Clown Car

Referring to all politicians as corrupt is pretty standard, and sometimes it seems that way. Most politicians aren't avatars of Jimmy Stewart's character in "Mr. Smith goes to Washington". The truth is that most people who run for office do so to further their own interests. Sometimes those interests are altruistic - they want to improve the lives of marginalized people, or the environment. Other times it's to make the rich a little richer. Still other times it's to further a narrow agenda that self enriches. Sometimes the quest for elected office is to make changes: "Those bastards in power are ruining everything", sometimes it's to preserve the status quo: "We have to prevent those other bastards from ruining everything". The problem is, and always has been, that there's no absolute standard for what "best for the country", there's no consensus among Americans on anything. This wouldn't be an insurmountable problem if there was an attempt at compromise, if we didn't look at incremental change as a betrayal, and a large percentage of the electorate wasn't proudly ignorant. 

What the current crop of politicians has turned into, and it's primarily, almost exclusively, the politicians of the Republican Party, is a bunch of performance artists, specifically, clowns. 

Legislators and executives have a job that they were elected to do, and that's to run the government. The legislature writes laws and appropriates funds while the executive executes and enforces those laws and collects taxes. On a national level, the Democratic Party, whether you agree or disagree with their goals, seems to understand what their job description is. They are debating appropriate solutions to national problems, passing laws, conducting foreign policy while the Republicans seem to be content to oppose anything and everything that the Democrats propose. Of course there are going to be things upon which they disagree, but there is no attempt at finding middle ground, just obstruction. And it's not like anything was accomplished when the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency either...other than a huge corporate tax cut and pushing through sympathetic judges after digging in their heels during the tenure of a Democratic president. On the state level, when the Republicans have control there is some governing, usually in the form of voter suppression and fights over nonexistent unAmerican agendas in the schools. 

What Republicans have been spending their time doing is mocking other politicians on Twitter, attending White supremacist rallies, misrepresenting things like Critical Race Theory and generally serving as clowns to the circus that Washington, D.C. has become. Oh yes, and continuing to claim that Trump "really" won the 2020 election. Which brings us to the accelerant to the brush fire that is the Republican Party of 2022. Republicans have become the safe haven for racists, sexists and bigots of all descriptions for decades. Newt Gingrich set the tone for non-stop lies and personal attacks in the 1990s, and the unabashedly racist opposition to President Obama thinly disguised as a concern over government spending made it worse. But it's been Trump who poured gasoline on the smoldering embers and made it not only acceptable, but positively required to wear an aluminum foil hat and spew hate of all "others". 

And to top it all of, look who just emerged from obscurity: Sarah Palin.