How A Republican Senator “Thinks”

Imagine that you are a Republican Senator. I know it’s hard, but try. Here’s a tip – turn your brain off for a few minutes, not so it’s numb, just so it’s dumb.

All through school, you ran for every office you could. You are still upset that they scheduled your kindergarten class Presidential acceptance speech during nap time, but maybe it was good practice for the thousands of snoozers you’ve delivered since. When you were just just ten years old, Ronald Reagan inspired you to be a Republican because, after all, his ideas appealed to ten-year olds. You founded a Dan Quayle Fan Club in high school because, as founder, you could be the leader. In college, you joined every organization that had very few members. That way, it was easier to get yourself chosen their leader. When you were President of the College Temperance League, for example, it didn’t get you laid, but the title looked good on your resume.

And now you have the job of your dreams, except, of course, the big one – God, or, as they call it in D.C., “POTUS.” But, now you are being asked to do something you never dreamed you would ever have to do. You have to sit in judgment of the man who is treated like a god by the people who gave you this dream job in the first place.  

You know what the right thing to do is. You know what that man did. You heard him for months undermining the integrity of the most fundamental mechanism of our American government. And then, when all that undermining evolved into roiling rage, he egged it on, he urged it forward, he lit the fuse. That man not only almost killed our democracy, in his name, his marauders almost killed you. He is not only as guilty as sin, he is guilty of sin.

But, doing the right thing? That has never been part of your political calculus. The right thing is whatever is  necessary for you to keep your job and enable you to get a better one. You didn’t really believe in temperance in college when you were President of that fucking League. You had to get drunk before those meetings just to get yourself through them. 

Oh, you’ll say that you will listen to the evidence, as if you don’t know what the evidence is.  You lived through it. You are both the juror and the victim. It would be like a rape trial where the rape victim is on the jury and, while staring at the man who raped her, she says, “Well, I’ll have to hear the evidence first.” And worse, she doesn’t even mean it – she knows that she is going to acquit the guy regardless of the evidence.

So, you know what you are going to do. Will you be able to live with yourself when you do it? Of course, you will. There are other things you could do that you would lose sleep over. The biggest one would be doing something that would undo all the bullshit you’ve gone through to get to where you are.  

Will you consider yourself immoral? Hardly. You can’t think of yourself as immoral unless you actually have morals to begin with.

And so, your vote will be Not Guilty. For you, this is an easy one.