GOPeity GOPeity GOPe.

Well, apparently Ralph Peters (former Fox News contributor) and John McCain (soon to be former US Senator from Arizona, God willing) have both lost their minds over the President today.

Peters, who ought to know better, is pissed off because he believes Fox News is little more than a propaganda machine for Donald Trump.  I’m not so sure I’d go that far.  But Peters is just another Nevertrumper who can’t see the forest for the trees.

McCain is bashing Trump for being a nice guy and congratulating Vladimir Putin on his “electoral victory”.  I put that in scare quotes because anybody who doesn’t know that election was rigged is a naive dreamer.  I will guarantee that Trump’s message of congratulations was heavily steeped in irony.

But these are just continuing reminders that, with friends like establishment Republicans (otherwise known as the GOPe), who needs enemies? No wonder we call it the Stupid Party.

This is how you lose the House and Senate, boys.  The Democrats know that you have to close ranks and maintain party discipline (they’re very Soviet in that way).  The GOPe has a problem understanding that survival as the reigning political party requires adhering to the party line, booting people from the party who won’t toe that line, and backing the president to the hilt when he’s from your party, regardless of what you think of him as a human being.

Peters in particular is an egregious ass, with his statement that Fox is acting as a “propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.”

You can be as patriotic as you want and you can be as honest as the day is long, but the fact of the matter is that politics is our great national sausage machine — and if you can’t deal with the way sausage is made, maybe you ought to stay the hell out of the political commentariat.

Besides, if Trump is so “destructive and ethically ruinous”, why hasn’t Special Counsel Mueller managed to toss anything at him that sticks?  Mueller has no reason to handle Trump with kid gloves, and plenty of reason (he’s a Democrat, you know) to do otherwise. It’s clear that there was no Russian meddling in our elections (or, if there was, it was mistimed and completely ineffective), and it’s just as clear that there was no soi-disant “collusion” between the Trump organization and the Russians…but plenty of evidence that a whole bunch of Democrats, up to and including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, were awash to their necks in nefarious dealings with the very same Russians.  Can you say “Uranium One”?  Of course you can.  If you can find the news articles about it in our left-wing press.

I won’t even discuss what John McCain has to say because John McCain is a dying and possibly borderline-senile old man who believes he should have been president.  Anything he says at this point about a sitting Republican president is sour grapes and has to be viewed in that light.  I respect the hell out of John McCain for his service (and time as a POW) in the military, but I’ve never really respected him as a Republican senator, and it’s high time he was removed from his comfy seat in the Senate by the good people of the State of Arizona, who could probably do a lot better.  He’s a shining example of someone who’s been in government far too long (31 years this coming November) and it shows.

The fact is, after eight years of Barack Obama, what exactly did either of these men expect?  No normal GOP politician would have had a chance in hell of beating Hillary Clinton, because no normal GOP politician would get out and fight for the job like Donald Trump did.  The fact that Trump won as many votes as he did is testament to the fact that people on the right are sick and tired of the pale, stale political pablum served up by the GOP establishment — a thin gruel, indeed! — and they, like Lincoln before them, could not spare this man — “He fights.”

What’s truly sad about the GOP is that so few of their tenured officeholders got primaried out of their seats in the last cycle, and we’ve been treated to another round of the same old same old by the GOPe.  And now a bunch of them are probably going to simply lose those seats to the Dumbs in November, which is hardly an optimal result.  You want a Constitutional crisis?  Because that’s how you get a Constitutional crisis.

No thanks to people like John McCain and Ralph Peters, we’re probably going to get one.  Hang on tight, folks, and keep your powder dry.  This ride ain’t over yet.

UPDATE, 21 Mar 2018:

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* There may be a reason Peters retired as a LTC — who retires as an LTC?  The one I know personally at least got a promotion to full bird when he retired.