The Camel's Nose
THE CAMEL’S NOSE
By Deborah Long
"If the camel once gets his nose in the tent, his body will soon follow." Arab proverb
How did America get from Barack Obama to Donald Trump? How was that even possible? It’s a long journey from “Yes, we can” to “Kiss my ass”.
We clutch our collective pearls at the moral hypocrisy of the GOP – to their Elmer Gantry style legislators, many of whom cut their teeth as pedophiles or sexual predators while invoking the name of God. To their newly appointed Supreme Court justice who appears to have acquired both his worldview and his judicial temperament from habitually molesting young girls in-between episodes of boofing with the boys. To their president - their standard bearer - who as Richard Cohen said, “fell to earth from inside a 30-year-old Playboy magazine”.
To Democratic voters, the Republican Party is no longer a legitimate political party in America. It is led by a murder of crows – scavengers who don’t necessarily kill their prey, but survive splendidly on their carcasses.
But to Republican voters, each ethical assault on our nation – a nation defined by their party’s founder as “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” - is symptomatic of nothing. Each blow to our environment; each brutalization of innocent children attempting to emigrate to America; each violation of treaties intended to maintain global stability and economic order is only a temporary deviation from the well-trod path of our American democracy.
To Democrats, the means justify the ends; to Republicans, the ends justify the means.
So, how did the Republicans evolve from the party of Lincoln to its outlaw culture of today? To its swaggering, gun-toting ‘Merica and its sneering alt-right thugs? We arrived at this moment because we have tolerated their incremental deviations from the path of democratic governance for almost five decades. We have permitted ourselves to view the criminality of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan’s Iran/Contra scheme as aberrations. We failed to fight the politically inspired impeachment of Bill Clinton, and we stood silent as it became clear that the Iraq War had been justified with a series lies by their Republican president, George W. Bush. Their trickle-down tax policies have brought America nothing but successive recessions and now unheard-of budget deficits.
The Republican Party has been running roughshod over democratic norms for half a century, but we continue to cling to our utopian fantasies and to our habit of turning the other cheek.
And now the Republican Party appears to be too big to fail. Now, three quarters of the camel is already in the tent, and we’re worried that if we upset him, he might bring the whole tent down on top of us.
