Splitsville NEITHER TRUTH NOR CONSEQUENCES

The Peppy, Perky Newsletter for Fans of THE SPLIT

Number 32 NEITHER TRUTH NOR CONSEQUENCES

Just when you thought you’d heard it all…

Just when you thought that no Republican could ever shock you again…

Just when you thought no one could top Donald Trump for breezily sociopathic comments about a devastating tragedy…

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Texas Governor Gregg Abbott.

As quoted in Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Substack, “Letter From an American,” we read this, as our jaws hit the floor with an audible thump:

One hundred and eleven people are dead and more than 160 are still missing in Texas after Friday’s tragic flood.

​​“‘[W]ho’s to blame?’” Texas governor Greg Abbott repeated back to a reporter. “That’s the word choice of losers.”

“Every football team makes mistakes,” he continued, referring to Texas’s popular sport. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who’s to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, ‘Don’t worry about it, ma’am, we’ve got this.’”

In the New York Times’ account, Abbott adds, “We’re going to make sure that we go score again, that we win this game.”

Predictably, other Texas pols (Chip Roy; Ted Cruz, about whom The Onion posted the hed “Vacationing is How I Grieve”) chimed in with the usual now-is-not-the-time-to-deal-with-these-failures chorus, perfected over decades of thinking and praying after school shootings (and before going on to do nothing to mitigate them). But give Abbott credit. It takes a certain kind of man to call the grieving parents of killed or missing children (or reporters asking questions on their behalf) “losers,” to liken this ongoing nightmare of death and uncertainty to a “game” that can be won, and even to suggest that winning teams don’t analyze failures and apportion blame in order to improve their performance.

Not that anyone could have prevented the downpour that caused the flash flood. (Although don’t tell Marjorie Taylor Greene that. She is not only certain that people can control and are controlling the weather, she has introduced a bill making it a felony.) But there’s no doubt that the people of Central Texas could have been more adequately warned, and some lives could have been saved, had not Trump and Elon Musk and DOGE (AKA “Elmo and the Incels”) not taken a hatchet to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the National Weather Service. All of these agencies have been reduced to skeleton crews just as hurricane season has gotten under way, so look for more unnecessary suffering and death thanks to Republican policies.

This painful, blatant illustration of the fatal danger of dismantling the modern world (solely to save money and transfer it to billionaires) comes mere months after Musk’s rampage, and on the very same day that Trump signed his disastrous, government-crippling budget bill into law. The timing is exquisite. It’s enough (well, almost enough) to make one believe in God—i.e., in the angry Yahweh of the Old Testament, who declares, “Behold, assholes. This is, and will continue to be, the result of your folly.”

However, it’s more than enough to make one believe that yet another way the US is Splitsville—our term for a condition in which two (or more) “nations” occupy the same geo-political whosis—is, one part of the country values honesty and responsibility, and the other part doesn’t.

Yes, honesty. “What?” some with-it hepcats will sneer. “That quaint old shopworn thing?” We know. Expecting honesty from most politicians is like expecting air-conditioned comfort in Hell. And as for expecting it during a Trump administration—as the French say, “Bitches, please.”

Trump, as every schoolchild knows, is a pathological liar, and he has cast his administration with people who lie as shamelessly as he does. Remember Sean “Spicey” Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary who, on the very first day Trump was in office in 2017, came out and told the press that Trump’s visibly-small crowd was the biggest inauguration throng ever? You could feel the press’s incredulity ten miles away. And yes, it took more than two years for the Washington Post and the New York Times to drum up the courage to use the word “lie.” But they finally found the nerve to say that word. By the end of Trump’s term, the Post had documented more than 30,000 lies told by Trump. (We did the math. Counting weekends and holidays, 30,000 lies over four years averages out to 20.5 lies a day. How many lies do you tell each day? No more than four or five, right?)

Everybody knows this. By now the question has become, not “Is Trump lying?” but “Of course Trump is lying. But does he believe the lie?” In any case, when Trump’s current press secretary (Karoline Leavitt, who is little more than Sean Spicer in a blonde wig) openly, sunnily lies, we’re indignant and outraged, but we’re not surprised.

But, in thinking about lying as a sin, or a crime, or a violation of some social contract, maybe we’re thinking about it all wrong. Maybe, to Republicans, lying isn’t some necessary evil, because, while endlessly necessary, to them it isn’t evil at all.

We suggest that Republicans—both those in office, and many rank-and-file constituents—view politics the way most people view war, as a context exempt from the rules of conventional morality. In combat, the normal standards of legality and decency are suspended; it becomes, not only acceptable, but praiseworthy, to kill people, as long as they’re enemy people. Similarly, maybe, to Republicans, being in politics not only allows, but requires, them to lie. The normal rules of morality and Judeo-Christian ethics are irrelevant. What you do and say in the pursuit of political power can’t be held against you as regards your character.

So when these people who make a habit of flaunting their Christianity (e.g., Leavitt, JD “Juvenile Delinquent” Vance, and Pious Mike Johnson) merrily go about violating the Eighth Commandment, you and we may think it’s rank hypocrisy, but they don’t. To them, it’s not real life; it’s politics. In their minds—and in whatever it is they possess for souls—they’re no more committing a sin than they would be committing assault by tackling someone in a game of football.

Speaking of football brings us back to Greg Abbott, which brings us to the idea of responsibility. Everyone remembers Trump, when asked if he took responsibility for his administration’s bumbling effort to test the public for the Covid virus, saying, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” That may have been the one honest thing he said in his first term. He didn’t say, “It wasn’t my responsibility.” He just said that he didn’t accept it. Because he never does. He physically, psychologically, and emotionally can’t. If he tried to, he would have what used to be called a “nervous breakdown.” (We would pay good money to watch that, but we’re not holding our breath.)

Ditto Abbott, by calling those asking whom to blame for the flood disaster “losers.” Republicans never, ever take responsibility for the results of their policies—which is hardly surprising, since their policies are terrible for everyone except the rich and the religiously insane. This means they’ve had a lot of practice evading responsibility. They blame Biden, or Obama, or “circumstances,” or “woke” culture, or immigrants, or “elites.” (They also engage in the inverse of this, by taking credit for things they opposed, that Democrats nonetheless managed to implement, and that yield good results.)

This evasion of responsibility—which will be turbocharged over the next few years as the disastrous effects of the hideous GOP budget bill become more and more obvious—is also a kind of lying. Instead of saying “X is true,” when it isn’t, they say “Y isn’t true,” when it is. And the falseness of it, the make-up-your-own-reality brazenness of it, dovetails nicely with the lunatic beliefs of the MAGA cult, with its posters of Trump-as-superhero and its “DADDY” t-shirts.

Of course there’s a difference between witting dishonesty, mental dysfunction, and ordinary, garden-variety stupidity. No problem—the GOP wants ‘em all! They’re a big-tent party! As long as you’re hostile to, or oblivious of, the truth you’re invited into that big tent.

And if the incompetents who set it up fail to anchor it properly, and it blows away in the next hurricane, killing hundreds, don’t blame them. It’s Biden’s fault.