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Bernie Evans: Streaming my consciousness
Bernie Evans.jpg
Bernie Evans

Never did I think I would find myself in bed with so many Republicans.

Figuratively speaking of course.

I’ve been a loyal viewer of MSNBC’s Morning Joe since it started in, what 2008?

The show’s namesake is Joe Scarborough, the former GOP congressman from Florida.

He would sometimes make me mad with his takedowns of President Obama, but he always has a good line-up, a panel of all my favorite journalists and authors, historians, pundits and politicians.

The man is passionate. He and co-host Mika Brzezinski are a hoot. Joe was divorced but Mika was married.

Suffice it to say, well, in her words: “The on-set chemistry was electric but even more so off-camera.”

Divorce court cometh.

Lifetime loyalty and devotion is one of the many lessons I think straight married couples can learn from gay married couples.

Serial monogamy is not monogamy. Love and devotion are hard work.

The grass is never greener… anywhere.

But I digress.

So, anyway, Joe is flagrantly anti-Trump. Which is to say, he believes in our constitutional republic and its institutions. Flaws and all. And he recognizes the damage President Trump and his capitalist-crony minions are doing.

It all adds up to great TV. No better way to start the morning than focusing on saving America.

For their part, the Trump campaign knows Democrats are out to sink Trump’s re-election, obviously; but with nary a word about all the Republicans and their different organizations out to do the same.

“Republicans for Rule of Law” is mostly conservative lawyers and former Department of Justice officials making a great case against the Trump administration’s lawlessness; “Republicans Against Trump” have garnered over 400 video testimonials of Trump voters who regret it and will be voting for sanity, Joe Biden (no longer hidin’). And my favorite, “The Lincoln Project”, is a whole lot of very gifted Republican strategists: Rick Wilson, Stuart Stephens, Steve Schmidt, et al, producing highly informative, polished anti-Trump/pro-democracy exposes. Of course, there’s also the pundits: MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush official; Tara Setmayer, the former GOP congressional- staffer, CNN; the hilarious and smart Ana Navarro, a former Jeb Bush official, CNN; Sophia Nelson, the former House GOP Investigative Counsel, now a senior columnist for The Daily Beast, et al. They’re all doing their part to defeat Trump.

Following the first televised Biden-Harris confab, Navarro, thrilled by Biden’s choice of running-mate, says: “I think people are feeling optimistic for the first time since this pandemic.”

Cool.

Fox “News” chased-off all of their anti-Trump Republicans.

We’ve never seen anything like this in American politics. And the books!

Rick Wilson’s first is titled, “Everything Trump touches dies.” Long-time Republican Party builder, the aforementioned Stuart Stephens, aide to Mitt Romney 2012, his book is titled, “It was all a lie.”

He says he has “no idea” how he let himself “be taken in” by such shenanigans and that “the truth of who Republicans really are” was “always in front of me” but he just “didn’t want to see it.”

I feel his pain.

The Republicans were once a “Grand Old Party” that stood for something meaningful and great: freeing the enslaved. Abraham Lincoln being the founder.

But then came modernity and civil rights.

I’ve always found it completely cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs that anybody thinks the party that defeated slavery and the Confederacy should then fly the Confederate flag from their front

porch. Brain, meet thought process. It’s just backwards. Not that one can be reasoned out of what one was never reasoned into.

It amazes me that the Democratic Party, which dominated the South (a racist conservative wing called “Dixiecrats”), still hasn’t won a majority of the white vote since Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed civil rights into law.

That kind of says it all about American politics.

Speaking of which, conservative lawyer/Newsweek columnist John Eastman has rebirthed Trump’s favorite racist trope: “birtherism”, questioning Senator Kamala Harris’s eligibility to serve as Vice President.

Trump says Eastman is “highly respected and talented.” This from a weasel. Imagine if the first generation of Americans born to European settlers and colonists were denied citizenship…I mean, you know, since their parents were foreigners. Racism never makes sense. As I’ve written previously, Republicans nominated Arizona’s Senator Barry Goldwater to be their standard bearer in 1964 and he likewise campaigned on racially-charged invective, “Elect me and I’ll kill the civil rights bill!” He won five Southern states and his home state.

It was a landslide. Democrats took it all.

May history repeat itself.

Bernie Evans is a local writer whose opinions have appeared in local publications, TIME and The Nation.

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