After witnessing the honest but disgraceful and unfair testimony of lifelong Republicans revealing Trump’s desecration of the United States Capitol; the terribly unfair investigation of Trump’s criminal threats to election officials and solicitation of election fraud; the patently partisan effort to expose Trump’s extortion of political favors from a foreign government; and the utterly inexplicable concern over Trump’s theft of top secret nuclear documents — I am so relieved that we are finally investigating something worth worrying about: Hunter Biden’s outrageous procurement of a cushy foreign job. Oh, my goodness gracious! Worse yet — his Dad may have helped him. And thank goodness other Hunter-related “theories” are being pursued!
It is hard to believe that the preceding paragraph, which might be dismissed as over-the-top sarcasm, is and has been the formal stance of the newly minted Retrumplican House majority. (Retrumplican Sen. Josh Hawley declared, in a Nov. 18 Washington Post op ed, that the Republican Party “is dead,” so let us employ an appropriate, new and more accurate name.)
In his opinion piece, Senator Hawley makes a well-written, coherent and unpersuasive argument that his dead party’s poor results in the recent midterms were caused, in summary, by the Old Republicans’ detachment from the working class, their embrace of Democratic ideas and legislation, their award of such things as tax cuts for the very wealthy, and other purported sins. Huh? In Mr. Hawley’s case, truly “all politics are local,” since his ideas appear confined to his own brain, even among Retrumplicans.
On the contrary, real-world evidence shows that the recent midterms reflect something simpler: voters’ exhaustion with nonsense. The red wave didn’t crash against a wall of Old Republican policies, or any wall — it was sucked down by the gravity of common sense. The results weren’t a love letter to Democrats, nor hate mail to Old Republicans — they were a signal that people are sick and tired of patent lying and bizarre “theories:” stop telling us to disbelieve what we’re seeing with our own eyes; we’ve got real problems to worry about, not childish losers’ ranting, or Israeli space lasers.
Those real problems do not include Hunter Biden’s tumultuous life and possibly sleazy, or even illegal, career pursuits. Because Hunter Biden will never play a role in anything materially affecting Americans’ lives, I am not keenly interested in him. When the house is burning down, you don’t worry about children playing with matches in a dirt lot a mile away. Instead, you worry about the flames at your neck. Retrumplicans would rather ignore the flames (insurrection, election extortion and fraud, theft of top secrets), fingers in their ears, singing “La la la la la la.” And the only voter scream will be: get the hell out of there (as Hawley did during the insurrection).
Senator Hawley, a brilliant young man by all accounts, knows that millions of voters still supported Retrumplican mythology and “theorizing,” so he’s doubling down on it, albeit through a strange and circuitous route — unusual ideas about Old Republicans and their supposed betrayal of Americans. Although he is a United States Senator, not a House member, be assured that Hawley will be “all in” and cheering for the ludicrously irrelevant House “investigations” about to unfold. Does he expect these inquiries to thrill the “working American” that he claims to passionately support, the majority of Americans whose gravity calmed the red tide of kooky denialism? Or will they just thrill the small group, himself included, who view American politics as some perverse form of grievance chess, with every pawn capture — however irrelevant —a cause for high-fives?
Among Retrumplicans of both houses, false equivalency is such an ingrained habit, it appears, that they literally can’t see the difference between serious issues that warrant Congressional investigation, for example threats and extortion of election fraud or the desecration of our beloved Capitol, on the one hand, versus things that don’t, for example nepotism or other alleged illegal behavior that do not materially affect the national interest. If rampant nepotism were the only problem in the Trump administration, most would have rejoiced, and he would have been re-elected. But nepotism and terrible judgment about some executive appointments — while hobbling — were such small problems, compared with his others, that few Americans seemed to care about it.
If people like Josh Hawley and his House counterparts sincerely want to revive the “Republican” Party, they’ll stop looking for fly specks in someone else’s pepper, stop blaming their ideological parents, and start looking at issues that will benefit all Americans, not just titillate Retrumplicans.
Nile Kinney is California attorney. These views are his alone and do not reflect those of his colleagues.
