Hypocrisy — Republican style
It has been truly said that hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue, and few people pay more compliments to virtue by practicing it less than members of the Republican Party.
Consider gas prices. Those members of the Republican Party who aren’t overtly in favour of fascistic regimes agree with the need to place sanctions on the import of Russian crude oil — even if it means higher prices at the pump. They even boast about how patriotic it makes them for doing something so obvious. Once that’s done they blame President Joe Biden for those very same higher prices that result because of those sanctions, which is like setting fire to your own house and then blaming your next door neighbour because your house is on fire.
I have never seen a group of people so willing to cause more trouble just so they can blame that trouble on Democrats. Even now, after all the war crimes he’s committed, some Republicans and Republican commentators are still prepared to carry water for Vladimir Putin. But then I suppose when you’re a hypocrite, special rules apply.
Not content to stop there, Republicans then behave as if the Green New Deal, a program designed to get America off this ridiculous cycle of fossil fuel addiction, was designed by Satan. “Green New Deal” has become a Republican trigger phrase, like critical race theory or cancel culture. They’re words that are sputtered with red-faced outrage without understanding. Their opposition is so bankrupt they must resort to easily-disproved absurdities such as the notion that windmills are noisy (they’re not) and that noise causes cancer (it doesn’t).
It’s not difficult to trace Republican antipathies. They love Putin because their lord and master Donald Trump loves Putin. Trump’s 2018 Helsinki betrayal, when he sided with Putin and insisted that 17 of America’s security services including the FBI, CIA, NSA and Department of Homeland Security were wrong when they said that Russia interfered with the 2016 election, is a case in point. That remains one of the most shameful days in American history, because it proved Republicans were prepared to gaslight the American people to save Donald Trump’s ego. And it remains true to this day. The worst of them, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, are happy to vilify Ukraine and glorify Putin even as Ukrainian civilians are being murdered by Putin.
But the fact remains, Putin did his best to hack and rig the 2016 election in Trump’s favor, and he tried to do the same again in 2020, and Republicans are grateful to him on that account. Republicans are soft on Putin because this evil he did was beneficial to Trump. Meanwhile, Republicans hate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy because he refused to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden. Trump used the threat to cut off aid to Zelensky in a failed effort to extort cooperation from him, which of course got Trump impeached the first time. Trump got impeached the second time because he tried to complete Putin’s effort to rig the 2020 election.
Much of the ugliness that is the latter-day Republican Party tracks back to their bizarre love for Vladimir Putin, caused by their cult-like devotion to Donald Trump. It’s an insane betrayal motivated by their weird devotion and characterised by jaw-dropping hypocrisy. Never in the field of human conflict was so much damage done to so many by so few. Truly, Republican hypocrisy is an ugly relic of these dangerous times, an artefact of how utterly sick and bereft of humanity they have become. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.