Do Not Mistake Gang Warfare for a Moment of Clarity

During Prohibition in my former home town of Chicago, the North Side and the Gold Coast were ruled by the Dion O’Banion formidable Irish mob, while the South Side was controlled by the Italians under Johnny Torrio and the Chicago Crime Syndicate, which was a consortium of the main gang leaders in Chicago. Eventually, in the interest of mutual profits for all, a deal was brokered between the North Side Irish and the South Side Italians, and a fitful peace was maintained among the bootleggers, brothel-keepers, policy operators and the muscle they employed to keep everyone in line.

For awhile.

However mobsters being what they are -- greed-motivated cheaters, liars, and murderers -- the peace could not be kept forever, and eventually the shooting started, beginning with the assassination of Dion O’Banion in his own flower shop, and effectively ending five years later with the seven of Bugs Moran's North Side Irish lieutenants being massacred in a garage on St. Valentine's Day massacre.  A massacre that was almost certinaly orchestrated by Al Capone.

But here's the thing.  Capone didn't knock off the Irish because he suddenly came to respect law and order and the Volstead Act or to get in good with United Stated Treasury Department.  He was a murderous thug who wanted to consolidate control over the whole city, and the equally murderous thugs on the North Side stood in his way.  So he eliminated them.

Think on that when you hear stories like this one.  Stories of dissent and rivalry within the Republican Party.

From the terminally-slow-on-the-uptake goobers at NBC:

Cracks in the GOP over Trump are beginning to show

Last Friday, we told you a significant divide existed between the pro-Trump and the pro-party wings of the GOP.

And on Tuesday, that divide became evident for all of Washington to see, when pro-Trump House conservatives went after Liz Cheney, the third-ranking member of the House Republican leadership.

Over, in part, Cheney’s support for Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., later Tuesday called on Cheney to resign or ‘be removed’ as the House Republican Conference chair. As chair, Cheney is the sole female member of the House GOP leadership,” NBC’s Kasie Hunt writes.

“Gaetz's tweet quickly received support from other prominent Republicans, including Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, and the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who compared Cheney to Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, the only GOP senator to vote to convict Trump during his impeachment trial.”

And it’s not just Gaetz vs. Liz Cheney.

It’s the clash between the White House and Senate Republicans over what should be in the next round of coronavirus-relief stimulus — before we even get to the Democrats’ demands.

And it’s Allen West — yes, that Allen West — becoming the new chair of the Texas Republican Party, in a state that’s becoming more problematic for the GOP.

"There are three words I hate to hear used: I hate 'big tent.' I hate 'inclusiveness.' And I hate 'outreach,'" West said, according to the Almanac of American Politics, per the Texas Tribune. "I think you stand on the principles that make you great, which transcend everybody in America, and people will come to it."...

Because before 2016 every one of these assholes and all the Never Trumpers were members in good standing of the same monstrous syndicate -- a coalition of factions, all equally corrupt and equally toxic, but all perfectly happy to cooperate and coordinate with each other because the rewards for doing so were so huge.

But now that Donald Trump, the boss of the White Supremacist/ NeoConfederate faction, has opened his mouth and put all their horrifying shit on Front Street, members of rival gang have decided it is in their best interest to take him down.

What you are seeing on the Right is not a struggle between  Black Hats and White Hats.  It is a war between rival factions of the same syndicate, each trying to calculate their best possible move under the reign of a sociopathic Republican crime boss whose still has the power to reach out and destroy them.

For those of you with long memories, this should all sound eerily familiar.  It is a virtual rerun of 15 years ago, when the Monster from the GOP Id who had virtually every elected Republican office-holder frozen in terror of what he might do was named Tom DeLay.

Here is part of what I wrote 15 years ago.  So long ago that it started out as a comment on the late Steve Gillard's News Blog.  Back in the Before Time, when all of our new Never Trump Republican pals would have you believe that their party was doing just super great.

You be the judge of whether or not any of it still rings true:

Rep. DeLay Preps the Beds for the GOP's Big Sleep

…Tom DeLay is now a Household Name. Been waiting 10 years for that to happen and always amazed that Republicans had no fucking clue who he was, even though you’d tell them five or a hundred times. Sheesh. All RAM and no Hard Drive with some people.

Every GOP Leader knows the Gingrich Lesson: No matter how much the membership owes you, they’ll go absolutely Lord of The Flies on your Piggy-ass the minute you becomes a measurable liability. Newt was so completely “I Am The Reich” that he would have been perfectly happy to go into the bunker and fight it out until the GOP was razed to rubble had he not been stopped by his own House Republicans.

And since the Suddenly Huge Liability named Tom DeLay is now just “Tell Tale Heart”--thundering away under the GOP floorboards, threatening to drown out everything else, the question is, will that same dynamic play twice?

Well DeLay ain’t Gingrich. He learned from that episode, and they don’t call him The Hammer for his shipwright skills. He spent a decade forcibly collecting GOP testicles and caching them in his private Crown Royal bag. At the slightest provocation he will to politically and personally destroy anyone who doesn’t bend a deep knee to His Gorgon Awfulness.

And both the Texas and National Republican parties have shown absolutely craven willingness to rewrite the Rules on the fly any time the Beast’s wet-bar needed to be restocked with virgin’s blood, or whenever a law or policy might make threaten to cinch-in the bottomless lust he and his stooges have for Power, Money, Trinkets and Perks, even a trifle.

So (hahah!) they’ve kinda disarmed themselves to accommodate him, and now they’re stuck very much up on that very windy gibbet with him. So if you were running in 2006 and playing How Do I Save My Pink Republican Skin while DeLay is holding your ass held hostage, what do you do?

Got to time it juuuust right. Jump away from Herr DeLay too soon and he’ll blow your head off. Jump too late, and your face will be morphed into Tom DeLay…into Randall Terry…into, I dunno, Osama Bin Laden? in every ad, every day, for the entire election cycle...

No Half Measures