My Republican fellow citizens, the time has come to finally choose for yourself between two mutually exclusive views of reality.
The first is that there was a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election from Trump, presumably involving hundreds of state and local election officials and workers, voting machine manufacturers and contractors, with 60+ judges, many Republican or even Trump-appointed, inexplicably disregarding evidence of fraud in courts around the country. (And that despite successfully stealing the election for Biden, Democrats lost seats in the House, and failed to avoid Senate runoffs in Georgia.)
That there was a conspiracy to accuse the Trump campaign of involvement with the Russian effort to influence the election, and that the 140+ contacts with Russian nationals by Trump and 18 of his associates (which included sharing internal campaign polling data) were innocuous. And that the investigation into those contacts, led by a Republican former FBI director (which indicted and convicted 7 of those associates) was baseless.
That Trump didn't withhold military aid to Ukraine to force an investigation into a domestic political rival, or threaten a Republican Georgia election official with prosecution if he didn't falsify votes to change the outcome of an election (transcripts and tapes of these conversations notwithstanding).
That former President Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States and was able to run for president only thanks to a conspiracy to falsify his early history in Hawaii and Washington state, presumably involving state officials, schoolteachers and friends, dating all the way back to a fake birth announcement placed in a Honolulu newspaper in 1961.
The second view is that Donald Trump was simply lying to you all along. Not spinning, shading, or selectively arguing the truth--which all public figures do--but outright lying to your face about nearly everything, big (Covid, election fraud ) and small (his inauguration crowd, his wealth).
He told you things that felt good to hear, to feed his ego with your approval, and to benefit himself financially and politically. He never cared about you, or any part of his constituency--rich or poor--or the country, or even the Republican party.
To be healthy, American politics needs a viable, national conservative party made up of reality-based, true conservatives arguing in good faith for a principled agenda, not crackpot conspiracy-weaving Confederate cultists devoted to one individual. Last week clearly illustrated the predictable consequences of trying to have it both ways. The time has come to make a choice.
Published in the Stony Brook Village Times Herald January 14, 2021:
