If you’re like me you get about a hundred or more emails a day asking for your money in support of some good cause. Needless to say the senders are aware that they are just one of many clogging the nation’s in-boxes, so they try hard to have a subject line that attracts.
This rant is about one particular strategy used to draw views and eventually pry money from the wallets of dedicated Democrats that I find particularly galling: the Republican glorification strategy.
Today, for instance, I got an email from the Vote By Mail Pac, an entity about which I know nothing. Some of these PACs are surely just money vacuums. (See, e.g., the Lincoln Project). But, I am straying from the main point of my rant.
This particular email tells me that “Senator Romney is stepping Up!”, adding in parentheses “Do you Agree?”. Reading further we are told that we should sign a statement so that we can show “MASSIVE” ( all-caps in original) public support for Romney’s “brave” stance of calling a spade a spade, for this is what he had to say about the insurrection:
What happened was a violent effort … It was an insurrection against the constitution.
I have gotten tons of similar emails praising Liz Cheney’s courage, which also consists of stating the obvious. Somehow, these people expect to pry money from me using this strategy, and judging by its ubiquity, it must work on a lot of people.
I’m old enough to remember sitting through Watergate. Back in those days a Republican who stated the obvious about Richard Nixon’s criminality was not cited for bravery. They were, once the evidence was in, merely average Republicans. It was more or less expected that they would acknowledge his criminality. After all, he resigned precisely because Republican Senators told him he was doomed. It was Republicans like Sandman, the Congressman from New Jersey who made a jackass of himself defending Nixon on the judiciary committee, who were singled out for scorn and derision.
Romney, especially, gets no credit for bravery. His is a safe seat. You can make an argument that Cheney’s seat is now in peril, but if she loses she will spend the rest of her life as a highly paid commentator on MSNBC or CNN, and she is fully aware of that fact.
What further pisses me off about this type of thing is the fact that the brave Republicans we are supposed to love are unalterably opposed to doing anything to make sure that this sort of thing truly never happens again. That can be avoided only by maintaining the Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate, and that can be accomplished only if people are allowed to vote. The Vote by Mail PAC tells me it is “working day and night to ensure every American has easy access to vote by mail”. How many days or nights has Romney worked to ensure those rights? The answer, in a very round number, is none. Maybe I’ll give some Republicans credit for something if they actually do the right thing, instead of merely saying the right (and always obvious) thing.
This rant is officially over. I know it’s not much, but it’s the best I can do.
