GOP should follow Goldwater’s example
It was 44 years ago this week that Republican icon Barry Goldwater, tired of the limitless mendacity of Richard Nixon and his men, decided that enough was enough, and that the nation took precedence over the Republican Party.
“There are only so many lies you can take,” said the Arizona senator, “and now there has been one too many. Nixon should get his (posterior) out of the White House — today.” Nixon resigned the presidency days later.
There does not seem to be any number of lies that will rouse today’s Republican leaders from their timidity, or outright silence, when it comes to Donald Trump. Political careers built on professions of concern about integrity, law enforcement and protecting America from hostile foreign powers seeking to harm us have been exposed as phony.
How a grand old political party came to discredit itself will doubtless be fodder for historians for years to come. For the moment, the indulgence of open dishonesty on the part of the Trump White House has passed from puzzling to simply amazing.
The latest developments center on the famous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and a Russian lawyer linked to the Kremlin who had promised the Trump campaign “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. The meeting occurred at a time when Kremlin agents were busy stealing tens of thousands of emails from Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee computers and arranging to release them in order to elect Donald Trump president, in accordance with Vladimir Putin’s wishes. When informed that the meeting’s purpose was to provide ammunition that the Russians promised would help Trump by hurting Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. responded, “I love it.”
The meeting between the Russians and Trump’s closest advisers, of course, constituted collusion. Not “NO COLLUSION,” but “yes, collusion.” Trump, who as candidate publicly called for Russian operatives to “find” Clinton’s emails at the very time those operatives were hacking Americans’ computers to do just that, denies that he knew his son, sonin-law and campaign manager were meeting with, or ever had met, the Russians.
This denial has never survived any sort of smell test for anyone whose nose was functioning even intermittently. Not only was it obviously improbable, but we now know that right after Trump Jr. set up the meeting he called someone with a blocked telephone number, whom he for some reason refused to identify. Lo and behold, it turns out his father’s telephone number is blocked, which struck many as the darndest coincidence.
It emerges that Trump’s longtime consigliere, Michael Cohen, is prepared to testify that he was present when Trump’s son told him that the Russian meeting had been scheduled. This would mean — here comes the shocker — that the president has been lying about this meeting. And why would he feel the need to do that if not to try to cover up the applicability of the “c” word?
Not a bad question. Predictably, the president, who has repeatedly vouched for Cohen’s honesty, has now changed his mind, and has decided that Cohen is “a pathological liar.” The expression “pot calling the kettle black” does not do justice to this president’s attack on another person’s credibility.
This is the same fellow who has denied knowing anything about the hush money payments made on his behalf to keep his sexual affairs secret in order to influence a presidential election. As for what the hush money was being spent to keep hushed, or what his fixer was attempting to fix, he claims ignorance — even though he is on tape discussing it.
“There are only so many lies you can take,” Barry Goldwater said when he had had enough of the damage Richard Nixon’s dishonesty was doing to our country. One wonders when — if ever — today’s Republican leaders will decide that they, too, have finally had enough.