Dana Milbank is a columnist for the Washington Post. He is one of my favorites. (I also adore Valerie Strauss and Jennifer Rubin, and of course, Glenn Kessler, the fact-checker). I’m sorry that his many links did not transfer when I copied and pasted. Subscribe to the Post.
He writes:
There were even more vermin than usual in Washington this week. A rabid fox at the Capitol bit at least nine people, including Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.). And Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison attacked Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) with an insult most entomological.
After Cotton implied that Supreme Court Justice-designate Ketanji Brown Jackson is a Nazi sympathizer, Harrison referred to Cotton as a “little maggot-infested man” on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Fake news! Cotton may go low, but, at 6-foot-5, he is not little. Also, maggots typically feed on dead things, and Cotton, though stiff, is not currently deceased. The man likes to carry on, but he is not carrion.
Harrison went on to censure the Republican Party as a whole: “It is a party built on fraud, fear and fascism.” Interestingly, a statement from the Republican National Committee taking offense at the “maggot-infested” charge did not dispute the “fraud, fear and fascism” formulation. As your self-appointed fact-checker, I have therefore examined the merits of the accusation.
Fraud
Sixteen months after President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud failed in some 60 court cases, we have finally found evidence of potential voter fraud. Trump’s White House staff chief, Mark Meadows, reportedly registered to vote in 2020 using the address of a mobile home he never lived in. And former Trump State Department official Matt Mowers, a current congressional candidate, voted twice during the 2016 primaries, in New Hampshire and New Jersey.
The “big lie” about a rigged election, accepted by two-thirds of Republican voters, has spawned new frauds about the dangers of coronavirus vaccines (leading to sharply higher death rates in heavily Republican counties) and the promise, touted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) of the deworming drug ivermectin to treat covid-19; an exhaustive new study finds the drug useless.
Then there are the little everyday frauds. Just days after Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) told the world that his colleagues engage in coke-fueled orgies, Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) declared at a Trump rally that it was Trump who “caught Osama bin Laden,” record-low unemployment is at a “40-year high” and there weren’t “any wars” during Trump’s presidency. Never mind Syria and Afghanistan.
Fear
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said people like Ketanji Brown Jackson become public defenders because “their heart is with the murderers.” Cotton said Justice Robert H. Jackson “left the Supreme Court to go to Nuremberg and prosecute the case against the Nazis. This Judge Jackson might have gone there to defend them.”
Republican senators used the Jackson confirmation to stir fear of minorities and vulnerable groups with manufactured crises about transgender athletes (of the 200,000 participants in women’s collegiate sports, perhaps 50 are transgender) and “critical race theory” (which isn’t taught in public schools).
Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance released an ad saying “Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
The Florida legislature approved an “election crimes” police force for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), with the potential to intimidate voters, while various GOP-led states move forward with new provisions providing residents with incentives to inform on each other.
The newly-revealed text messages of Justice Clarence Thomas’s activist wife, Ginni, show her sharing with the Trump White House her “hope” that the “Biden crime family” as well as elected officials, bureaucrats and journalists would be taken to “barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”
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Is the GOP “a party built on fraud, fear and fascism”? Certainly, not all Republicans think this way. But too many others are subverting democracy, cavorting with white nationalists, spreading racist fears and fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment for political opponents and the media. For them, the jackboot fits
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We will have to wait until the Jan 6th committee finishes its work. So far Democrats have spoken softly, but they may have a big stick in section 3 of the 14th amendment of the Constitution, if they have evidence of legislators planning or aiding the January 6th insurrection. Sadly, this clause is not a slam dunk. Since this clause is open to interpretation, it may land the matter in the lap of the Supreme Court, and we know how that will go.https://www.lawfareblog.com/14th-amendments-disqualification-provision-and-events-jan-6
Agreed. I don’t understand why the January 6 insurrection is not parallel to, even worse than the Chicago 7 Conspiracy Trial. Although they were acquitted, there was enough reason to bring to trial the charges of “conspiring to cross state lines with the intent to incite riots”. Sound familiar?
Hello Diane: The one good thing about Putin’s activities in Ukraine is that he is showing the rest of the world the end-run of what authoritarian governments do when the all-powerful dictator doesn’t get their way. For us here in the United States, it’s the people in Milbank’s article that are the lead up to that kind of authoritarianism (fascist) . . . and we are getting a nice picture of the disjunction between that and democracy (See “Freedom or Death,” MSNBC’s special by Richard Engal.)
In terms of education of the young, what teacher here cannot relate the humanitarian situation in Ukraine and Russia . . . the total disregard of human rights and well-being, and even the USE of atrocities for political purposes . . . not to mention the murders of several Russian oligarchs, their wives and children, in recent years, who were opposed to Putin, . . .
. . . what teacher cannot relate that situation to an absence of education towards sensitivity in childhood . . . teaching young children about being sensitive to others’ and to animals and even to plants (the environment)–this kind of person-education is basic to democratic thinking . . . to emphasize empathy to others rather than letting that potential in children to wane away and be covered up by carelessness, self-aggrandizement, and hate.
I’m so glad to see liberals stop wringing their hands and grow some gumption. CBK
Unfortunately, so many of the radical right wing do not connect the parallels of the Republican Party to the actions of Putin. They blindly vote for anyone with an R next to his or her name, even when it is voting against their self interests. Most Republicans that remain in the party seem to be tribal sheeple.
CBK– Perhaps the reports are exaggerated, but I keep hearing that a sizeable chunk of Republican voters are sympathetic to Putin. That would be because he is an autocrat. I’m sure those people have all kinds of rationalizations for the rape of the Ukraine (NATO expansion, Russians defending themselves against Nazis etc). Such people see empathy as weakness.
The biggest threat to the United States today as a Constitutional Republic and democracy is the Republican Party.
The biggest threat to individual freedoms in the United States today is the Republican Party.
The biggest threat to the working class in the United States today is the Republican Party.
The biggest threat to the 1st, 5th, and 14th Amendments of the United States Constitution today is the Republican Party.
The biggest threat to health care for working class Americans today is the Republican Party.
The biggest threat to Social Security today is the Republican Party.
The biggest threat to increased violence from MAGA extremists today is supported by the Repulibican Party.
The biggest threat to public education today is the Republican Party.
The biggest supporter of white collar crime/fraud is the Republican Party.
It doesn’t matter if there are a few, ten or less, elected Republicans that do not stand with the MAGA fascists that now control the GOP. Those threats and more are still there and getting worse.
Well LL, for once I don’t have a bone to pick. Spot on.
What a weird time we live in! Imagine if, ten years ago, someone had told you that a president of the United States would make several different attempts to overturn a democratic election, including inciting a mob to attack the Capitol to stop the certification of the election, and that that guy would walk away from having done this scot free and go off to live like a rajah and play golf and continue to be the kingmaker for his party. If I had invented this scenario for a novel, it would have been too ludicrous, too unbelievable, to pass muster. But here we are. House minority leader Kevin McCarthy is on tape saying, right after January 6th, in a call with Liz Cheney, that he was going to ask Trump to resign. He KNEW. He KNEW how serious this was. That it was treason by a sitting president. And then McCarthy simply lied, denied that he had said such a thing, until the tape of his statement was released.
Over the entrance to the Supreme Court are carved, in marble, the words “Equal Justice under Law.” The fact that Donald Trump and his co-conspirators have not been prosecuted for attempting to overthrow the democratically elected government of the United States makes a joke, a complete joke, of those words. Clearly, in the United States, if you are rich and powerful, you can get away with anything. One law for you and me. Another for people like Donald Trump.
All the “little guy” idiots who participated in the attempted coup are speedily being tried and sent off to prison. Meanwhile, all the suits who orchestrated the coup, including the big suit, are immune, a race of invincible supermen and superwomen. Superman with orange skin, blonde troll-doll hair, a paunch, tiny hands, and a tiny little mouth spouting big, big lies. Two systems of justice. And so Donald Trump continues, as he always has, to get away with it, right out in the open, knowing that he is rich and powerful enough that he can do whatever he wants right out in the middle of 5th Avenue, for example, in broad daylight.
Right now, the Ukrainians are dying in a desperate war to preserve democracy in their country. The elected representatives of the people of Ukraine (the Ukrainian parliament, or Rada) had the courage and integrity to vote overwhelmingly (the vote was 328 to 0) to kick their president, Viktor Yanukovych, out of office when he turned out to be a Russian puppet who murderously turned his secret police on his own people. These people provide a true exemplar of democracy and rule of law. What signal does our inaction against Trump and his co-conspirators send to the rest of the world about the state of democracy in the United States, which considers itself a model of democracy and rule of law for the world? Well, this continued inaction in response to the attempted coup shows that democracy and rule of law in the United States are negotiable, depending on how wealthy and powerful a particular individual happens to be. You know, as in Putin’s Russia.
I don’t mean to over generalize here, but while Republicans continue to play the disinformation game too few Democrats choose to engage in the fight or meaningfully promote what they are trying to do through governance. Democrats don’t fiddle while watching Rome burns, they sit back and enjoy the view.