There Can Be No Unity Without Justice And Accountability

Ever since the election, Donald Trump has lied to the American people -- telling them he won the election, and it was stolen by Democrats through fraud. 

And many Republican elected officials enabled Trump by repeating that lie. In doing so, they incited the rioters and insurrectionists.

Now they are calling for "unity". They are lying -- and that will be exposed by their attempts to block the Biden agenda in the days to come.

They don't want unity. They simply want to escape the responsibility for their actions. They know they are in trouble, and they're hoping calls for unity will get them out of that trouble.

But there can be no unity until they admit they were lying, and publicly recognize Joe Biden as the legally elected President of the United States.

There can be no unity with accountability!

Here os part of what former Republican (and new Democrat) Steve Schmidt has to say about those calls for unity:

The inciters of violence and the spreaders of the Big Lie are now making shallow and insincere calls for unity. They must be rejected. No accommodation can be made with these seditious extremists. There is no compromise with people who want to throw out millions of Black votes and impose a new Jim Crow.

There is no compromise with the white nationalists and supremacists. There is no compromise with the fascists and the militias. Democracy will be defended under the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution. We do not seek retribution. We demand justice and accountability under the law. This autocratic movement must be crushed. Trump is the worst president in history. He didn’t do it alone. He is surrounded by liars, thugs, seditionists, racists and opportunists. Know their names. Understand their treachery. This rancid movement that has grown around Trump's malignant personality must be eradicated as a serious threat to take political power in this country.  

All decent Americans who love liberty are stakeholders in that fight, and there is no fight more important than that one, because all other progress is dependent on democracy prevailing. 

The "Big Tent" Democratic Party Welcomes A New Member

Unlike the Republican Party, the Democratic Party is a "big tent" party -- welcoming conservatives, moderates, liberals, and progressives. As of today, it has a new member. It's Steve Schmidt. He considered himself a moderate Republican in the past, and helped run Senator John McCain's campaign for president in 2008. But the Republicans have gone crazy, supporting an autocrat in an effort to bypass our electoral system -- and that drove Schmidt out of the party. He says the Democratic Party is the party that supports democracy, and he's right.

Here's what he had to say in becoming a Democrat:

“I spent 29 years as a Republican, I’ve spent two and a half as an independent, and later this afternoon I will register as a member of the Democratic Party. Because in America today, it’s only the Democratic Party—which is the oldest political party in the world—that stands for the ideas and ideals of American liberty.”

This Republican Is Not Afraid To Tell The Truth

The Republican base, and most Republican officials, seem happy to let Donald Trump do anything he wants. They don't mind that he has alienated most of our allies. They don't care that he lies an average of 15 times a day. And they don't seem to care that he has mishandled the Coronavirus pandemic -- unnecessarily costing the lives of thousands of Americans.

But there are still a few Republicans who haven't abandoned their honor and morality. One of that few is Steve Schmidt. Schmidt's GOP credentials are impeccable -- having worked on the campaigns of George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and John McCain (where he was a senior campaign strategist for his 2008 presidential bid).

Schmidt has been critical of Donald Trump in the past, and now is especially critical of Trump's mishandling of this pandemic.

Here is what he told MCNBC's Ari Melber in a recent interview:

I think the White House has done, historically, very poorly in this. This is one of the most significant crises in American history. It’s certainly the largest American crisis of our lifetimes, and it’s been the most inept response by the executive, by the president, think, with regard to any crisis in American history but, certainly, any crisis in our lifetimes. And we look at a president, who is so clearly in over his head and out of his depth, who has been dishonest, who has been imprecise, who’s been inaccurate, and whose deadly indecision will be paid for with the lives of tens of thousands of Americans, as this virus escalated to a place it never need have gotten. And that is all because of the wasted month of February, where the president was hate tweeting, firing people that he was angry with over impeachment, going on campaign rallies and golfing. And, now, the country is paying the price for that. We should be careful to understand that when the same guy says, ‘Well, it’ll be back in September but we’ll make it go away really quick,’ is the same guy when there were 15 cases in the country, said, ‘Soon, it would be gone to zero and it would disappear like magic.’ The lack of credibility in these evening news events is epic and unlike everything we’ve ever seen. It’s a Baghdad Bob show every night of the week, day after day, the airing of the grievances, the airing of his anger issues. The attacks on the governors. We see every night all of the qualities you never, ever want to see in a leader in a crisis when lives are at stake.

Interview With Steve Schmidt On His Leaving The GOP

(This photo of Steve Schmidt, from Wikipedia, is by David Shankbone.)

Steve Schmidt has been a Republican all his life -- and he has worked for many powerful Republicans (like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Arnold Schwarzenegger). But he loves his country, and that has caused him to publicly declare that he is no longer a Republican (and will support Democrats in the coming election).

Here is part of an interview with Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone after making his decision to leave the GOP.

Why did you finally decide to leave the Republican Party?

I think it's fair to say I've been estranged from the party on a number of issues going back to my advocacy and support for marriage equality in 2009 and then my opposition to the populism and the nationalism that we've seen. The reality that I've come to is that the party stands at an hour at which it is irredeemable, where it has died and bled out because of the cowardice and fecklessness of its leaders.

When Trump was elected, there were three parties in Washington: the Trump party, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The Republican Party had every chance to put a check on his vile personal conduct, his administration's outlandish corruption, his fetishizing and affinity for autocrats around the world and his undermining of the western alliance.

This present strain of know-nothingism has long been in the party's DNA.

This cancer has always been there. This dormant cancer. But it has become fully embraced in this moment. We're seeing at this moment a president of the United States do five things. He is using mass rallies that are fueled by constant lying to incite fervor and devotion in his political base. The second thing we see him do is to affix blame for every problem in the world. Many of them are complex, not so different from the issues faced at the end of Agrarian age and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We see him attack minority populations with words like "invade" and "infest." The third thing he does is a create a shared sense of victimization caused by the scapegoated populations. This is the high act of Trumpism: From Trump to Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham, everyone is a victim. The fourth thing he does is he alleges conspiracy by nefarious and unseen hidden forces – the "deep state." And the fifth thing is the assertion that "I am the law, that I am above it." He just said immigrants don't get a hearing; they don't get a court representation.

So the party's evolution is as much cultural as it is political or ideological.

The two parties for a long time were not homogeneous ideologically. There were plenty of conservatives in the Democratic Party, and there were no small number of liberals in the Republican Party. Now, culturally, we're in thrall to theocratic crackpots like Mike Huckabee and Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, where you're able to justify the candidacy of a Roy Moore because you want to keep the Senate seat. The theocracy and crackpot sewer conservatism has taken over.

What you've seen is this rapid devolution over the last 18 months of the Republican Party becoming a white ethno-nationalist party, a blood-and-soil party that is protectionist, isolationist, that is rooted in resentment and grievance.

The Republican Party isn't going to die because of Trump. It's going to die because of Ryan and McConnell. You're now left with one political party in support of liberal democracy.

Can the Republican Party be saved?

If the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt and Reagan is to be redeemed and resurrected, then the party of Trump must be obliterated. Annihilated. Destroyed. And all of the collaborators, the complicit enablers, the school of cowards, need to go down. Maybe something can regenerate from that.

I don't view it so much differently than I view a forest fire. A forest fire is part of a natural cycle of the forest. The forest burns, and through its burning and destruction, it is regenerated and made healthy again. For the Republican Party and the conservative movement, with its rot, its corruption, its indecency ... before there can be any talk of restoration, there must be a season of burning.

Schmidt Blasts Trump/GOP Congress Over G-7 Disaster

(This photo of Steve Schmidt, from Wikipedia, is by David Shankbone.)

Steve Schmidt is a life-long Republican, and has worked for many Republican candidates -- including being in charge of the daily campaign moves of John McCain during his 2008 run for the presidency.

But Schmidt is also a loyal American, and he is horrified by the damage Donald Trump is doing to his party, and to the United States of America.

After Trump's disastrous appearance at the G-7 conference in Canada, where he attacked our allies (especially Canada) and withdrew from the summit agreement after telling our allies he agreed, Schmidt took to Twitter to express his displeasure with Trump and the congressional Republicans (who failed to speak out).

Here are his tweets:

There Are A Few Honest Republicans Left In The U.S.

The pictures above are of Nicolle Wallace (currently with MSNBC) and Steve Schmidt. Both are life-long Republicans, and have been involved in the campaigns and administrations of several Republican officials. They are also honest Americans who love their country, and they are worried about what Donald Trump and the current crop of congressional Republicans are doing to this country. The following is an exchange they had on MSNBC last Thursday:

STEVE SCHMIDT

This president is besieged by investigations, and all around this president from Scott Pruitt and cabinet secretaries who have already resigned – we see fantastic levels of corruption, the type of corruption we haven’t seen in this country going back a hundred years.

And what’s increasingly clear, whether the target is James Comey, whether it’s Director Mueller the Special Counsel, the reality is that this president will burn everything to the ground to protect himself from this investigation moving closer to the Oval Office.

Everything he’s doing is a strategy of incitement. He’s trying to harden & incite his base through the most deliberate, the intense misinformation campaign that this country has ever seen.

This president is a serial liar. He is lying to the American people every day. He is making up things out of whole cloth. He is serially attacking vital institutions that are necessary to the security of the country.

He will apparently stop at nothing.

There is a second scandal, and that is the complicity of the majority party – the Republicans in the Congress.

The fact is that there is not one of them, not one who will stand up and say that we are a country of laws, that no one person is above the law, that these institutions are vital and necessary and objective truth matters.

This is propaganda. This is what propaganda looks like. It’s what it smells like. We have never seen anything like it. What we’re seeing is an attack from within on vital institutions like a person’s body would be attacked by a flesh-eating bacteria, and it is unprecedented in America.

NICOLLE WALLACE

We started the hour with news that Emmet Flood, one of the president’s new lawyers representing him in the Russia probe, attended this meeting on Capital Hill with the Gang of Eight where they reviewed the most sensitive of information about a human informant. Can you imagine any scenario Alberto Gonzales [former Attorney General under George W. Bush] or Harriet Myers [former White House Counsel to George W. Bush] would have checked in with Pat Fitzgerald who was investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame?

STEVE SCHMIDT

It should never have happened. I mean on the one-to-ten scale of inappropriateness it comes in about 157. An the real issue now is what’s the next transgression? What’s the next time that the Department of Justice backs up because of the whims, because of the demands of the president.

We’re moving as John Heilemann said “closer and closer to crisis to the critical hour.” And the rule of law in this country must be defended.

There’s a potential, absent any defense of it by leaders in this country, that we’ll be living in a very different type of country. For 240-plus years the rule of law has held in the United States of America and the spinning of these conspiracy theories, the constancy of the attacks, the victimization that Trump puts upon himself – always blaming someone, this nefarious conspiracy – this is the hallmark of autocratic leadership back to the beginning of time. This is not normal in a democratic republic like the United States. And it should be opposed.

There Are A Few Honest Republicans Left (But Not Many)

(This picture of Steve Schmidt is by David Shankbone, and was found at Wikipedia.)

Steve Schmidt is a life-long Republican, and has been involved in Republican politics for most of his working life. He was involved in the campaigns of Arnold Schwarzenegger, George. W. Bush, and ran the day-to-day activities of the 2008 campaign for John McCain. His credentials as a Republican cannot be questioned.

I have usually disagreed with Schmidt's politics, but I respect him as an honest and ethical individual. The tweets below are his -- and they remind us that not every Republican has tossed morality out the window to be a supporter of the ethically-challenged and incompetent criminal that party has put in the White House (Donald Trump).

Unfortunately, he is in a tiny minority in the Republican Party. As the charts below show, most Republicans have drunk the rancid kool-aid Trump has offered them. They ignore his racism, misogyny, incompetence, and total lack of ethics. In fact, too many of them view those as favorable traits.

The charts are from the latest Economist / YouGov Poll done between May 6th and 8th of a random national sample of 1,500 adults (with a 3 point margin of error). These charts reflect only the views of Republicans.

An Honest Republican Blasts The Trump Administration

(This photo of Steve Schmidt is by David Shankbone and was found at Wikipedia.)

The Republican Party is now unquestionably the party of Donald Trump. Both the base and party leaders go out of their way to defend Trump -- no matter how ridiculous his words and actions are.

But there are a few honest Republicans left in the United States. One of those is Republican strategist Steve Schmidt. Here is what he had to say about the Trump administration:

“The comportment of these people is shameful.”

“It’s just really a tragedy that we have tens of thousands of kids look at the President of the United States and they see a joke. You can’t watch the evening news with your children, because any different moment the newest porn star will be on explaining the relationship.”

“And from a personnel perspective, we’ve never quite seen the assemblage of crooks, just outright weirdos, wife beaters, drunk-drivers, complete and total incompetents that’s been assembled. If you took the ten greatest H.R. managers in the world and put them together and said we want to form a 1927 Yankees of incompetents, it’s not possible they would have done a better job than assembling this team and it’s not possible that this team could have let loose more chaos than they already have.”

"There Has Never Been An Administration Like This"

Steve Schmidt is a Republican. He was the senior campaign advisor to John McCain in 2008, and has also worked on the campaigns of Arnold Schwarzenegger and George W. Bush. But he is also a rarity -- an honest Republican.

Here is what he told MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace about the mess the Trump administration has made out of the Rob Portman wife-beating scandal:

The story imploded today like it was a building implosion or stadium implosion you were watching on tv. What happened here is that the FBI came back and they said, ‘hey, the staff secretary who has a code-word SCI top-secret clearance is credibly accused of beating his two wives.’ And the White House took no action, kept him in place.

We see the abject incompetence that was described in the Michael Wolff book. We see recklessness around national security issues, scores of west wing officials don’t have the requisite clearances necessary to see the nation’s most closely guarded secrets. 

We see the usual dishonesty and it’s blowing up in their face. And lastly, we see the cruelty. The cruelty of the press secretary toward these women. Of Kellyanne Conway toward these women. Of the President of the United States toward these women. And really, the whole of the administration toward these women.

I think the important thing to understand, to remember, for the American people, is that this is not normal. This is — there’s never been an administration like this. In fact, when you look out across all the western democracies, you don’t see lying like this. the constancy of lying, the dishonesty, the allegations of conspiracy, the smearing, the defend-to-the-end at all costs the image and the reputation of the leader.

There’s never been anything like this. We are in a — we are in unchartered territory with this comportment and it’s vile. The behavior is disgraceful, it’s disgusting.

The country has never before now elected somebody who is so manifestly unfit intellectually, morally, temperamentally, for the office of President of the United States.