The Pathetic Party

Renaming Lake Ontario is ridiculous on its face and the people who indulge it, whether actively or passively, are pathetic.

We’re back in the stupid. Donald Trump thinks he’s renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America,” just like he thinks he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Republicans like Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum cheered him on. I’m sure MAGA is pumping its collective fist, shouting, “Hell, yeah!” Other Republicans are looking the other way, pretending it’s not happening. It’s all pathetic.

Burgum, of course, knows better. He’s just sucking up to Donald Trump and trying not to alienate the shrinking MAGA base that’s dumb enough to think it’s actually great. Other Republicans will try to equivocate. I can hear Thom Tillis now: “The president is getting bad advice,” as if Trump isn’t the one constantly making the dumb decisions — from threatening to invade Greenland to renaming large bodies of water to implying he will annex Canada.

And, of course, there’s the idiot wing of the GOP that honestly believes Trump can rename the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. They think the Canadians would gladly join the United States. Natural selection will eventually get them, even if it might take a while.

There are those who really believe Trump’s false narratives — mostly paranoid people easily manipulated by confirmation bias. There are those who know better but cynically use the dark fantasy of hordes of immigrants voting to push through voting restrictions. And finally there are those who should know better but don’t because they have allowed their political inclinations to cloud their judgment and reason. They are all pathetic — and dangerous.

So in that vein, I’m renaming the Republican Party the Pathetic Party. It’s long past time for them to change their name. They haven’t been republican in a long time. They don’t want power to reside with the people. They want a tinpot dictatorship or a cabal of cronies who rule with little accountability.

They are pathetic because they cater to the whims of Donald Trump and indulge the prejudices of our most ignorant people. In North Carolina, they banned Sharia Law even though only one percent of the state is Muslim and the parts of Sharia Law they don’t like are already illegal. They keep creating solutions to imaginary problems.

But renaming lakes is just the silly end of a much more dangerous pattern. The same people cheering “Lake America” are the ones who believe millions of non-citizens are voting in our elections. They use the power of social media to spread these false narratives and then cynically use them to push through legislation that restricts access to the ballot box. It’s all the same impulse — manufactured outrage over imaginary problems while real ones go unaddressed.

They’ve been pushing the fallacy of massive numbers of non-citizens voting without any evidence. It was the root of Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government when he lost in 2020. It’s become an article of faith among many otherwise sane conservatives.

But the whole storyline falls apart when you step back. Why would a bunch of immigrants, whether here legally or illegally, vote en masse? What is the purpose of threatening their livelihoods to cast a ballot that’s certainly not going to make that much of a difference? They have a greater chance of getting deported than getting some sort of windfall.

If some organized effort were underway, it certainly would have come to light after fifteen years of scrutiny. But they’ve got nothing — just a nightmare fantasy about dark-skinned people controlling the country. They’ve been pushing this lie for fifteen years and all they’ve got to show for it is a more restricted ballot box.

The Pathetic Party has decided to overlook the blatant corruption and indiscretions of the president for some sort of political gain. They’ve indulged the basest instincts of the most paranoid and narrow-minded citizens to engage them politically. And they’ve come to believe their own lies to justify undermining democracy and embracing authoritarianism.

They are ignorant, cynical, and delusional, putting their politics above the good of the country. They are pathetic, not patriotic, and they can’t even tell the difference.