On Friday morning, Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas faintly -- very faintly -- praised Republicans for their straightforwardness while damning them for their supposed hostility to political freedom. The post’s headline: “Republicans are totalitarians, and they’re being more honest about it every day.”
“We’ve long known that Republicans have little respect for traditional democratic norms and ideals,” charged Kos. “We’ve seen it in their hostility toward voting rights, their decimation of traditional norms in the House and Senate…their obstruction of the Obama agenda despite being in the deep minority, and their worship of big daddy strongmen (like Putin, even before Putin installed a puppet regime in our White House)…Conservatives used to at least pay lip service to the idea of democracy. Yet the last few weeks have been rough on that facade.”
Kos’s indictment of the GOP included:
-- “Mike Huckabee call[ed] for the elimination of an elected Senate, and specifically, the 17th Amendment, which literally has the words ‘elected by the people’ in it.”
-- “Conservatives are literally pining for dictatorship, like Fox host Jesse Waters [sic]: ‘A lot of people wish President Trump was a dictator, maybe we could repeal Obamacare. It would be a lot easier that way.’ When Republicans thwarted President Barack Obama, did we sit there and say, ‘God, I wish he was a dictator!’ Of course not, even as Republicans convinced themselves that’s what Obama wanted. They do projection really well.”
-- “According to a YouGov poll, 45 percent of Republicans want the government to ‘shut down “biased or inaccurate” media outlets’ (of course, they’re not talking about Fox News or Breitbart).”
-- “Conservatives don’t care about Russian interference in our elections. If Hillary Clinton was elected on the back of a massive Russian intelligence operation, I can guarantee you we wouldn’t be shrugging that off here at Daily Kos. But to Republicans, elections aren’t sacrosanct.”
Kos concluded that Republicans have made “a mockery of our democratic norms and ideals, and the reasons why are obvious. They hate democracy. They love Putin-style autocracy. And it’s up to us to make sure that never happens here, in these United States.”
