The great purge of the Republican party begins.

Posted by Pointman on September 9, 2017 · 42 Comments 

I’m sure you’re all familiar with the story of the Gordian knot and how Alexander solved the problem by cleaving straight through it with a sword rather than attempting to unpick the knot and failing in that attempt as reputedly so many others before him had done. It’s one of those clever Greek myths of antiquity which over the centuries have added to the increasingly bigger than life reputation of Alexander, but it’s almost certainly a complete fabrication.

A nice one, but there you go.

In real life, complex problems only rarely have such simple solutions. The massive knot has to be approached and studied. You untangle the first bit of it and having made that small bit of progress, you look for the next logical bit to unravel and you keep doing that patient thing over and over again until there is nothing left of your particular Gordian knot.

While you’re busy untangling it bit by bit, you must never lose sight of the grand objective. That’s the fundamental difference between a workman-like tactician who’s totally engaged and a gifted strategist who never takes his eye off the prize.

It’s a bonus of old age that you realise there are no quick fixes to systemic problems. It’s called wisdom and you can only acquire it by surviving both your youthful excesses and considering carefully the disastrous mistakes you’d made in it. Like the Gordian knot, Trump is unravelling the swamp that is Washington and its political establishment one tangle at a time. I’ll freely admit that when I first saw he’d entered the presidential race, I barely looked at him.

The song bring on the clowns, as Judy Collins a songstress of my retiring generation made famous, seemed appropriate. However, as I watched the clown buzzsaw his way through the other cardboard cut out GOP candidates in the primaries, it slowly dawned on me that he wasn’t the clown, that crown belonged to his clueless republican opponents as he dispatched them one by one.

I’ll freely admit my pride was wounded. I’m not used to being fooled like that – by anybody. From then on, I watched him like a bloody hawk.

He has never since disappointed as I’ve watched his moves one by one striking home. A quick dagger thrust is always seen and reacted to immediately by reflex, but despite appearances, that’s not really his style. The slow steady winkle through a chink in the armour is rarely noticed until the point of the stiletto is already scraping against the bone of your spinal column. By then, it’s way too late. You’re gone, history.

If you still simply refuse to see there’s an intellect and planner there who’s been at work all along, you’re on your own. He’s going to keep rocking your world for the next three years and I suspect health allowing, the next four after that.

One by one, he took out all his enemies except for the one whose time hadn’t quite arrived. The competitors for the Republican nomination were relatively easy. Realistically, a collection of pricks whose name you’d be challenged to remember five minutes after you’d shook hands with them. After that, Hillary Clinton, possibly the most odious candidate in American political history, fell by the wayside despite the most massive and partisan mainstream media support also in American history.

Her gift to him is that she like Barack Obama simply won’t go away. Like a particularly penicillin-resistant strain of gonorrhea, she insists on hanging around the political landscape generating all the wrong headlines like some failed whingeing albatross permanently nailed around the neck of a Democrat party that’s already in crisis and would simply like both of them to fuck off into obscurity, just so they can start some sort of reconstruction from the shattered remnants of last year’s electoral disaster.

She’s a headline hogging reminder of the systemic corruption of the Clinton era and the ultimate failure of the strategy of identity politics on middle America. Obama is increasingly seen as a bread head squeezing every dollar he can get out of having once been a president of the USA, but even in his case there are dark clouds on the horizon.

As various investigations pick the scabs off the Obama years and move closer to him over the bodies of his minions like Comey, Lynch and others, people are backing off that particular love affair. He’s no longer somebody the smart political operators feel they can still comfortably share some spit with.

The mainstream media have with some prodding from Trump, made themselves irrelevant to his voter demographic, who by this stage actually don’t believe a single damn word they say. He chose to concentrate his fire on CNN and has effectively destroyed that brand.

It was basic military stuff straight out of the hard charging tanker’s playbook that eventually powered George Patton eastwards across France but originally Heinz Guderain westward through the Ardennes forest and around the much vaunted Maginot line. Schwerpunkt und Aufrollen. A massively strong hard point to smash through a small area of the enemy front and then roll out either side of their now compromised linear defense. He picked out CNN and destroyed it, but he could easily change his target, as the NY Times is currently finding out.

The mainstream media is still in gas pedal stuck down to the metal mode generating fake news, fake popularity polls and fake anonymously sourced bollocks stories which people routinely skim past. The reality is the beast they despise so much is more popular than ever with the people who live an everyday life outside the beautiful cherubims of a media land they now ignore. The media is safely ensconced in their own self-wanking echo chamber with an occasional cri de coeur escaping out of it into the void to die of loneliness like a motherless child nobody actually cares for.

The nature of politics these days is to be short term, and the corollary to that way of thinking is to believe that when you’ve finally made it to Washington, you can park your prematurely fat arse on a seat in congress for the next twenty-five or thirty years or so and automatically gravitate to being an elder statesman, which everybody knows means you’re not much better than a spear carrier on the political fringes of the stage while the main actors get on with the play.

One of the truly democratic things I like about the mechanics of the electoral process in America to get a new or sitting candidate into Congress is that before they can even get to do the toe to toe thing against their nominal political opponent to secure their seat, they have to run against fresh challengers from within their own party to secure that privilege.

All that shit will happen in the first quarter of next year, so we’re looking at a six month window. To defend that record, Trump is throwing your voting intentions on things like DACA that you’ll have to defend against a ground base electorate who’re steadily losing patience with your ivy league refined fence-sitting.

It is in essence an opportunity for their party’s rank and file to voice their judgement of how well their congressman has represented their concerns or more brutally, their opportunity to dump them for someone who’ll represent their true iterests with more fidelity.

With one tweet of support of your opponent, he can destroy your brilliant political career in the congressional primaries. You better vote his way in the next six months or he’ll crush you. He swung a totally unexpected budget deal with the Democrats not out of weakness but strength, and that was a warning shot across the bows of the Republican party. He’ll make deals with anyone to get his way, and if that means flushing you, he’ll do it without a second thought.

After nearly a year of acting like petulant obstructive children, the rank and file democrat congressmen desperately needed to start acting like a responsible party otherwise they quite rightly suspect they’ll get murdered in next year’s mid terms. Suddenly, everybody is getting co-operative and grown up in dealing with the everyday governance of a great nation. It’s all a bit late I think; they’re probably going to get murdered anyway.

In a very similar sense, all those republican congressmen content to ride Trump’s coat tails into power while all the time righteously whining on about “never Trump”, are looking at end of political career. You’re in Trump’s trademark zugzwang. He has you. You either plight your troth to him or you’re basically fucked. The old comfortable play safe machine politics are well and truly dead. He has neither love nor care about you and why should he? He now owns the game.

His last enemy, the last tangle to unpick, is the Republican party itself, and in the next few months using the mid terms, he’s going to put his enemies within it to the sword. He is an unforgiving type and payback time has finally rolled around.

There will be blood and make no mistake, no mercy will be shown.

©Pointman

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Zugzwang.

Find them, fix them and then destroy them.

When you attack, you hit them with everything you’ve got, and all of it at the same time.

Click for a list of other articles.

Filed under Article · Tagged with Donald Trump, Poliitics, Strategy