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Jimmy Carter would have ridden that midnight train to a federal pen, not Georgia

Berry Craig
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By BERRY CRAIG

AFT Local 1360

Imagine it’s March, 1977. The cold war has yet to thaw.

The CIA and FBI believe the Soviet KGB interfered in the November, 1976, presidential election to boost Democrat Jimmy Carter over incumbent Gerald Ford, a Republican.

Carter insists that a tough anti-Soviet plank be pried out of the Democrat platform.

Carter effusively praises Soviet leaders Alexei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev. Top Carter operatives mysteriously huddle with Soviet officials.

Even faintly praising the Soviet dictators would have cost Carter the election and probably handed the Republicans control of congress, to boot.

If Carter had somehow won, any such KGB election tampering and clandestine confabs with the Soviets would have had the whole country howling for his impeachment on a treason rap.

The ex-Peach State governor and peanut farmer would have ended up on a midnight train to a federal pen, not to Georgia.

Forty years later, the CIA and FBI suspect Vladimir Putin’s Russia intervened in the November election in part to help Donald Trump win. 

The Trump campaign apparently had the GOP platform rewritten to go easier on Russia.

Trump is still fawning over Putin. Trump courtiers met with Russian officials.

Even so, most Republicans are rallying to Trump. Apparently there's nary even a hairline crack in his bedrock support.

Never mind that the Republicans still idolize their cold warrior forebears. They love Ronald Reagan for scorning the Soviet Union as “the Evil Empire.”

Right-wing Republicans of yore never missed a chance to smear Democrats as “soft on communism.”

The John Birch Society, a favorite of the GOP’s reactionary fringe, flat called Democrats closet communists or communist sympathizers. Robert Welch, the society founder, even wrote that President Dwight Eisenhower, a moderate Republican, “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” 

The tea party, the white supremacist alt-right and the Donald Trump presidency are the ideological heirs of the Bircher fringe. 

Anyway, MSNBC's Joy Reid believes that the GOP establishment—which Trump so reviled on the campaign trail— will stand by their man. So do I.

“I don’t think Republicans will ever turn on Trump because Paul Ryan has made it pretty clear that he is going to use Trump’s right hand—is he right-handed?-- to get the things that Paul Ryan wants,” the host of “AM Joy" said on “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

She reloaded and fired again: “And Paul Ryan essentially wants to repeal the 20th century. He wants to privatize Social Security if he can, gut Medicare, gut Medicaid, gut food stamps, essentially throw the poor on to the mercy of charities and churches, turn everything into a fistful of vouchers, a voucher for you to go to school which you’re not going to have to pay for because Ms. DeVos wants to privatize it, a voucher for you to buy health insurance, good luck if the voucher isn’t enough for you to pay for a policy than can actually help you when you’re really sick, and that fistful of vouchers strategy, they can throw it on Trump and say ‘Well, Trump signed it.’”