Can Republicans step up to the plate to recapture American "honour"?

Letterman says he (trump) would be fired if he worked at The Gap, or at Dairy Queen. Letterman wants to stop the whining and put him in a home.

Joe Scarborough has declared, on Stephen Colbert, that he has left the Republican Party and become an independent.

Donald Junior openly acknowledges he would love to get damaging information from official Russian sources on Hillary Clinton, and then attends a meeting for precisely that purpose, along with bro-in-law Jared and that guy Manafort. And then tells the world nothing of substance was offered.

Manafort tells the world the t-campaign has no connections to the Russians.

Flynn omits his having worked for foreign governments reporting on his national security clearance, and Kushner omits his meetings with Russian bankers and lawyers from his national security clearance.

Himself continues to call this “the worst witch-hunt in history.” (Always insatiable for the “most”, the “greatest” and the “largest” even if it is a self-destroying drama.)

A rich Russian oligarch was about to build another t-tower in Moscow, halted just prior to the election campaign, while himself shouts to the world, I have nothing to do with Russia or Russians.

John McCain says “I told you there would be more shoes to drop, and there will be more shoes to drop yet.”

Angela Merkel says the world can no longer trust the United States as an ally and friend and will have to make other arrangements.

Lindsay Graham says his is the most serious information to come out of the White House….and he is greatly disturbed.

Eugene Robinson says we now know that the t-campaign colluded with the Russians….Was it treason? Some speculate that it was.

The country is enmeshed in a boiling cauldron of hate, lies, deceptions, denials, rationalizations, cover-ups, all of it surpassing any Stephen King whodunit in its complexity, its implications and its radioactivity.

Can the country really afford to wait for the Special Prosecutor to report his legal findings before taking steps to set this administration aside?

A Congressman from California, support by a lone Texas representative, has filed a bill to impeach the president although most Democrats spurn the move in the belief that, at this time, it only emboldens ‘his’ supporters.

“Impulsive incompetency” is the phrase used by the mover to headline and to explain his currently only symbolic initiative. Even Letterman would agree with that, and so would millions of people inside and outside U.S. continental boundaries.

It is the Republicans in Congress, however, who will have to join the parade to impeach if it is to have any chance of succeeding.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, spokesperson for the Oval Office, calls the move “utterly and completely ridiculous” and “a political game at its worst” (The Associated Press, ‘First step on a long road’: Long shot to impeach Trump launched, National Post, July 13, 2017)

As French President Macron hosts the American president for Bastille Day celebrations, and twists his arm toward environmental protection, and toward a softening of the “America First” slogan so vehemently clutched by trump, Republican members of congress are going through a more thorough critical self-examination than they ever thought they would have to endure.

On the one hand, “belonging” to the party trump is alleged to be leading, and having campaigned on repeal and replacement of Obamacare, tax reform and infrastructure renewal, they know that their legislative accomplishments and potential credibility will be on the ballet in 2016. Control of both houses of Congress will rest in the balance, and losing Republican majorities is a real possibility. All of their promises to voters, made in the illusory and delusional confidence of their projected control of government when they were campaigning, could be reduced to ashes if the current political weather, climate and chaos continues in Washington.

Distraction is a far too tepid term to describe the dynamic legislators are facing. Such a moniker significantly diminishes the power of the man who sucks the oxygen out of every room, phone call, tweet, rebuttal, press conference and television talk show, even every international meeting of heads of state. Those leaders, however, are not tethered to this personage as are the Republican members of Congress. They can and have charted a unanimous and separate path, for example, on environmental protection. And they have chosen to link their countries individually to single trade pacts and partners, exclusive of the United States, rendering “making America great again, to “making America alone”.

On the North Korean conundrum, the Japanese have become so nervous of the scary potential emerging from the linked impulsivity of both Kim Jung-Un and the American president that they have begun “protective responses”  through national media to any missile attack that might originate from north Korea. Reminiscent of those cold war warnings to students to take cover under their desks in the event of a nuclear bomb warning, they are just another political and cultural political barometric showing signs of how the world “feels” and fears the risk of a hot war.

While the Dow and the Nasdaq continue to climb, the impending storm clouds continue to form on the horizons of millions, both leaders and ordinary people around the world.

So the Republican legislators are divided, both within their caucus, and within their individual minds. On the public scale, some are growing weary and anxious about continuing to mouth platitudes of sweetness skirting the elephant in the capital, while writhing privately about the price of such apparent complicity with the Oval Office. And the number of those willing even to consider abandoning their merely titular and self-declared party leader continues to grow. Internally and psychically, they are also torn about their eroding personal ethics and integrity, knowing full well that politics was never this bereft of conscience, integrity,  respect and honour. Those men and women who have fought for and suffered extreme injuries, as an “honour” to fight for their country in the American military, will shortly have to answer their children and their families about whether the next generation will or even should follow in their footsteps, and enlist. Under this administration, the American uniform is being scared with the dirt of lies, deceptions, denials and evasion, none of which would be tolerated on the battlefield.

On those battlefields, loyalty matters. In the Oval Office loyalty is worth less than a food stamp. Only the person and the reputation of the office-holder matters, and effectively the country’s needs, (and there are many), the country’s aspirations (and there are even more) and the country’s reputation (it was considerably restored by Obama) are being thrown under the bus. It is one thing to throw an unco-operative, and unrepentant individual ‘under the bus’; it is quite another to throw the whole country under the bus, while vainly attempting to hold tight to the “brand” of the last name, as has been the case for decades in business.

And for Republicans to join this self-sabotaging parade of nihilism (the rejection of all religious and moral principles) will be their final act of political obstruction that did not start with this administration but has reached heights (depths?) not envisioned for decades, or perhaps even in U.S. constitutional history.

Not only does doing nothing not sit well with an American public that is starving for relief and consideration, the underlying cynicism is soul-destroying for the nation. This nation has had a heart as big as the Grand Canyon, in philanthropy, in foreign aid, in Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and in programs like the Marshall Plan. Even George W. Bush’s campaign to fight AIDS in Africa demonstrated the American heart and compassion and national soul in a most commendable way. Even to be seen to be complicit in the hardening of the arteries, and the plaque build-up that threatens national cardiac arrest of this once noble and exemplary nation, a nation that could and did take pride in its physical beauty and physique, its athleticism and discipline and its intellectual rigour, breadth and depth, is a step too far to be contemplated or envisioned.

And that is true not only for Americans themselves, but for those of us who, having lived in their country and having watched its mercurial rise and fall, and who now watch its character being sullied, tarnished and besmirched by a charlatan. The world cannot afford, and the American legacy cannot tolerate any more days, certainly not months or years of this administration.

And the surgical intervention, if that is what it takes, will have to come from those Republicans most complicit it is electoral genesis.

Are they American enough to do their clear and compelling national duty?