An Arizona Senator's trumpgrets

Imagine where we would be if people could have seen this coming.

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Flake doesn’t have Trumpgrets. He was a Never Trumper and still is, and even after the conventions was saying Trump should not be president.

He has Republigrets, not Trumpgrets.

Yet he’s still a Republican? Go figure.

UPDATE: And he voted for ACA repeal, so … meh.

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I most likely disagree with him on almost every matter of public policy, but I’d rather deal with an opposing party made up of people who respect the underlying structure of our democracy than the GOP we have now.

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“I was completely in favor of this bill because I’m in lockstep with the party. Now that I see how unpopular it is, I’ve decided to change my mind because of my … well, let’s call it integrity?”

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Would that be Texas or Florida?

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As others have stated he was a never Trumper from the get-go So like many of us, he thought boat anchor Trump was going sink the party from the beginning. It’s just that most of us thought that would happen in the general election, not slowly and painfully over the next couple of years.

At some level, I think that many Republican politicians didn’t REALLY realize just how many of their voters just don’t really care about the policies that that the party espouses, just a deep “anti-liberal” tribal identity. The Republicans sometimes accuse the Democrats of playing “identity politics,” and they’re right. But the Republicans have been playing that game better and for longer, and are even more dependent on it.

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I honestly don’t know why the (ever dwindling) moderate Republicans don’t pull off the Blue Dog Democrats and build a Center-right party.

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given the way the republican party has dived headlong into being the party of needless cruelty it isn’t a hard problem to map them to evil.

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They can call it The Milquetoast Party.

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Yes. That’s why I said that it is approximate or incendiary, rather than wrong.

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Gosh if only Flake held some kind of elected office where he could actually do something about this.

But I guess writing editorials is just the very best he can manage.

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Abso-fucking-lutely. Flake is saying all the right things – and, contrary to what some people are saying, it doesn’t appear to be because it’s to his political advantage; he’s already probably the most vulnerable Republican in the Senate, and the more he speaks out against Trump the likelier he is to lose a primary – but he’s still voting in lockstep with Trump’s agenda. (So far. He IS working on an immigration bill that sounds like a rebuke to Trump, so good for him on that.)

I’m registered independent. I intend to vote for Flake in the primary, against whatever lunatic Trump gets to run against him. But, as much as I respect the things he’s saying (plus he saved Scalise’s life), I still find his policy positions disgusting, and just can’t see any circumstance where I would vote for him in the general.

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this, very much this.

i won’t deny the courage it takes for a republican officeholder to publish an essay like this under his own name but he has had all kinds of chances to use his office and his votes to work against the influence of 45, chances he has not availed himself of so far.

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Flake seems like someone I could not stand or stand for. That said, this was great:

So as I layered in my defense mechanisms, I even found myself saying things like, “If I took the time to respond to every presiden­tial tweet, there would be little time for anything else.” Given the volume and velocity of tweets from both the Trump campaign and then the White House, this was certainly true. But it was also a monumental dodge. It would be like Noah saying, “If I spent all my time obsessing about the coming flood, there would be little time for anything else.” At a certain point, if one is being honest, the flood becomes the thing that is most worthy of attention. At a certain point, it might be time to build an ark.

One thing my regular anti-Trump reading is missing is a good bible analogy.

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Because they would lose. For one, there are many fewer Blue Dog Democrats who think the Dems are too liberal – because the Dems are not liberal. They have some liberal members, but when the ACA – a Heritage Foundation health care plan – is the best your party can do with 60 Senators and a massive lock on the House, you are not a liberal party.

What these moderate Republicans should do is join the Democrats, because then it would be a center-right party.

And, yes, I am a Democrat.

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I’m going to guess it’s because Gary Johnson got 3% of the vote. And that’s not just because he made a couple of embarrassing blunders (after all, look at the guy who won); the deck is stacked against third parties, in everything from entrenched donors to the first-past-the-post electoral system. Switching to a third party is risky, and the only way people are going to do it is if it becomes less risky than staying in the party they’re in.

After all, for as much discord as there is in the Republican Party, they sure haven’t had any trouble winning elections.

Once that changes? Hard to say. I don’t think the wholesale collapse of the party is out of the question. But I also never thought Trump would make it through the primary, let alone the general. I’ve got a poor track record at predicting just how toxic the GOP has to get before voters won’t support it any longer.

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…It says something about how corroded our politics have become that mere evidence of sanity is considered “all the right things.”

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Plus, most of the blue dogs were voted out in 2010. I absolutely agree that the Democratic Party is not truly liberal, but it’s more liberal than it was under Bush.

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Basically:

Look! The man didn’t kick a puppy, let’s give him the paragon of virtue award!

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…Or the type of kidnapper that releases the prisoner once they get the ransom…so he can be reasoned with.

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