Since Republicans can't "operate" on themselves, Democrats are being forced to do the "surgery"

 

For the past 30 years the Republican Party had been slowly, but inexorably, crawling in the slime toward the events of January 6, while electing crazed adherents of conspiracy theories and inciters of mob violence. Sure, there are some “old guard” Republicans left who remember a time when lawmakers were not lawbreakers, or when their base was not “mesmerized” by Charles Manson or Jim Jones wannabes. But today’s Republican Party is so infested with diseased rats that it can’t feel “alive” without them. This could hardly be gainsaid after the Republican “leadership” in the House refused to even verbally admonish mass-absorber of violent mass-insanity, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Speaker Nancy Pelosi subsequently issued this statement:

After several conversations and literally running away from reporters, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Q-CA) made clear that he is refusing to take action against conspiracy theorist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. As a result, the House will continue with a vote to strip Greene of her seat on the esteemed House Committee on Education & Labor and House Committee on Budget. McCarthy’s failure to lead his party effectively hands the keys over to Greene – an anti-Semite, QAnon adherent and 9/11 Truther.

What we see here is that morally and ethically-deficient Republicans are so desperate not to “upset” the “base” or Trump that it prefers to step aside and watch the Democrats to do their “dirty work” for them. The fact that Greene was even allowed to sit on the education committee after claiming that mass shootings at schools were “false flag” events demonstrates the tone-deafness of the Republican “leadership.” For her part, Greene continues to be utterly devoid of any sense of wrongness, instead responding to criticisms of her collegiality with sociopaths, neo-Nazis and would-be assassins with the psychopath’s habit of seemingly referencing both their own and the media doppelgänger:

They are only set out to destroy Republicans, your jobs, our economy, your children's education and lives, steal our freedoms, and erase God's creation. And the bloodthirsty media are their henchmen who help them by relentlessly attacking anyone in their path.

If Greene was not an elected official with a national platform, no one could take her seriously; now that she is, Greene is in a position that David Duke could only dream of being in—to be the spokesperson for, and to give “credibility” to, every paranoid white nationalist’s fantasies and conspiracies, and be a continuous object of fear and scorn. Perhaps worse, Greene’s extreme-extremism will be used by other Republican lawmakers as a means to keep the focus on her instead of their own extremist beliefs, and falsely portray themselves as a being more “mainstream”—which only means extremism in the Republican Party has been “mainstreamed.”

But Sen. Lindsey Graham has inadvertently provided us with a suggestion on how we might at the very least discover the true extent of the “cancer” that Mitch McConnell referred to within the party: Have the FBI do an exploratory procedure to hunt down the cancerous cells in the body politic and find out just how “terminal” they are. Naturally, Graham is such a Janus-faced hypocrite that he didn’t actually mean what he suggested, but he was foolish enough not to realize the import of his words. The other day when impeachment managers suggested that they might call some of the January 6 rioters as witnesses to incitement by Trump, Graham proclaimed that

If you open up that can of worms we'll want the FBI to come in and tell us about how people actually pre-planned these attacks and what happened with the security footprint at the Capitol. You open up Pandora's box if you call one witness, I hope we don't call any and we vote and get this trial over next week—when it starts.

Get the trial over—when it starts? At least we know how long Graham wants the trial to last. But Graham gave the game away when he then said that the point of the impeachment trial was to make Trump and the Republicans “look bad,” which he knows will happen if rioters called to testify state emphatically that they felt that they were operating on the orders of Trump on the basis of his election fraud lies, as well as from incitement from extremist Republican lawmakers and media “personalities” like Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo; what a way for those sociopaths to have a permanent record in the history books.

 

Republicans certainly have much to fear if the FBI gets involved in investigating the involvement of lawmakers in the January 6 insurrection, which may lead to felony charges for a real conspiracy.  I should think that Graham would rethink his stance and hope that the FBI does not get involved, and the last thing he or any Republican wants is a lengthy trial, revealing more and more of their treason against the country.

Republicans only have themselves to blame for any stain on their reputations. Even Mitch McConnell refused to concede that Biden won the election until the official state ratification of the electoral votes six weeks after the election, providing cover for Trump and party extremists to control the narrative until it was too late for to take ownership of that mistake, and silence the extremists by refusing them positions where they have a platform in which to have a voice in lawmaking—which would send the message to those who voted for the like of Greene, Loren Boebert, Matt Goetz and Josh Hawley that there is no “percentage” in sending such to Congress.

But then again, as we have seen in states like Arizona, the “new” Republican “leadership” can be just as radicalized as the “base”—and will remain so as long as Trump remains Der Fuhrer, which Trump is too ignorantly megalomaniacal to disown. Since what is left of the Republican “leadership” is either too craven or has the cancer of extremism too deeply embedded in its DNA, Democrats are being forced—at least in the case of Greene—to do the “surgery” for the Republicans, since they obviously cannot “operate” on themselves. But the cancer is such that like a virus it spreads and mutates quicker than it can be operated on. Only voters can stop the spread of this cancer, and as we see in bills presented by the Republican-dominated legislature in Georgia, the hands of the “surgeons” are already under threat of amputation.