Wow, we're hitting rock bottom again. We cats have just read Jill McCabe's op-ed in The Washington Post — about the destruction of her husband Andrew's FBI career and the persecution of her family — and it doesn't seem possible that things could get any worse. It's scary to realize that they probably will.
Time to back up a bit and see how we got here.
The only place to lay blame for the toxicity of today's politics is directly at the feet of the Republican Party. (Okay, with a supporting role by the media, but never mind that now.) We've been furious about this for years — around 25 of them, in fact. That was when the GOP really revved up what had already been a noxious attack machine — the repulsive legacy of Lee Atwater, who started it all with the Willie Horton ad and who deservedly died of a brain tumor in 1991.
Back then, we naively thought we'd seen the worst of the politics of personal destruction. But then Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush in 1992, and FOX "News" was born a few years after that. And things have just gone so far downhill since that now we're all in the abyss.
Even after September 11, 2001, when we were all supposed to be E pluribus unum, Republicans never strayed from demonizing Democrats. (We'll never get over what they did to Vietnam vet and triple-amputee Senator Max Cleland.) We all know now how Barack Obama's victory in 2008 drove them to new levels of birtherism, obstructionism and delusion. Today, with voter suppression, the GOP is undermining democracy, but that's not all: With Donald Trump and the Russians, they're willfully committing what in our book is treason.
Jill McCabe's story of harassment and persecution by Trump and his GOP enablers is the latest chilling chapter in this awful, awful story. "Nothing can prepare you for what happens when your life is turned upside down by current events," she writes. "Nothing prepares you for conversations you have to have with your teenage children. Nothing prepares you for the news crews staking out your house, your back yard, your place of business. Nothing prepares you for the fear you feel every time you receive a package from a stranger."
Did anyone just notice that she just compared Trump and his gangsters to the Austin bomber? We did. Politics simply cannot be like this, and the only way to fix it is to kick these Republicans' asses out of office — not just in the 2018 midterms, but for good. We cats will do everything we can to make that happen. In the meantime, we HISS.
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