Establishment Republicans are on the war path. They are determined, in unison with “woke” Democrats, to get rid of Donald Trump come November. In 2019, a number of these Republicans formed the so-called “Lincoln Project,” an organized effort to trash Trump and throw support behind Joe Biden, thus once again demonstrating there is very little difference between establishment Republicans and Democrats.
On June 27, Darth Vader of the neocons, former vice president and war criminal Dick Cheney, joined the establishment “resistance” to the reelection of Trump.
Dick Cheney…. welcome to the resistance. pic.twitter.com/gez5481WpF
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 26, 2020
The Lincoln Project says it will work to defeat Trump and restore the Constitution. If the latter is true, why the hell did Republicans welcome Constitution-buster Cheney to the party? In addition to filling the Pentagon with Israel-first neocons and kick-starting the disastrous Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Cheney claimed special powers under the unitary executive, a theory that “asserts that all executive authority must be in the President’s hands, without exception.”
In addition, Cheney proclaimed the VP office to be a “fourth branch” of the state that does not answer to the American people.
“Cheney has tried to increase executive power with a series of bold actions — some so audacious that even conservatives on the Supreme Court sympathetic to Cheney’s view have rejected them as overreaching,” Dana Milbank wrote in 2004 for the establishment newspaper The Washington Post. “Many of the restraints on executive authority — the War Powers act, anti-impoundment legislation, the legislative veto and the independent counsel statute — have already disappeared or become insignificant.”
The Lincoln Project “is holding accountable those who would violate their oaths to the Constitution and would put others before Americans,” according to its website.
Let’s. Go. Joe. pic.twitter.com/338AECInep
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 26, 2020
Sadly, Cheney was never held to account for his constitutional violations, most notably engineering a war behind the back of Congress and the American people, a war predicated on lies and falsification. His inclusion makes a mockery of the Lincoln Project’s supposed principles:
Our many policy differences with national Democrats remain. However, the priority for all patriotic Americans must be a shared fidelity to the Constitution and a commitment to defeat those candidates who have abandoned their constitutional oaths, regardless of party. Electing Democrats who support the Constitution over Republicans who do not is a worthy effort.
The “shared fidelity to the Constitution” does not apply to Cheney and his neocon coconspirators.
It is interesting anti-Trump Republicans decided to use Abraham Lincoln as a mascot. He was a serial violator of the Constitution. “Lincoln took it upon himself to arbitrarily redefine treason, not by amending the Constitution, but by using brute military force,” writes Thomas DiLorenzo.
His new definition was any criticism of himself, his administration, and his policies. He illegally suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus (illegal according to this own attorney general, Robert Bates) and had the military arrest and imprison without due process tens of thousands of Northern-state citizens, including newspaper editors, the Maryland legislature, the mayor of Baltimore, the grandson of Francis Scott Key who was a Baltimore newspaper editor, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, his chief critic in the US Congress, and essentially anyone overheard criticizing the government.
So much for the First Amendment and habeas corpus.
The establishment deals in illusion and deception. The real history of Lincoln — his racism, his connection to big business, railroad magnates, and vested interests of the day, his indifference to the suffering his war created — is buried under the Lincoln Myth, a fictional story of a brave man who emancipated and freed the slaves (never mentioned: he wanted to deport former slaves).
President Abraham Lincoln led the United States through its bloodiest, most divisive and most decisive period of our history. He fought not because he wanted to, but because he knew the dual goals of preserving the Union and the end of slavery would be achieved only through armed conflict.
Left out of this lopsided patriotism is the right of the people to secede from a corrupt central government and exercise the right of self-determination, and the right of a people to establish their own government, as put forth in the Declaration of Independence.
Republicans and Democrats no longer believe in constitutional principles and law. They insist the United States is a democracy, not a constitutionally limited republic as originally envisioned. In a democracy, the state propagandizes the people in order to gain consensus.
“President Donald Trump and those who sign onto Trumpism are a clear and present danger to the Constitution and our Republic,” the Lincoln Project argues. “Only defeating so polarizing a character as Trump will allow the country to heal its political and psychological wounds and allow for a new, better path forward for all Americans.”
Trump was elected in the mistaken belief he would punish the corporate and bankster swamp creatures and return America to the rule of law. He promised to end the illegal and immoral wars. Trump said he would audit the Federal Reserve. He did none of these things and, quite frankly, his inability to do anything but pump up his own grotesque and narcissistic ego was obvious during and well before the campaign.
77-year old Joe Biden is the perfect candidate for the establishment. His encroaching dementia and ignorance of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, along with his inappropriate behavior around children and women, are not a problem for the ruling elite.
Not even his threat to have the Obama administration pull a billion dollars in loan guarantees to Ukraine if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin — at the time investigating Biden’s son, Hunter, for corrupt dealings while at the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings — will derail the Biden trajectory to the White House.
The primary objective is the removal of Donald Trump, a grossly incompetent and mentally deranged hotel magnate and reality TV host naively elected to the presidency by Americans sick and tired of government corruption. In doing so, both sides of the one-sided corporate establishment political class are pushing for an equally incompetent and flawed candidate to defeat Trump.
But this does not matter so long as Joe can still read a teleprompter.
Reprinted with author’s permission from Medium.com.
