I don't blame John Kasich for the absolutely rancid garbage he was troweling out on MSNBC today.
Well, OK, that's not true. I do blame him. He's awful. But he is an old man, living in a world where every political force he thought men like him had mastered has run amok and bucked him right out of his saddle and into the dust.
Before Kasich could make it all the way to life's finish line, with a nice, bipartisan funeral with leaders from Both Sides saying kind things about him from the pulpit, the racism and derangement which men like Kasich alway knew was there roiling just below the surface of their party (and on which they had always quietly depended to win elections) kicked the GOP basement door off its hinges, stomped up into the parlor and demanded that they finally be given all that they had been promised for their decades of loyalty.
And Kasich?
Kasich is just an aging bundle of Republican nerve endings and obsolete talking points, doing what aging bundles of Republican nerve endings do: stabbing around in the dark, seeking the least painful way forward. A path that is not too hot and not too cold. That will offend no one, except a few dirty hippies who no one pays any attention to anyway. A path which has been well-paved and well-marked by decades of pundits smoothing it, widening it and installing Very Respectable media comfort stations where they could refresh themselves in the company of their peers, and which also acted as Roman milecastles -- garrisoned mini-fortresses established at regular intervals for the purpose of protecting the Both Sides Do It pundit road from those who might do it harm.
And in his 71st year on this Earth, that is where we still find John Kasich. Still a member of the American Fascist party, still mindlessly inching forwards along the mighty Both Sides Do It highway, which has been created and maintained for just this purpose by 10,000 New York Times and Washington Post op-ed columns, and 10,000 episodes of Morning Joe, and 10,000 Sunday Shows and 10,000 billionaire-funded white papers.
Like so many other cowards -- even cowards I keep being told are now my "allies" -- on some deep, biological level Kasich is incapable of just saying, "Donald Trump and my Republican party are the problem. And I accept my full measure of responsibility for what my party has become. Period. Full stop."
Because then someone might mistake him for a dirty partisan Liberal! Oh noes!
And so, instead, it's "nobody" and "everybody" who are at fault.
Kasich: Nobody's listening to anybody else, and it's all dominated by anger.
It's "people" in their "silos". And "One side against the other". And fuck it, just let God do it!:
Kasich: I think we need some sort of a spiritual revival in this country. I don't know what's going to get people out of their silos and I don't know what's going to quell the anger, which is now turning into hatred. One side against the other. We've seen spiritual movements before work ...
Then come the bona fides. You can trust me. I am pureblood.
Kasich: I have been against Donald Trump for seven years, not seven months or not one year or whatever.
Then, once that's out of the way, BOHICA! More Both Sides! With an implied "In a world" movie guy voice-over gravitas!
Kasich: I don't hate Donald Trump, I want justice to come to Donald Trump and accountability, but we live in a world today where it's a world that anger and hatred and glee at somebody else's misfortune or bitterness to what the other side thinks.
Then, finally:
Kasich: Are we going to be divided like we ended up when we went actually into a civil war back?
Hey John, you do remember what the Civil War was about, right? And you do remember that it fucking well wasn't about abstract "sides" or "people" in their "silos". And although there were two sides to the conflicts, the first Republican president of the United States did not dare defile the sacrifices being made on the battlefield by pretending that Both Sides were to blame:
From Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, Washington, D.C., March 4, 1865
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.
1 comment:
Similar to Lincoln could be said of Russia and Ukraine. In that conflict, Russia is clearly the aggressor, but some people are trying to do "both sides" and it comes off like "what planet do you live on?" We need to have that level of clarity about conflict in this country, such that the "both sides" people sound unwell.
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