Pardon me sir, but can I pardon myself?

[Rev. Rye]

I am dead serious in saying that the GOP is fearful of change, and this is about for them, keeping power.

I can remember Dad being baffled at the fact that the Republicans in Congress were, to a one, fully supportive of Roy Moore after he was outed as a sexual predator. I found myself repeating O'Brien's words from 1984: "The sole object of power is power."

Literally everything the Republican Party has done since November 4, 2008 makes sense when you remember that idea, and without keeping it in mind, it looks like they were hijacked by fascists and libertarians hell-bent on driving them (and the rest of the country) off a cliff for no goddam reason.

That timeline may seem optimistic, but at least Dubya had some sort of ideals (bringing democracy to the Middle East being the most blatant one). Those ideals may have been impossible to implement, and even if they were impossible, they were Hell-bent on pursuing the worst possible methods (both constitutionally and practically), but they were still pursuing some sort of higher ideal, and if they weren't, they at least did a damn good job of acting like they were. Post-2008, they haven't even tried.