Rim Country Gazette: How bad is it? It's really, really bad when Mr. Conservative George Will tells Republicans to vote Trump, GOP lackeys out of power.

Friday, July 17, 2020

How bad is it? It's really, really bad when Mr. Conservative George Will tells Republicans to vote Trump, GOP lackeys out of power.

If one of the most respected conservative voices in the nation writes: “The nation’s floundering government is now administered by a gangster regime” you can be sure something is not only wrong but is pathologically wrong with our politics.

I’ve never been a big fan, doctrinally, of George Will but I’ve been reading him for 50 years, starting with his weekly Newsweek magazine column in 1965, when I got out of college. I have always had respect for him because first, he’s at the top of the heap in terms of his command of the English language (Notice the imagery of the first sentence of this column.), and second, his generally well thought out reasoning to support his opinions. If the country is better with two healthy political parties trying to sell their ideas to voters, Will must necessarily be included among the top salesmen for Burkian conservatism. At times he has infuriated me but I stayed with him through all these years.

Of late, though, I’ve noticed an air of unbridled disgust in Mr. Will. Last week he was admonishing his readers that conservatives, despite any fundamental problems with liberalism, the nation will not survive another four years of Donald Trump and that voting for Biden was an act of courage—maybe patriotism is a better word. In early June he wrote:

In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what?

There seems to be a movement afoot to gather up conservatives and bring them to the Democrats if for no other reason than to hand Republican leaders a total rejection of their “Vichyite collaboration” with Trump. And now a website, Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT) features first person stories of ordinary Republicans who are disillusioned so much that they are leaving the party and telling their stories for the world to see.

Maybe, finally, Americans, red and blue, are just plain tired of the sociopath in the White House and Trump’s cynical bootlickers. Is this the tsunami of Rejection for Trump we’ve been waiting for?