Hot Takes on Senate Impeachment Vote: Part 2
Dinesh D’Souza, a pseudo-intellectual phony-baloney who has spent the past several years pushing various commercial, Republican-friendly products as though they were important theories, throws his two cents onto the pile of Trumpkin funny money regarding Mitt Romney’s infamous vote heard round the world:
Who is the more vindictive one? It’s close, but I vote for @MittRomney over Nancy Pelosi because Romney is knifing his own team in the back. There is no excuse for this. The @UtahGOP needs to hold him accountable
— Dinesh D’Souza (@DineshDSouza) February 5, 2020
What drivel. “Romney is knifing his own team in the back.”
First of all, the “my team right or wrong” pragmatism D’Souza is implicitly advocating here is exactly the leading practical mechanism of America’s political devolution.
Secondly, how is making a public vote on an open-vote issue, after days of making public (and presumably private) statements indicating one’s disapproval of your “team’s” behavior and rhetoric, an example of knifing your team in the back? If his knife landed in their back, it is only because they kept turning away from him while he pleaded with them to listen to what he was saying.
If the essence and meaning of this or any such senate vote is merely to sign your name on the position paper written by the party leadership, then why even have votes? Why not just say, “Democrats for, Republicans against”? What’s the point of all these weeks of public debate and discussion and preliminary votes and legal arguments, if at the end of the day, anyone who chooses to follow his conscience over his party leadership’s decision is to be branded a backstabber?
Oscar Wilde said, “True friends stab you in the front.” And this implies that friendship is not determined by whether a person agrees with you about everything, but rather by whether the person is prepared to look you in the eye and say, “I don’t like what you are becoming,” rather than whisper it behind your back. That harsh look in the eye, it seems to me, is exactly what Romney has given his long-time friends in the GOP with this vote. The reactions he is getting from many of them only serve to indicate that he was right to express this disapproval. They are proving him right.
“There is no excuse for this,” whines D’Souza. Right — for speaking and voting as an independent man, rather than an establishment “team player.” There may be no excuse, but there is a reason, a reason career climbers like D’Souza would never understand: dignity.
“The Utah GOP needs to hold him accountable,” cries D’Souza. As usual, the response of partisan cowards is to beg their friends to gang up on that lone outcast and beat him up. Trump himself fosters this attitude in his sycophants, since his every tweet and rally is nothing but a variation on the same theme: please protect me from the big bad wolf, because I don’t have the courage to stand up for myself. Witness Tuesday’s state of the union stage production, pure conservative radio fan pandering, begging for his supporters to circle around and beat up those bad Pelosis who are mean to him.
Lily-livered followers, the whole bunch of them.
