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Evan McMullin Poses a Blink Test for Conservatives: Rocky Balboa or Drago

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We have arrived at that surreal moment when a presidential candidate from our last election, a Republican who ran as an independent against an oligarch who ran as a Republican, asks his fellow conservatives a question that until this past year would have been a no-brainer.

We all saw the Trump supporters and their Russian flags at CPAC.

So it is not with tongue in cheek that pointing to the photo above of Rocky Balboa facing down Russian titan Drago in 1985’s Rocky IV, Evan McMullin asks,

There is some irony in the fact that Donald Trump offered Sylvester Stallone the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). But Stallone already passed the blink test when he said,

“I love Donald Trump. He’s a great Dickensian character. You know what I mean? There are certain people like Arnold, Babe Ruth, that are bigger than life. But I don’t know how that translates [laughs] to running the world.”

We just witnessed the president of the United State fire wholesale 46 U.S. attorneys for fear that President Obama is out to get him.

A president who has labeled the press the “opposition party” and “enemies of the American people.”

A president who claims our own intelligence community, the so-called “Deep State” is his enemy.

And that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who hacked the U.S. elections on Trump’s behalf is his friend.

It seems elementary math that if Putin is Trump’s friend and that our own press and intelligence community are his enemies, then Trump is not by any measure an American president.

Rob Reiner tweeted last night,

The scale of Trump’s corruption by itself ought to see Donald Trump impeached and removed from office. But the Russian scandal only gets deeper and deeper, as George Takei noted:

For eight years, Republicans dug deep to invent scandals about President Barack Obama. None of them were true, from his birthplace in Kenya to his Islamic beliefs, let alone his status as Antichrist. Now, faced with very real scandals about Donald Trump, many of these same men and women want to forget the whole thing and move on.

And not only the GOP and Trump’s “state news,” Fox News, but the press. As Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert observes , no doubt with some disbelief,

“[W]eird. more scribes warning journalists to go slow on the Russia story–where were all those Go Slow warnings re: Hillary emails?”

Because even being an agent of a hostile foreign power isn’t enough to deter them from the realization of the holy grail of the conservative agenda: tax breaks for the rich and the servitude of the middle class with a little theocracy on the side.

They’ve been aiming for this since Goldwater’s defeat in 1964. If you think a little treason will deter them now, you’re mistaken. If Vladimir Putin offered them all this on a platter, they’d vote for him. In fact, they did vote for him.

And they are reaffirming their vote before our eyes.

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Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen's Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.

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