Vote Against

Where do we start?  Nearly continuous pathological liar?  A level of ignorance that makes G.W. Bush look like Einstein?  A heart of darkness?

Two issues are enough.  Nuclear weapons.  Climate crisis.  That's the future, starting right now.

And there's the economy, wrecked beyond recognition by convulsing the health care system alone.  There are reasons stock markets went up Sunday when Comey exonerated Clinton.

We could drill down to some points not repeatedly made.  Jonathan Bernstein made two last week.  First is the level of opposition to Trump by Republicans, many of them on the basis that he is dangerously unfit.  Despite the craven congressional leaders, that opposition is extraordinarily widespread.  Bernstein suggests that if that story had been more prominent, Trump would have faded long ago.

Whether the Republican party becomes a political party again or remains a cabal supported by a cult is an open question.  But as political storm troopers for an orange-haired Hitler, let's not.

Bernstein's other point is the one I want to emphasize as motivator.  You can't let the bully win.

It's a fact of life learned many times.  But it was very significant when the electoral chances of the bully Trump was given life by the Federal Bureau of Insinuation, and all the other Republican bullies came running out of the shadow, shouting their threats.

Bullies at Trump rallies. Bullies on talk radio and Faux News.  But worse, bullies in Congress.  Bullies leading Congress.

Bernstein makes his point in terms of the survival of the Republican party: "If there's ever any hope for effective conservative government in the U.S., the first job is to reclaim the Republican Party for conservatives who actually try to do the hard work of governing. And that means standing up to the would-be True Conservatives -- whether they're at Heritage Action, on talk radio and other conservative media, or even in Congress."

That's a sophisticated reason for conservative Republicans, and everyone else who sees the need for governing our way through to the future, to resist Trump and the other bullies now in charge.

But there's a simpler reason.  You can't let the bullies win.  Because everybody else loses.