I'll make my usual comment of annoyance that Corker won't just come out and say "lie." Come on, people. Just call a lie, a "lie." Anyway, let's take a moment to reflect on the fact that this is what the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says about the President. Of his own party.
But not too long of a moment because along came Jeff Flake. Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) is retiring basically because he can't fucking stand Trump. He won't cozy up to that piece of fucking shit to win a primary, and he thinks Trump is "dangerous to a democracy."
Let that one sink in. A Senator of the President's own party is saying that what the President does to the system is "dangerous to a democracy." Holy shit. I've written about Ben Bradlee, "holy shit" moments before. This is one of those.
I've been fascinated by the wackos in Congress for a long time. Corker isn't a wacko, and neither is Flake. Michele Bachmann... now there was a wacko. I miss her. I even wrote a paper inspired by Bachmann and those of her ilk! She made a name for herself with this appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews, just before the 2008 election.
Oh, and that youtube caption has a typo in it. I'm spelling her name correctly. It's one l in "Michele." Anyway, this kind of talk is what we expect to hear from the extreme end of the opposing party in Congress. Michele Bachmann was an early star in the "tea party," not because she had two brain cells to rub together, and not because she was any more ideologically pure than anyone else in the increasingly ideologically homogeneous GOP at the time. No, Bachmann just talked shit about Obama.
And she wasn't alone in doing it. The biggest thing that separated the Michele Bachmanns, the Allen Wests and the other early tea partiers from regular, old-fashioned conservatives was just the kind of shit that they would go on tv and say. Then, we had Joe Wilson, the Representative from South Carolina, who decided to yell, "you lie!" at Obama during an address to a joint session to Congress. Democrats were aghast. Republican leaders pretended to be aghast, but gave him a wink and a nod while he raised money off of it after a fake, pseudo-apology.
You know who didn't talk that kind of shit about Obama? Democrats. Republicans didn't talk this way about George W. Bush. Democrats talked some shit about Clinton during the Lewinsky affair, but only to condemn adultery and lying. None declared Clinton unfit for the Presidency, nor "a danger to democracy." None voted to impeach him in the House, nor to convict in the Senate, nor did any do what Corker did, and say it was a mistake ever to support him in his election.
To find intra-party criticism on par with what we are hearing from Corker and Flake, we have to go back to the early 1970s. While modern parties don't always get along with their presidents (see: Carter, Jimmy), they don't call their presidents "a danger to democracy." However, during Watergate, it was Republicans turning against Nixon that forced his resignation. As I keep saying, though, that ain't gonna happen en masse because Trump has an electoral bomb strapped to him with a dead-man trigger, and the entire GOP is chained to him. He goes boom, the entire party relives the 1974/1976 election sequence.
That's why the only Republicans willing to point out what every single one of them with a working brain knows are the ones who are retiring (like Corker), dying (like McCain), or willing to retire to let them speak the truth (like Flake). Trump will retain the support of his party, no matter what because of Watergate. And the party was just given the greatest gift ever. The Washington Post reports that Clinton and the DNC paid for "the Russian dossier." You know, the one put together by the British spy about how Trump may be the subject of Russian blackmail? With something about golden showers? That one. Is the WaPo story true? Does that make anything in the dossier less likely to be true? As far as the politics are concerned, that won't matter. This will unify the GOP around Trump even more. There could be an actual tape of Trump handing national security secrets to the Russians, and it wouldn't matter...
Oh, wait, we know he did that. In the Oval Office... Fuck.
We have no idea what Trump's real relationship with Russia is, and the origin of "the dossier" tells us little about it. If Steele had been actively working for MI6 at the time, on behalf of the British government, to help Clinton, this would be... kinda like that meeting between Don Jr. and the Russian spy, though, and let's be blunt about that. I have zero tolerance for hypocrisy. If this was contract work, we are in murkier territory, but let's keep an eye on this...
Anyway, what we know is that a lot of Republicans in Congress hate and distrust the President. Of their own party. But, they are too cowardly to speak out unless they are dying or retiring. People retired under Obama, and nobody talked this way about Obama on the Democratic side. In fact, even the "establishment" Republicans didn't talk about Obama the way Corker and Flake talk about Trump.
Bob Corker and Jeff Flake are talking about Trump with a level of contempt that one expects from the fringe of a party, towards the opposing party. Instead, it is coming from the sane wing of the President's own party.
However, nobody within the party can bring themselves to say it unless they know they won't be there after January, 2019. There are two sides to this coin. First, most of the party knows what a worthless, vile and incompetent piece of fucking shit Donald Trump is. They know how badly they fucked up. If they could go back in time and fight like hell to get anyone... literally anyone on the ballot as the 2016 Republican nominee, they would do it. The sane wing of the party, such as it is, is miserable right now.
The flip side is they think they have lost. They don't know how to beat Trump within the GOP. Trump has won the battle within the GOP. He is an idiotic, racist, misogynist demagogue who doesn't know jack fucking shit about shit. Paul Ryan has called him a textbook racist. Mitch McConnell laughs at Trump. World leaders joke about Trump because they know what a clueless dipshit he is, and the CIA keeps intelligence from him because they don't fucking trust him. The Doomesday Clock was actually moved to 2.5 minutes to midnight (yes, it's a real thing), quite seriously because of Donald Fucking Trump. Why? He's nuts. The American Psychoanalytic Association has relaxed its rules to let members comment on how fucking nuts Trump is. Former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, James Stavridis puts the odds of Trump starting a nuclear war with North Korea at around 10%. Because Trump is that fucking stupid.
But while Trump's approval rating overall is sitting at 36% (a record low for a president at this point), the GOP base still loves that festering pile of infectious human waste. So, what's a craven incumbent to do?
Retire, die, or be brought to heel, apparently.
Where does this end? Who knows? For now, let's just keep in mind that the contempt for the President we are hearing from Corker, Flake and McCain is a level of contempt normally reserved for the fringe element of the opposing party. Of course, they are saying out loud what a lot of the rest really believe, but are too cowardly to say publicly. And that is the real problem with the GOP right now.