Republican hatred for the United States of America is as constant as the North Star, but usually it occurs as an endless litany of pettier crimes and disgraces. However, every now and then the circumstances align such that a Republican in power has a clear, unavoidable choice between serving their country or brazenly betraying it for the sake of their Party's criminal agenda, and they will always choose the latter. They know it is unlikely they will ever be brought to justice for it, so there is no reason in their morality-devoid, honorless minds not to betray their country. Sometimes, in moments of rare candor or commonplace arrogance, Republicans will even openly brag about their willingness to harm America for their own benefit. I now present the top ten acts of Republican treason committed so far, as known to the public. Their complete record is far worse, and what horrors they've succeeded in fully concealing aren't to be imagined.
In chronological order:
1. Watergate (1968-1974)
Richard Nixon's treason ran far deeper and over more time than merely burglarizing Democratic Party headquarters: There was an entire ecosystem of covert operations whose intent was to sabotage the democratic process, guarantee Nixon's personal power, and retaliate with increasing severity against those who defied him. He clearly intended to become some kind of dictator, and the idea of murdering critical reporters and activists was repeatedly raised in discussions among his operatives. If not for an unusually intrepid pair of reporters and a major news organization willing to defend them, that would very likely have been the outcome. Unfortunately, Nixon's psychopathic behavior and wanton criminality were merely the blueprint for future Republican behavior.
2. Pardon of Richard Nixon. (1974)
In 1974, no man was more plainly guilty of worse crimes against the republic of the United States of America than Richard Milhouse Nixon. Not one person rotting in prison at the time had harmed or jeopardized more people, and what's more, he showed absolutely zero remorse about it and baldly insisted in public that he had done nothing wrong. He took no responsibility for his actions, and thanks to Republican President Gerald Ford, he never faced any external imposition of accountability either: Ford granted him a full, unconditional pardon, elevating a proven and remorseless traitor to the status of an innocent citizen and a retired US President. The message was loud and clear: Republican treason doth prosper. Nixon received a public pension right up to the day he died, his portrait remains in the gallery of presidents, and future Republican leaders have built upon his criminality.
3. Iran-Contra (1985)
Conservative hero Ronald Reagan sold missiles to an avowed enemy of the United States in order to fund fascist terrorist groups in Central America after Congress explicitly outlawed funding them. But because he cut rich people's taxes, Republicans to this day don't think his act of blatant treason merited any kind of accountability - i.e., their complicity in the treason was bought cheaply. Impeachment would have to await a Democratic President's blowjob to be considered a legitimate option.
4. The 2000 coup
Republican politics and democracy have never quite seen eye-to-eye, but the GOP took a giant leap toward realizing Richard Nixon's fantasy of dictatorship when five Supreme Court "Justices" ordered the state of Florida to stop counting votes, declared George W. Bush the victor because they personally supported him, and basically rationalized the decision by saying that Bush's divine right as a Republican to rule must not be challenged by something as pedestrian as the actual outcome of the election. Sparked the beginning of the Interregnum period 2001-2009, during which the US Constitution was not in effect to any meaningful degree on the federal level, and was charactized by the monarchial privatization of the Executive branch by the Bush family and its criminal associates.
5. Torture and murder of prisoners. (2001-2009)
One of the most heinous and intolerable features of the Bushian Interregnum dictatorship was the establishment of a Gulag Archipelago under the American flag in which thousands of suspected terrorists, family members of suspected terrorists, people who happened to have names similar to suspected terrorists, and even people just dumb enough to offer their cooperation to the Bush regime as witnesses to terrorist activity, were confined incommunicado in military-run dungeons, tortured for years on end in ways both petty and violently savage, and occasionally murdered. Many of these prisoners were deliberately hidden from Red Cross observers to hide their treatment, and videos of torture sessions taken by the CIA were brazenly burned to destroy the evidence.
Bush, Cheney, and several other perpetrators of these crimes against humanity at first vehemently denied it, but once they became confident they would face no consequences, revealed their pride in having committed the crimes. Today, they enjoy spitting it in the face of the American people and the world that they remain above justice, and the Republican Party openly and enthusiastically supports their treason. Given half a chance, they will very likely do it again, and this time not limit themselves to foreigners or terrorism investigations.
6. Iraq War (2003-2011)
The world had not seen the kind of psychotic imperial pronouncements and bald-faced lies coming out of the Bush regime in 2003 from a global military power since literally Nazi Germany. It was a nightmare reawakened out of nowhere, with no foreshadowing whatsoever: A world at peace and in prosperity, suddenly confronted with mass-murdering madmen in control of the world's most powerful military and promising to launch blitzkrieg on any nation that did not worship George W. Bush as a god.
The regime effectively declared itself the arbiter of the composition of all foreign governments, and George W. Bush personally the King of Kings who would pick and choose who would be permitted to rule what nation. Meanwhile, the US media flooded its content with outright lies and the most ludicrous, lying propaganda ever seen in this country, effectively serving as little more than stenographers to the increasingly deranged statements of regime mouthpieces. Sanity, fact, reason, and dissent completely disappeared from major media overnight. An endless torrent of Big Lies ensued one after the other: When one lie would be debunked, a totally different one would be offered; when that would be debunked, a third would pop up; and when the third lost credibility, the regime would go back to repeating the first as if it had never been disproven. And the target of it all was to justify a conspiracy over a decade in the making: The conquest of Iraq, irrespective of international law, policy rationality, or national interest.
Only half the public was ever convinced, but that didn't matter. The UN refused to endorse it, but that didn't matter either. We were never attacked by Iraq, there was no evidence and no remotely sane basis to believe Saddam Hussein intended to attack us, and every scrap of intelligence not fabricated out of wholecloth by the regime to justify its own agenda said it simply wasn't going to happen, but that didn't matter at all. The regime was determined to seize Iraq and kill as many people as necessary to do so, and thus on March 20, 2003, for the first time since the German invasion of Poland, a Western military power unilaterally and aggressively invaded another nation in a blatant act of conquest.
Any pretense that it was intended to "liberate" the Iraqi people - however little credibility that pretense had to begin with - was soon eradicated when local Iraqi forces spontaneously organized after the fall of Saddam's regime began to be systematically slaughtered or imprisoned and tortured if they defied the edicts of Bush's imperial government. The ensuing chaos took anywhere from a quarter of a million to over a million innocent lives, destroyed entire cities, obliterated the infrastructure of an entire nation, introduced al Qaeda to a country where it had not previously existed, made the US a pariah rogue state with increasingly hostile relations with democratic countries, cost thousands of US lives, and sunk over a trillion dollars of national treasure into the sands never to be seen again. But business interests affiliated with Dick Cheney gorged themselves on cash from no-bid contracts associated with the occupation, and Bush proudly cited his own crimes as a "national emergency" to push through radical right-wing legislation on every subject including tax cuts for the wealthy and declared all who criticized him unpatriotic.
Most of the German military leadership and Japanese Imperial high command sentenced to death by Allied courtrs after WW2 had committed virtually identical crimes to those committed in the process of the Iraq War, and in fact many of those crimes are proudly, publicly acknowledged by the perpetrators. Their arrogance in treason knows no bounds, because as usual, they are utterly confident there will be no consequences for them. This treason, more than any other, is a stain on our nation that will never be removed, and cannot even be mitigated until justice is brought to these traitors.
7. Fake terror alerts as campaign tools (2004)
The Bush regime had become so reliant on the specter of 9/11 to keep the population obedient that it had developed a sort of Tourette's, where terrorism was practically a substitute for the word "the" in their press releases whenever anyone would question them about anything. By the time of the 2004 election, it had become so egregious that the nation would be told we were under severe threat of imminent attack every time Bush would take a dip in the polls, and virtually all such alerts ceased the day after the election. Aside from the fact that using the power of US national security to promote petty political interests is treason unto itself, when someone uses the threat of terrorism to get whatever they want, they themselves are effectively terrorists. There is no real difference between threatening to blow up buildings if your demands are not met or conspiring to falsely convince people that someone else will blow up buildings if your demands are not met. Bush piggybacked on al Qaeda to threaten, terrorize, and despotically dictate to his own country.
8. Citizens United (2010)
In another infamous 5-4 judicial coup d'etat, the Supreme Court declared that corporations are people and that buying elections is protected speech. Basically, the decision - quite possibly the most lawless, ridiculous, and obviously partisan in all of American history - declared that "some are more equal than others," and was done plainly to open the floodgates for corruption of the electoral process in 2010 at a pivotal moment in the GOP's plans to retake Congress. In the case of the principal instigators, the "reasoning" of the decision was apparently pre-written for them by the Republican Party. More or less they declared that laws mean whatever the GOP needs them to mean at any given moment to win, which is also the essential meaning of the Court's previous treason in 2000.
9. Deliberate sabotage of the US economy. (2011-present)
The Republican Congress has made no bones about it: They are deliberately and fanatically blocking any measure to improve the economic situation in this country or mitigate the suffering Americans experience due to the recession they inflicted on us, just so they can blame a Democratic President and benefit politically from harming their own country. They have said as much, openly and proudly. The GOP is a party of traitors, period.
10. Suppressing, corrupting, and hindering climate science.
Global warming is not merely a dire economic and security threat to this nation, but to the entire human species, so the fact that Republicans are determined to suppress, corrupt, hinder, and smear the credibility of science attempting to characterize and address it in order to serve their paymasters in the petroleum industry is really just another example of their infinite contempt for this country and humanity in general. As long as they personally are rich enough to escape the consequences, they have zero concern for those who are not, and couldn't care less if this entire nation disappears into the sands of time so long as what emerges from the rubble is ruled by them. This is who and what Republicans are, and it's nothing American. We've dealt with people like them in the past, but only on the other side of battlefields - now they're a tapeworm draining the life from our republic and bragging about it as they do it.