybe he made himself feel a little better.  He did nothing to help the country.