The Canadian rock group Rush was never one of Curmie’s favorites. He didn’t dislike them, but there are no Rush CDs on Curmie’s shelf, nor any of their songs on his Spotify “starred” list. Their stuff seems to be a favorite of the local classic rock station, however: enough so that it’s not unlikely that one of their songs will show up on the car radio during Curmie’s commute.
And so it is that one of the group’s better songs in Curmie’s opinion was fresh in his mind when he read about Republican Congresscritters who were so terrified of the Tangerine Tribble that they capitulated to his every perverse idea, lest (OMG, the horror!) they be faced with a primary challenge. The song, as you may well have already surmised, is “Free Will.” It has a two-stanza chorus, the first of which follows:
You can choose a ready guide
In some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide
You still have made a choice
Yes, inaction is a choice, especially when it’s your job to act. Whereas Curmie has no doubt that the POTUS is a petty, vindictive, and (of course) powerful little fecal accretion, he can muster precisely zero sympathy for these sniveling toadies. They are sworn to preserve the Constitution, to place the welfare of the nation foremost in their list of priorities. They’re now admitting that they didn’t do that.
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| Dave Trott: “retired" Congresscritter |
Over seventy years ago, at the Nuremberg trials, some defendants argued that they were just following orders: “Befehl ist Befehl” (an order is an order). Many of these ex-military officers would literally have been risking their lives had they disobeyed an order… and yet the so-called Nuremberg Defense was rejected except as a mitigating factor in the punishment phase.
The fact that the fear is of a primary challenge rather than a general election loss is also telling: they come from safe, quite possibly gerrymandered, districts. They are the product of corruption, and they chose not to bite the hand that feeds… until that same iniquitous system might be used against them, of course.
This little posse of whiners could have actually done some good. They could have represented the ideals of the country and of their party. They could have prevented at least part of the Trumpster Fire of incompetence, cronyism, and venality we as a nation have suffered of late. But no. They were concerned about their “careers.” Dancing attendance on a petulant, mendacious and dim-witted wannabe dictator is a career? What would being an amoral drudge look like, then?
Maybe Curmie fails to understand because he’s publicly voted in the minority, often alone, more times than he can count. He was the sole “nay” in a roomful of over 200 “yeas” on one occasion… at least a dozen people told him that if “[they’d] known someone else was going to object, [they] would have, too.” Curmie doesn’t work that way. Compromise and consensus are good things, but they aren’t divine. If it’s the best we can do and it’s acceptable even if flawed, OK. But fatally flawed is fatally flawed… and as we can see in the coronavirus response, sometimes the word “fatally” is literal.
Curmie does understand, though, that sometimes it’s hard to stand up to authority, to speak truth to power. There are certainly moments when deciding a particular hill isn’t worth dying on is a function more of pragmatism than of cowardice. Curmie has been making a lot of those decisions lately, mostly as his white liberal friends indulge in orgies of self-flagellating virtue signaling. But most of the time another factor is that most of us never get any real say in how policy is decided. There’s “input,” which if it’s other than sycophancy, is promptly ignored, and which is likely to lead to ostracism and possibly exile from even the insignificant pockets of political power to which we’d previously had access. But these GOP pols had a vote. They could have at least been true to their own ideals. They chose instead to meekly bow to the schoolyard bully.
Moreover, presumably these are people who could be successful in other fields—in business and law, mostly, both of which professions pay better than the Congresscritter’s salary. There really are worse fates than not being in Congress. “Retiring,” of course, is the chicken’s way out. Um, “If I was still there and speaking out against the president, what would happen to me?” Seriously? Did you think you were going to be disappeared à la the KGB? Speak your truth. But, no. You don’t actually stand for anything. Just like your colleagues in the Senate who could have said “no” to the obviously unqualified Bret Kavanaugh, who could have examined the evidence in the McConnell-engineered farce that was the impeachment trial, who could have insisted on recognizing the threat posed by COVID-19 once it was manifest to all and sundry: you have no political philosophy other than your own short-term interest.
You are contemptible. Not as bad as Trump, but neither is Sauron.
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