Sucks of the year: the elite of perfidy

Groveling   Mitt

How low can you sink?  Ask Mitt Romney. He fawned and groveled at Donald Trump's feet, and went on television to suck the Trump rump.

Romney gave a speech on what bad candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were, but he reserved his invective for Trump.  He said:

"Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat."

Those remarks are the one time I can ever remember agreeing with anything Romney has said.  I did not trust him as a presidential candidate because of his duplicity.  He instituted a healthcare program in Massachusetts and excoriated Barack Obama for establishing the same program in the nation.  He talked about building American jobs,  but his venture capital company was actively involved in buying up American companies and shipping the jobs overseas.  He made a dismissive comment about 47 percent of Americans.  But when he attacked Trump's character,  he seemed to be underscoring what everyone could see, rather than ignoring and defending a degenerate fellow billionaire. 

And then  he thought Trump might choose him for Secretary of State,  and he put on his obscene exhibition of sucking.  Some Trump spokespeople said Trump had been toying with Romney in vengeance for the attack on Trump.  And Romney may have coveted the job so much that he was willing to debase himself for the TV cameras.  But what he really did was show a degradation of character as low as Trump's.  And he demolished any respect that people might have had for him.  He was stunningly perfidious.

Eddying Eddie

Another defector from trustworthy to perfidious is Ed Schultz.  His situation is a bit more nuanced and less obvious on the surface than Romney's.  He had been advocate for liberal causes, but then  he was booted from MSNBC and went to work for RT America,  previously known as Russia Today, a network funded by the Russian government.  After he  started anchoring the evening RT news,   he attacked some of the people he previously supported.  And he made nice to people he had previously disparaged.  

Romney has made no attempt to explain his abject submission to the degradation of Trump,  but Ed Schultz is trying to maintain some dignity..  The Washington Post published a story on Eddie's transformation from a liberal stalwart to one of  Putie's  (as he  once referred to Putin) boys,  and it was reprinted widely by major newspapers in the upper Midwest.  Schultz claims that he gave up advocate news formats, such as he did on radio and MSNBC, in favor of doing straight, objective news.  He gave a long interview about his change in direction to National Public Radio.  

A colleague from Fargo called Schultz the Kremlin's mouthpiece.  It is largely Schultz's former colleagues and people who knew him from North Dakota who cast skepticism on his motives.  He started out as an imitator of Rush Limbaugh, but the stories of his career say that he converted to liberalism with the catalyst of Democratic money.  The problem with that story is where Democratic money could come from and how it could be used to create a liberal spokesperson.  Schultz's own account of his conversion to liberalism is that his wife is a psychiatric nurse who worked with homeless people and her work gave him knowledge of these people and changed his sympathies.  

However, other accounts point out that he was a Republican candidate for the House of Representatives and later tried to be a Democratic candidate for the Senate.  He once decried Putie's human rights record and called Trump a racist because of his birtherism and claimed to be a friend of Hillary Clinton.  But now, he calls Putie a protector of his country,  approves of Trump,  and calls Hillary and her campaign deplorable for suggesting that the Russians were behind the hack of the DNC.  And that is where Schultz begins to repeat the GOP party line.

First of all,  there is no doubt the DNC was hacked.  We can look at the e-mails published by  Wikileaks.  Seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies say they have evidence that Russian actors and affiliates did the hacking.  Schultz and the GOP say they need to see the evidence before they'll believe that Putie and company had any hand in the hacking.  The problem there is that intelligence agencies do not want to reveal how they can trace hacks and they classify information.  If anybody reveals classified information,  the GOP calls them criminal.  It is for the possibility that Hillary had classified information on her e-mail server, which was never proven, that the GOP wants to lock her up.  Still,  Schultz and the GOP insists the classified information be released, knowing that intelligence agencies will resist revealing operational secrets.  So,  Schultz and his new compatriots deny that Russia was involved,  although a number of countries in Europe have also discovered Russian hacking and fooling with their internal politics.  Schultz does not say, let's see what an investigation by an independent panel comes up with on the hacking issue.  He simply denies that his boss Putie has anything to do with it.  And in that denial,  Schultz's perfidy becomes evident.

The nation is severely divided.  Conservatives,  led by the likes of Rush Limbaugh,  have generated a level of hatred against anyone they call liberals that is as intense as the divisions over slavery that led to the Civil War.  News articles that deal with Trump's election are flooded with comments that threaten and recommend violence.  The submission of prominent people such as Romney and Schultz to the infantile bluster of a person like Trump encourages the hate-filled and sends a message to the left wing that it has a choice of submitting or of preparing to meet violence with which we are threatened.  As a veteran who served his country to prevent just the kind of Holocaust-like politics of Trump,  I opt for resistance.  And that means confronting the perfidy of people like Romney and Schultz, who have shown that there is no integrity of belief and purpose when a rich celebrity commands them to debase themselves. 

In a time when so many people have lost any grasp of facts, it is imperative for those who still value truth to recognize that the greatest threat to America is the duplicity and perfidy within the country.  These men do not represent the striving for liberty,  equality, and justice.