The GOP is Allergic to Integrity
Attacking Liz Cheney for telling the truth is typical Republican behavior.
It is a truism that all presidents lie. It is hard to imagine how anyone could do the job without telling some lies.
Since Nixon, however, Republican presidents have turned a regrettable necessity into a constant habit. Famously, Donald Trump is a compulsive liar who lied more than he uttered the truth.
Now that the default Republican voter is a good Christian, the Party’s base has no objection to powerful people lying to them, so they keep voting for liars, even Donald Trump.
At the moment, Republicans are busy performing their own quasi secular inquisition, going after apostates who refuse to pay lip service to what all thinking people call “the big lie,” that Democrats stole the 2020 election and that Trump is the rightful president of the United States.
Republicans in Utah booed at Mitt Romney, the Party’s presidential candidate in 2012, because he refuses to bleat Trump’s big lie.
More pressing, in terms of actual outcomes, is the impending decision to remove House member Liz Cheney from a Party leadership position because she, too, refuses to bleat the big lie:
And so the Republican Party is still in the same fix it has been since they let Trump take over in 2016. Too many of its elected officials are too afraid of Trump to stop him, or even disagree with him publicly. Minority leader Kevin McCarthy has consistently made a point to suck up to Trump at every opportunity and is now actively pursuing Trump’s personal agenda at the expense of all other considerations.
Since Trump knows nothing about integrity, it is no great surprise that his Party is acting with zero integrity in this matter. Whatever else one thinks about Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney, both of them are acting with integrity that would look very ordinary in times that were ordinary, but we are still stuck with Trump’s special brand of extraordinary, in which the perfusions of his perfervid imagination instantly become Party gospel for the true believers, who react as they always do, with fear and attack anyone who dissents from that gospel.
The word, “integrity,” can only enter this discussion to remark its total absence from the conduct of Republicans.