Build Back Sanely

 Perhaps the era of slash and burn politics is coming to a close. The tough-talking shoot from the hip style of Kari Lake is where my finger is currently pointing. It strikes me that alienating members of one's own party may not lead to the easiest path. At a campaign stop in the days before the election, Ms. Lake made reference to the middle of the road Republicans exemplified by Senator John McCain. She asked, “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we?” former television anchor Lake asked the event’s attendees, who booed in response. She paused for a moment and then unleashed: “Well, get the hell out!”

Perhaps feeling the MAGAt vibe even more strongly at this moment, Ms. "I don't" Kari added, “Boy, Arizona has delivered some losers, haven’t they?”

John McCain served Arizona in the Senate for thirty-one years. He was elected to the House of Representatives for four years prior to that. And before his time in public office, he served in the Navy, enduring five years in a Vietnamese prison camp where he was tortured and kept in self-confinement. 

John McCain did lose one election. The one he ran against Barack Obama. It was in the closing days of that campaign that he felt the need to recuse himself from the racist and fear-based rhetoric that his party was throwing around about his opponent. A woman stood up at a town hall and insisted that she couldn't trust this Obama fellow because she had heard he "was an Arab." A month before the election of his life, John McCain assured his confused follower, "No ma'am, he's a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that's what this campaign is all about."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what Kari Lake, former news anchor and first time politician, called "a loser." It should likewise be noted that four years ago that I Don't Kari wrote about the Senator's passing that the state of Arizona and the country had lost, “A war hero, icon and a force to be reckoned with.”

Well, it would seem that she has now finished reckoning with that legacy, as millions of new voters came to this most recent election and made their voices heard. Their rejection of the MAGA principles was a bright spot on a somewhat bleak political landscape. Do I imagine that this will be the end of mud-slinging and character assassination? Have we turned the corner on the politics of hate? 

I would like to cast my vote for that.