IF YOU HAVE ONLY ONE CHOICE, YOU AIN'T GOT A VOICE.

     Elizabeth Holmes is guilty on four counts of defrauding investors in her miraculous claim to have invented a way to read your medical tea-leaves with a single drop of blood. To be precise, she was convicted of three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to defraud investors. Her defense, that she was in an abusive relationship with her business partner Ramesh, Sunny, Balwani, did not bring her the not guilty verdict she had hoped. More will no doubt come out in his upcoming trial, stay tuned. 

     I do not wish to sound callous. Ms. Holmes may well have been abused by a larger, richer, and more powerful male partner. There would be no surprise there. In the realm of sexual relationships power is most often in favor of the male partner. There is a similar, but more subtle rubric in business relationships. Men usually have the right connections and access to the most money. That proverbial glass ceiling, may have some cracks but it has not yet collapsed to the floor. To a female who might have an idea worthy of venture capital, a male partner would be preferred to bring the rain of money. She may have felt early on that she needed a powerful ally to get her into the venture capitalists offices. With the passage of time, and when her invention began to show its weaknesses, she may have become vulnerable to intimidation by her stronger, more connected partner. The complete story will emerge slowly.

     What prompts my interest in this tidbit of business news, is the resemblance to a significant political power relationship now in play among the American political machinery. It will not surprise anybody when I say that I have a strong distaste for Republicans. At times it has only been mild disapproval (I am not old enough to have a political memory of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, or the House Unamerican Activities Commission, but I know well that history). Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W Bush were notable for pushing me into the the area of strong distaste. Donald Trump jumped the proverbial shark into pure hatred. Like a car with old tires I am spinning my wheels in that mud to this day. There are many reasons for my disapproval of the Republican Party, beyond the twice-impeached con-man who lost re-election in November of 2020. There's the comfort Republicans have shown with racial voter suppression. The cruelty and insensitivity to marginalized people. Their slavish caving to business interests (a trait shared by some, but not all Democrats as well), and their tolerance of racism and fascism. If they do not outright support some nationalist or racist sympathyies, they merely turn their backs on their duty to stand on that high moral ground which they claim only Republicans can inhabit. This trait is pretty damn close to the jurie's verdict of Elizabeth Holmes. She may have felt, as time went on, that she had no choice but to, "fake it till she makes it". Republicans, too, feel the need to keep faking it until the electorate is bullied into accepting it. But, in the end they are still guilty of perpetuating a fraud.

     Recently one of the 10 republican congressmen to vote for Donald Trumps impeachment, Fred Upton, was quoted on NPR saying, that Republicans had no choice but to back Donald Trump in his post-2020 maneuvering. It needs to be stressed that prior to 2021, Rep. Upton was considered to be a "moderate" Republican during his eighteen years of public service. While I'm tempted to harp on the state of moderatism that has fallen into disrepute among Republicans, I will save that for another day.

     No choice, fachrissake! In a nation that has carried the ball for democracy for nearly 240 years. That has led  what is often called, the Free-World", and built stronger relationships to countries that were previously led by monarchs. In the 2012 presidential primary the Republican party fielded a total of seventeen candidates. The smartest of the field, John Huntsman, a former governor of Utah and an ambassador to China who didn't need an interpreter, gained maybe 1% of the Republican primary vote, won by Mitt Romney, son of a legendary Republican governor and one-time candidate for president. Governor Huntsman's sin against the party was accepting President Obama's offer to be ambassador to China. The other fifteen contestants were what Republican governor and presidential candidate Bobby Jindahl was hoping would not lead the Republican party into being, "the party of stupid". A similar number ran in the 2016 republican presidential primary. Not one of them could claim the intellectual accomplishments of John Huntsman. Even worse, the stupidest guy of the pack that had become the nightmarish party of stupid that Gov. Jindahl had warned about, won not only the Republican nomination, but the presidency. This is the leader of the republican party that Fred Upton says with, quiet certitude, has left "no choice" for any party members who hoped to have a post-Trump future in politics. Governor Jindahl was trying to warn his colleagues, without saying so directly, that people who openly identify as racist or nationalist are by definition stupid. There may be some sharp cookies with prestigious degrees among them, but the people they wish to motivate can't tell you the difference between ferment and foment.

    If, as there appears to be no doubt, a choice does not exist, how can that be considered representative of a popular democracy? Or even a representative democracy. For those Republicans who may be confused by my attempt at logic, how is this any different from how elections are conducted in Putin's Russia? They have elections  but the choices are controlled by Putin and his oligarchs. Opponents can look forward to either a long life of misery or a short life as a candidate. Thanks to the twice-impeached former president who couldn't cheat his way to re-election, states under republican control have been hard at work creating a comfortable place for no choice. This fertile ground for petty despotism has been prepared by Republicans for some forty years. No one was prepared for the strength of the movement they created. Gerrymandering and racial voter suppression has created legislative districts where moderates are not tolerated. RINO's are primaried and voters whose politics are tepid wait to vote in the general election, leaving the most viscious Republicans in the seat of power come November, and the RINO's with no choice other than a Democrat. Given that choice, the Democrats are the better choice. One possible bright-spot on the horizon is that the no-choice party has also been working diligently to shrink the field of republican voters by rejecting prudent pandemic policies like mask wearing and vaccines.       Perhaps I am being uncharitable. Perhaps I should model to our righteous brothers and sisters on the right the moral principles of the teacher whose name only they can honor properly (how they can justify that belief is a mystery to me). I will be the liberal in this case. I will need to work overtime to find some version of human compassion for this party, to find the human compassion the Son of God taught them in his parables. In short, to find the tolerance that a  liberal would strive for, even as they sometimes fall short. Maybe I will put them on my list of humans who I might want to change my opinion of at some future date. I'll place them right behind the Arbury killers, McMichael and son, and their hapless neighbor. I think I will enjoy the schadenfreude of the once pretty good party that was captured by the three most toxic contributors to authoritarian governments, fascism, racism, and evangelical Christianity. 

     The Republican party of the first quarter of the twenty-first century is the Elizabeth Holmes of the political world. They have what they have been convinced is a pretty good idea, they have the corporate oligarchs that act as the venture capitalists of the political realm. None of this is new. That their "pretty good idea" has significant shortcomings is not new either. The presence of an abusive former president with no respect for what used to be political norms is the not-so-secret sauce that has moderate Republicans (if they still exist) cowering in fear. This man, with the orange toupee and the impoverished use of spoken language, has given voice to a significant percentage of the American populous that has previously been restrained by political norms. He talks like them, he insults like them, he bullies the same marginalized people that the racists and fascists have previously needed to do on the Q T. He has mobilized the (oh what was that term that a previous Democratic presidential candidate accurately used) the "basket of deplorables"! He has mobilized the vast basket of American deplorables to gain a lock on the party. Any republican who wishes to rise out of the primary must bury their sense of ethics, assuming there are still people of that stature in the Republican party. 

     Throughout our history our legislative leaders were represented by people who rose from mediocrity. Some of them are remembered for the brilliant feats of logic in their speeches. Some of those were even Republicans. Their memorable words were often written by a speechwriter who knew how to script those speeches to shine the best light on their bosses, but they were remembered and we credit those who spoke the words for at least mouthing noble thoughts, if not leading us to the nobility the speechwriter scripted. The legacy we brought into the twenty-first century was cobbled together by such people. Sometime after Rush Limbaugh hit the airwaves, when Fox News became the Republican  propaganda channel, when Grover  Norquist lectured that "bi-partisanship was the moral equivolant of date-rape" (and no republican admonished him) that party began to exemplify what Bobby Jindahl feared. Sarah Palin led to Michelle Bachman, Louie Gohmert, Steven King, and now we have Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boeburt, Madison Cawthorne and other examples of mental decline.  Some day, Republicans will be forced to admit their mistake. I hope I live long enough to see that day. I am afraid the final years of my life, until that day, will see the sunset of a once pretty good democracy that endeavored throughout its history to become better than it was, and sometimes succeeded.