For MD Gov. Larry Hogan, a thousand-mile journey to being a decent Republican politician begins with one first step.
Gov. Larry Hogan had one bar to clear: Will he refuse to vote for Caligula for a four-year gig playing hackeysack with the Nuclear Football? This example of the soft bigotry of low expectations needed a backhoe to set that bar. Our guv hopped over it with alacrity.
A new Washington Post/University of Maryland poll shows 75 percent of Marylanders favor Hogan’s rejection of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, and 71 percent giving Hogan himself a positive approval rating. This smacks of over-blown gratitude one might have for losing only one hand in a blender accident. We take our blessings in tiny sips in this season of Trump.
Larry cleared that bar; let’s scootch it up. Perhaps he’d offer his denunciation of the rest of the GOP field, rejected in spittle-flecked primaries as unfit and insufficiently godly for office. Will Hogan dismiss those ludicrously cruel mimics of Christianity, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee? Can he turn his back on the magic needed to bet your Social Security on Paul Ryan? Does the guv have the character to turn his back on Trump’s transition director (and Hogan Inauguration special guest star) Gov. Chris Christie, before Christie’s left hanging upside down under a lamppost on the George Washington Bridge?
Crank that bar up, above the dandelions. Is Larry prepared to reject the GOP tax fetishists who make insatiable plutocrats grin and gut-punch state school systems and pensions and public safety? As Gov. Scott Walker (R-UknewIt) drives away top researchers while knifing Wisconsin’s university system, will Hogan stand tall for the University of Maryland? As Gov. Brownback (R-Grandma spits at his name) brings Total Republican Control and statewide fiscal collapse to Kansas; as privatizing Gov. Snyder (R-always) poisons Flint, Michigan, to prove less government is better; as Texas Gov. Abbott (R-drop dead, gorgeous) shutters women’s clinics and watches pregnancy mortality skyrocket, does Larry resolutely denounce the mad elephant disease that keeps his party in constant battle with history and science and simple humanity?
Take’er up another inch. Will Hogan denounce the rape-blatherings of amateur gynecologists like Rep. Todd Akin (R-of course) and Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-what else)? Or the bespectacled jabber of Inquisition accountant, Maryland Rep. Andy Harris (R-Gawdhelpus) who wanted a doctor’s note for your accountant if you deducted medical expenses for abortion after being raped?
Now we nudge that bar up for dachshund field trials. Will Larry denounce Republican efforts, in two-thirds of states, to kneecap the voting rights of “certain” Americans? Will he renounce the GOP lie of “vote fraud,” “substantiated” by a couple dozen hapless idiots among hundreds of millions of votes cast over decades?
Every moral short-cutter who promised that WMDs were found; every oil-hungry political profiteer; every god-bothering zealot more interested in beating the rest of us into goodness than nurturing their own immortal souls; every one-percenter peering down on us, the tiny, tax-paying fools who can’t afford the political action to bless our greed; everyone who see the police and the military foremost as tools of a racial and religious destiny; every weapon fondler, with their reverence for the hardware that makes such efficient obliteration of Christmas parties and movie dates, and brings us nightmare tableaux of blood and fingerpaint and bullet-riddled little lunchboxes; every America-firster who’d slam mercy’s door on that rocket-stunned Syrian toddler, numbly smudging his gore on the seat of an ambulance; every one of these electorally transmitted diseases has learned there’s a political component to their survival. There are a very limited number of parties to work with, and only one that holds, for them, the promise of any public clout.
Thanks, Gov. Hogan, for confirming that you see Donald Trump as the ignorant monster that he is to most of the world. Now reject the Republican ideology of the only political party that created and fuels Trump. When will you arc resolutely through God’s sky over that high bar?
