Not to put too fine a point on it, if you can rationalize Scott Pruitt’s behavior, then the rest of us never need to hear you complain about anything, ever. And expressions of mild concern don’t cut it.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
This has been going on for a week. I mentioned one of the reasons why at the end of EPA relaxing fuel efficiency standards, setting up fight with California on my personal blog.
I think it’s that last sentence that’s key. As long as Pruitt is available to replace Sessions as Acting Attorney General, who can then fire Mueller, Trump will continue to support him and most of the Republican Senators will not do much more than their current tut-tutting. Besides, he’s enacting the G.O.P. agenda on the E.P.A. They support that.
I know it’s a tired truism but the modern GOP is completely unconcerned about corruption (or even treason) so long as it is a Republican that is involved. They have long since become a totally tribal cabal and their incredibly destructive behavior of undermining longstanding norms of democratic accountability will not end until either the country is significantly damaged or until the GOP is permanently removed from the political scene. Count on the first happening before the second ever happens.
We are locked into a two-party system, the GOP will be with us for a long time. I think it will become discredited into permanent minority status at the national level, controlling its rural redoubts and not much else.
White supremacy plus Christian supremacy are not the waves of the future and the GOP is locked into those, as they are locked into their cultish self-reinforcing bubble.
. . . point: I’d call this the most significant damage, because it’s so crucial to enabling the rest of the damage already inflicted and that still on the way (digby’s QOTD yesterday):
There you have it folks. What ails us worst in a nutshell: Reality-Denial as a conscious, deliberate strategy. Think, for just one very obvious example, of hypocritical “conservative” “evangelicals” granting Trump a mulligan!
It’s a telling commentary on the monstrosity of the Repub party (and America in general) that the outrage over the revolting Pruitt is his waste and abuse of a few dollops of taxpayer funds, while his irreversible destruction of the environment goes unnoticed and unremarked. Pruitt was a corrupt Evangelical extremist in OK, so obviously he will be a corrupt extremist on a somewhat larger scale in DC. That was baked into the nauseating Pruitt cake. It is kind of comical what a cowardly “public servant” he is, clearly terrified of the general public, sort of like an “aristocrat” in 1790s France, haha.
But the tut-tutting by DC Repubs is so sparse and muted because they know how successfully Pruitt’s Environment Destruction Agency is reversing the past 40 years of environmental progress for their plutocrat paymasters. And that is Job One.
When Gen. Ulysses Grant was under fire in 1862 for alleged malfeasance of duty, Lincoln remarked, “I can’t spare this man, he fights!” Similarly Der Trumper and his Repubs have to say of Pruitt (whatever his obvious corruption), “We can’t spare this man, he destroys!”