By Mike Weland
One thing about putting radicals in power … They love to make rules, even though they are bad at it and the rules invariably terrible. That’s especially true of the radicals who insist with fervor that they believe in less government, fewer rules. Who tout “True Conservative!” values.
No, such folk are like a kid with a new box of 64 crayons and a stack of paper, they just can’t bring themselves to stop. And goodness me but aren’t they coloring some masterpieces?
Take Dorothy Moon and her faction of the Idaho GOP as regards writing rules necessary for the upcoming GOP caucus. Yes, you read that right, “rules necessary.” We are a nation of rules, of law. A rule or law well crafted can explain and define the steps and sequence of a process or define what is or is not acceptable in a society. There can be no question that rules are essential.
One thing you’ll notice when reading the rules Dorothy and her gang wrote is that the rules they conjured don’t appear written to benefit the voter, but to protect the interests of them of the party who be holding the box of crayons.
Those rules hold no provision for notifying the public, either of the process or of the results once tallied. In fact, a Boundary County caucus official willing to sit down for an interview and explain the rules and processes and who offered to call in the results when they came in had to call back and recant the next day … in Dorothy Moon’s Idaho GOP, elected local GOP officials aren’t authorized or trusted to answer media questions. Only Dorothy Moon is, even if establishing such edicts require her to make up rules on the fly.
No public notification process, no provisions for public dissemination of the rules. Access to the venue strictly limited to only Republicans in good standing, access to the ballot even more stringent. The cult that insisted on their free and unrestricted access to polling sites as official observers in 2020 ban cameras and the media in theirs in 2024.
Far worse, they deliberately make no provision to afford all members of their own party the right to vote; no absentee ballots, no provision whatever for the ill, the disabled, the elderly. No provision made for those registered Idaho Republicans on land, in air and at sea in service to our nation’s military … if you can’t make it in person and on time, if you can’t stand for the duration in the requisite line, if for any reason you can’t bear or abide the mark upon your body which we require without exception (and be careful not to accidentally wash it off!), you can’t participate in our caucus party.
When the rules promulgated are written to push an agenda, advance an ideology or to retain power without any requisite benefit to public service or we, the people, the rules and the intent become destructive. And have you paid attention? Notice who it is that always seems to unseat the Dorothy Moons, the Donald Trumps, Jim Jordans, Marjorie Taylor Greenes, Mike Johnsons, Scott Herndons, Heather Scotts and others of their ilk?
It ain’t the opposition. Not the enemies they’ve been trained to hate, those who “are out to take what’s our’n, by God!”
Nope, it’s the people of their own party, often once true-blue loyal-to-the-death sycophants, who finally wake up to the realization that they’ve been played, shills to a master con. People so played seldom wake in a magnanimous mood. Just ask Mussolini.