Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: The GOP on the Eve of Destruction

My grandfather, a lifelong Republican who taught Eisenhower at West Point and who was a Brigadier General who served in both World Wars, would have been horrified with what has happened to his party and the truth of this powerful article. He would have been profoundly disturbed by so much, including the invasion of Iraq, which he stated back in the '80's would have dire consequences to the entire region. Which is also true... Another world is possible. ~ Molly 

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By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump signs autographs and talks with the crowd during a campaign stop at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio, November 23, 2015. (Photo: Andrew Spear / The New York Times)

For reasons hard to fathom, the Republicans seem to have made up their minds: they will divide, degrade and secede from the Union.

They will do so with bullying, lies and manipulation, a willingness to say anything, no matter how daft or wrong. They will do so by spending unheard of sums to buy elections with the happy assistance of big business and wealthy patrons for whom the joys of gross income inequality are a comfortable fact of life. By gerrymandering and denying the vote to as many of the poor, the elderly, struggling low-paid workers, and people of color as they can. And by appealing to the basest impulses of human nature: anger, fear and bigotry.

To see more stories like this, visit Moyers & Company at Truthout.

Turn on your TV or computer, pick up a paper or magazine and you can see and hear them baying at the moon. Donald Trump is just the most outrageous and bigmouthed of the frothing wolf pack of deniers and truth benders. As our friend and colleague Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch writes, "There's nothing, no matter how jingoistic or xenophobic, extreme or warlike that can't be expressed in public and with pride by a Republican presidential candidate."

Like the pronouncement of the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's 1984, ignorance is strength, whether it's casting paranoid fantasies about thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering 9/11, or warning about terrorists in refugees' ragged clothing and Mexican rapists slithering across the border.

Just four-and-a-half years ago, Washington mainstays Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein shocked the inside-the-Beltway establishment (especially the press, with its silent pact to speak no evil of wrongdoers lest they deny you an interview) when they published their book, It's Even Worse than It Looks. The two esteemed political scientists wrote, "The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier - ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

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