When George W. Bush stood in the rubble of the World Trade Center in 2001, a plurality of Republicans and to be fair a large number of Democrats cheered him. George W. Bush rallied America in the midst of its 9/11 sorrow, in response to firefighter Rocco Chierichella yelling, “We can’t hear you!” Bush said, “I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people—and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” Young men and women bravely ran to military recruiting stations, and we gave extra cheers to the then New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s appearance on the video screen at Yankees games. Bush was America’s strike-throwing hero and Giuliani was America’s Mayor. Giuliani has been revealed as a sycophantic buffoon, and finding a Republican to admit he voted for Bush is as scarce as Louis Gohmert’s hairline.
The Republican party followed Bush heartily into a disastrous war and over the financial cliff. In the years that have followed they dare not speak his name, disappeared him from Republican presidential conventions, and roundly rejected his brother Jeb’s run for president, with a, how dare you be a Bush. The GOP is good at pointing fingers while at the same time not lending a hand. They say over and over that we want a big tent while closing the flap, pulling up stakes, and starting a barn fire with the remnants. They tricked their way back into Congressional power winning the 2010 midterm election by denying they ever knew G.W. Bush or voted for his policies. The truth is 43 was not the Frankenstein’s monster they wanted, even with VP Dick Cheney turning the switches to the electrodes.
They found a new castle with the embossed words Trump Tower and pried from it the monster they have been seeking since Ronald Reagan. With every insulting tweet and every gibberish filled speech they pull back wide-eyed and say, I don’t listen to what he [Trump] says, I pay attention to what he does. Republican pundits scream that Trump is not the Party but he has enjoyed approval ratings in the high 90s with Republicans. Even today with almost 160,000 dead as a result of the novel corona-virus and the revelations that we have an incompetent leader searching in his self-imposed darkness for answers, he is at 92 % approval from Republican voters, in polls taken in July.
Just as the GOP tried to tell us they were not Bush that is as big a lie as they are not Trump. Republicans shed white tears at the thought of being called racist, they angrily disclose, heretofore, long lost people of color and claim them as family, as proof. After 8 years of Republican leadership in the Senate bashing and denying the right of the first black duly sworn American president to fulfill his Constitutional mandate to nominate a Supreme Court Justice, the party selected a man who denied that same duly sworn president was a citizen. Yesterday the President purposefully denied the legacy of John Lewis, feigning ignorance about his legend. At the same time, voting rights legislation sits on Mitch McConnell’s desk, ignored like the President ignored the great John R. Lewis.
In a few years do not forget 9 out of 10 Republicans voted for Donald John Trump because that is who they are.
Vote in 2020 for Change.