Just Imagine

Just imagine              Gerry OShea

There seems to be no end to the lies and  outrageous assertions that Republicans will tolerate from their man in the White House. Just consider how they would be reacting if the person in the Oval Office was a Democrat.

  Imagine that Hillary Clinton is in the White House and she claims that her father who came into the world in Scranton, Pennsylvania was actually born in Durham, England, the birth place of her grandfather. Would Republicans ascribe such a blunder to  normal memory slippage which seems to be the best excuse they can muster to explain how their man in the White House boldly asserted that his father, Fred Trump, was born not in the Bronx, which all the records indicate as his place of birth, but in Germany.

Senator Bill Cassidy, Louisiana Republican, a distinguished physician with a strong interest in the area of mental health, would surely be calling for a psychiatric evaluation of any Democrat in the Oval Office who seemingly doesn't know or has forgotten where her father was born.

Just think of Lindsey Graham's red-faced anger if a Democratic president had the temerity to wonder who was our greater enemy, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, appointed by our president, or President Xi, the Chinese autocrat with a deplorable record of locking up and routinely torturing anyone who disagrees with his dictatorial rule.

Stay with Senator Graham as he hears a diktat from the White House stating "our great companies are hereby ordered" to limit all commercial dealings with China. Surely, the senator from South Carolina would angrily compare this White House edict to Stalinist tactics where the government abolishes any rights of private companies.

Imagine the response from Senator McConnell if a Democrat in the Oval Office matched Trump's wild assertion that Jews who vote for the Republican Party are unpatriotic. This outrageous presidential belief would certainly get an acerbic response from the leading Republican senator.

We are in a trade war with China which President Trump claims is a positive development because "trade wars are easy to win." This view runs counter to a core belief in both parties and especially among  conservative Republicans that the free market favors business enterprises and that nobody has ever emerged victorious in a trade war.

 A Democrat in the White House would be excoriated by conservatives if she engaged in a tariff-raising conflict costing farmers and other exporters to the huge Chinese market billions every month, not to mention the resulting annual residual "tax" of approximately $800 on every household, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Consider the outrage in Republican circles if a Democrat in the White House promised to invite President Putin to the next G7 meeting, which will be hosted by the United States next year, despite the fact that not only has the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine not abated but the Mueller Report confirms in unambiguous language that Moscow engaged in widespread interference in the 2016 Presidential election.

Imagine the reaction of leading Republicans if, following the recent mayhem and murders in El Paso, a Democratic president visited some of the victims in a local hospital and then held a press conference where she focused not on the human suffering all around but on the size of a crowd which she addressed at a recent political rally and mockingly compared her huge number of attendees to a mere few hundred that allegedly gathered for a meeting addressed by an opposing candidate.

 Surely Dr. Rand Paul and the medical wing of the Republican establishment would be hinting how this behavior by a Democrat leader mimics the classic symptoms of a sociopath.

Just think of a Democrat in the Oval Office who believes that the strong economy should be the calling card for her re-election. But the polls indicate that the public is not impressed, so she declares that "fake news is doing everything to crash the economy"  in a conspiratorial plan to ensure that by propagating lies they will prevent her re-election.

Republican leaders would have a field day accusing the Democratic president of paranoid behavior and engaging in tirades of self-pity, blaming the media for her inadequacies.

Just imagine the incredulous reaction from the Republican intelligentsia if a Democratic president tweeted that the appropriate answer to an impending hurricane revolves around nuclear bombing the eye of the storm as it advances.

Expect a similar reaction if Hillary Clinton or anyone of similar standing in her party raised the possibility of the United States buying Greenland and then taking umbrage when the Danish prime minister described the idea as absurd.

 The Republican guffaws would be heard all over Washington as they wondered if we are living in a twilight zone.

Conservative leaders, all firmly committed to the sacred  principle that national budgets should reflect a pay-as-you-go philosophy and should never pass on unpaid bills to future generations, would decry the current outrage of adding about a trillion dollars to the national debt every year. Senator Rand Paul would be especially agitated about this because demanding a balanced budget remains a signature issue of his.

The response from Republican leaders would surely be of disbelief if a president from the other party insisted that Hurricane Dorian was heading for Alabama even after the National Weather Service in an unprecedented presidential correction assured the country that this assertion was wrong.

Finally, as a coup de grace, just imagine a Democrat in the White House proclaiming as she looked towards the sky that she may well be the "chosen one" by divine powers assigned to sort out the unruly world. All those evangelical Republican senators would have a field day expressing their outrage that the divine forces in the universe could ever possibly favor Democrats!

Gerry OShea blogs at  wemustbetalking.com