What's Good For the Goose . . .

February 09, 2021 / Kurt F. Stone

Back in the late nineteen teens through the mid-nineteen thirties, one of the most beloved people in the United States was vaudevillian-turned movie star-turned down home philosopher Will Rogers. Rogers (1879-1935) was at one time the world’s highest-paid movie star ($35K a week) the honorary mayor of Beverly Hills, and easily the most quotable wit of the day. His aphorisms, frequently couched in humorous terms, were widely quoted: "I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a Democrat," one of his wittier jibes went. Without question, his best-known quote was "I never met a man I didn't like." Despite all the humor, Rogers “hizzoner” the honorary mayor was also a serious political player with a keen eye for what was right and/or wrong with the two-party system. Will senior died in a plane crash in a plane piloted by daredevil Wiley Post in 1935. The nation was devastated. His son, Will Rogers Jr., served a single term in Congress in the early 1940s as a representative from California’s 16th district.

One has to believe that were Will Rogers - or someone like him - alive today, he would have plenty to say about the current state of partisan politics in the United States. He would have despised the fact that national Republicans, fearing the politics of such ethnic progressives as Reps. Ilhan Omar (D.MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Talib (D-MI) and Ayanna Pressley (D.MA) - (collectively known as “The Squad”) - had become the name and face (the brand) of the entire National Democratic Party. Through cherry-picking the loudest, boldest and brashest of their quotes and political proposals, Republicans have sought to make these four progressives - plus 2020 freshmen Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush (both of whom are black) - the end-all and be-all of Democratic Party politics. What the national Republican Party has done its best to convince their loyalists of is that because of “The Squad,” the entire Democratic Party establishment is made up of nothing but anti-Semitic, anti-Israel Socialists and anti-Christian immoralists, whose major political goal is nothing more destroying white Christian America.

Of course, the real fear besetting post-Trump Republicans is that soon, white Christian Americans will “achieve” minority status in America. And truth to tell, we really aren’t all that far removed from what they fear. Indeed, the number of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and other people of foreign parentage is close to overtaking WASP America. Which brings us back to Will Rogers, who suggested that what Democrats most seriously lacked was organization. I have to believe that were Will alive at the beginning of the Biden Administration, he would seriously urge his party to make such newly-elected people as Marjorie Taylor Greene (R. GA), Lauren Boebert (R.- CO), Matt Gaetz(R. FL) and Nicole Malliotakis (R. NY) the face and figure of the National Republican Party. I’m fairly well convinced that Hizzoner would say that “What’s good for the (Republican) goose, is just as good for the (Democratic) gander.

Consider that 199 members of the Congressional Republican caucus voted in favor of the Georgia anti-Semite (MTG) keeping her committee assignments . . . finding little or no problem backing a colleague who believes that Jews are responsible for burning forests in California, that Democrats are pedophiles and are are largely responsible for the deaths of both President John F. Kennedy and his son JFK. Jr., and that Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be assassinated. What bothers me the most is that the two Jewish Republicans serving in the House (New York’s Lee Zeldin and David Kustoff of Tennessee) found no problem supporting Ms. Taylor-Greene’s remaining on the House Education Committee – despite her statement that the mass murders at Parkland, Florida’s Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School were “false flags.”

The fact that these 199 Republicans gave an electoral thumbs-up to a vile, unlettered anti-Semitic bigot who never met a conspiracy she didn’t love, is far more than a GOP problem: it’s an American problem. As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote just the other day, “You don’t have to be a scholar of 20th-century Europe to know what happens when the elected leaders of a democracy condone violence as a political tool and blame the country’s ills on the Jews and Zionists.

To my way of thinking, it’s high time that Democrats take a page from the Republican political playbook and brand the G.O.P. the party of not Lincoln, but rather of MTG, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz and North Carolina’s Ted Budd.

For those who don’t yet know him, Rep. Budd is the fellow who, during the vote on whether to strip Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments told his colleagues that “today is really about one party single-handedly canceling a member of the other party because of something said before that member was even elected.” How droll! From his words, it is clear that Budd knows nothing about 20th century American political history. If he did, he might know that for more than sixty years, Republicans reminded anyone who would listen that West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd (1917-2010) was once (depending on who was doing the telling) either a member of - or exalted ruler of - the K.K.K. back in the 1940s, and that therefore, all Democrats were virulent racists. And while it is true that as a young man, Byrd was a short-timer in that noxious organization, he later wrote that he was a KKK member because he "was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision—a jejune and immature outlook—seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions." Byrd also said in 2005, "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized for a thousand times ... and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened."

Indeed, if what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, then both Democrats and Republicans should never forget that MTG and her colleagues are just as vile and stupidly hateful today as they were even before they were first elected to congress.

In the eyes of most Republicans, Democrats are under the spell of a feminine “squad.” Perhaps it is time for Democrats to accuse Republicans of being in thrall to a brigade of bigots.

Hizzoner, Will Rogers, knew all about this a long, long time ago, when he wrote ““The problem ain’t what people know. It’s what people know that ain’t so that’s the problem.”

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