On CNN's "State of the Union", Jake Tapper was eloquent about the deep peril that our democratic form of government finds itself in today. He provided his commentary on Mike Pence’s statement that he “did not think he would ever see eye to eye” with ex-President Trump regarding the events of 1/6. Tapper ended his commentary with this:
Do you think that McCarthy, Scalise, and Stefanik will stand up for democracy and the U.S. Constitution or will they do what Mike Pence did this week, bend to the will of a delusional man living in a fantasy world? Because you know what? You can't agree to disagree about the threat to the life of Mike Pence. You can't agree to disagree on the threat to the life of American democracy.
You can find the full transcript here. There was a clear tone of incredulousness in Tapper’s voice that such a thing could be happening in the United States of America in the early part of the 21st century. But he breezed right over one of the central reasons that this could and in fact is happening now in this country.
Just prior to this segment, Tapper interviewed Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves. And he had no reaction at all to Reeves’ statement:
…abortions are murdering literally millions and millions and millions of Americans across many, many years. And it's a sad, sad state of affairs.
This is a big lie that predated The Big Lie by decades. Every single Trump supporter I have every heard interviewed has referred to Democrats as “baby killers” in one way or another. It is obvious to me at least that this a more fundamental source of their “grievance” than economic stress, or loss of social status, or fear of a majority minority country, or whatever the explanation of the week for Trumpism happens to be.
Tapper should have stopped Reeves immediately and asked him, if America is “literally murdering millions and millions and millions of Americans across many, many years”, then isn’t it justified to cause our government to fall by any means necessary, including by force, and including allying with a foreign power to accomplish it? Aren’t we as bad as any dictatorship led by Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot? Does it matter whether we have democracy, if the majority of the people support the murder of millions? By that reasoning, isn’t Paxton Smith, the Valedictorian of her high school in Austin, TX who gave the graduation speech last week as bad as Josef Goebbels? But Tapper let this vicious, untrue accusation of out and out mass murder slide by without a single word of objection.
People like Tapper unaccountably lose all their conviction and bravery when it comes to facing that big lie of Reeves, which is actually far more centrally part of the rot of our democracy, because it predated all of the other lies, than anything Trump has said on any other topic.