 It's February the 3rd, 2021. It's Wednesday, it's 11 o'clock. It's time for Rediscovering America. I'm your host, Tim Appachella. And the title of today's show is, is there a sane GOP party out there? And I think I'm gonna go right to our guests. I'd like to introduce Jay Fiedel, Stephanie Dalton, and Winston Welch. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, Jim. You know, every week it just seems like it's something so, you know, every week is just unbelievably packed filled with news articles and news stories and things that, you know, 10, 20 years ago would be unbelievable. But here we see them once a day and every week, even though with Donald Trump out of the office, things are still fantastic. So Jay, where is our GOP party these days? Is it changed forever? Well, will the GOP, what I call the old guard GOP, will they get their party back or is it forever lost with the kooks, the kunans and the conspiracy theorists? You know, I think it's that exact question is in the balance right now. We're at a kind of tipping point because, you know, there are many people out there leaving the Republican party because it's so crazy. And there are others trying to save it. Like McConnell is trying to save it. His comment calling Green a loony a couple of days ago, that is an example of him trying to save the Republican party. He's trying to separate the crazies out of the party. If he succeeds, it will continue, it will survive. If he doesn't succeed, it's gonna go downhill into, you know, some sort of dark abyss, which, you know, it could easily do. We are at a tipping point. And I guess the question is where Trump fits in all of this. I think Trump is trying to make it crazy. It doesn't work well, but he's apparently given up on his idea of having a patriot party and he's rather trying to hijack the Republican party. This is ultimately a battle, I think, between McConnell and Trump. How do you like that? And my feeling is that McConnell will probably win because, you know, pursuant to the theory that we all discussed earlier, as Trump is out of office and off Twitter, and he is, you know, the bad things he has done are being revealed. And that trial next week is gonna show other bad things and he's gonna lose more support, even if he's, you know, acquitted at the trial. And over time, the power is gonna slough off him and he won't have the clout to really build a patriot or hijack the Republican party. And McConnell will probably cut some kind of deals. I'm not sure with what, with Schumer. And we will have a, you know, a bilateral system. And that will be a good thing. So I can't say I'm optimistic about this, but I see the possibilities out there and they seem real in terms of the survival of the Republican party as a rational party. Well, let's look at one person, the representative, House representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene. How's it become the lighting rod and the polarizing figure? One person that's ripping the GOP party in two. But let's take a look at a couple of things that she has stood for and has either said or has supported. One is shoot Pelosi in the head. Two, hang Obama in the first lady. Three, Jewish bankers are sending laser beams from the sky to burn the northern woods of California and the wildfires created by these laser beams. 9-11 never happened. The Parkland shootings never happened. Just to name a few of the crazy things that she has, you know, sprouted and talked about. And, but yet we only have really Mitch McConnell has come out and has spoken and called her Looney Lies and she's a cancer on the GOP. But he just said that a day ago, where was he a long time ago when she first was elected? Where was, well, Mitch McCartney, excuse me, Mitt Romney has come out recently and a few others have come out. But where's Kevin McCarthy? Is his loyalty split between Donald Trump and the sanity of the GOP party? What's your opinion about McCarthy? I think he bends over for Trump and I think he's completely compromised for Trump. He's Trump's best friend right now. And it's a very sad story because he'll never be able to recover his reputation and he thinks that's gonna help him in the next election. He's probably wrong. It's a huge mistake, a strategical career mistake that he's made. On the other hand, I also feel that the green is actually a good friend of the Democrats. What I mean is she's so out of her mind that people have gotta be turning off the Republicans in general. And the Democrats win by that. Nobody in his right mind is gonna believe what she's saying. You know, when she first started to speak, you only had anecdotal examples of this kind of craziness. But now when we start putting it together, accumulating all her ridiculous things that she's been saying, I mean, any rational person, not everybody is rational, but every rational person would say, this is a real crook here. We can't side with her. So I think she's really destructive for the Republican Party. I think she helps the Democrats. And she helps, I mean, I think, of course, Mitch McConnell has done some terrible, terrible things in the last four years. And he should have cleaned things up a long time ago and been reasonable and cared for the country a long time ago. But now, as usual, he's caring for himself. And he wants to survive himself as the leader of the Republican Party. And therefore, he's going to castigate her and make them distanced and it's all predictable. I don't think that she's gonna have a long-term effect. I think she's gonna be exercised from all legitimate institutions in the government, such as they are. All righty, thank you, Jay. Hey, you know, we've had some power outages on the island here and Cynthia, Lisa and Claire, that's normally with us, she's ready to come on. So let's take a quick pause and see if we can get Cynthia in. In the meantime, hey, Winston. Yes, sir. You know, I've been saying that when it comes to facts, they're really irrelevant with the GOP. We're in a belief realm. When you're in a realm of belief, facts really don't matter, they don't count. To what degree has the evangelical party that has been attached to the GOP party since really the Ronald Reagan days when the moral majority was kind of took an entree into the politics of the GOP. And it was a nice symbiotic relationship for all these decades. But now it's led to almost the acceptance of these crazy Q non theories, conspiracy theories and anything goes, whatever Donald Trump used to say, anything goes. And now what anyone says, as long as it's defense of the Trumpers, anything goes. To what degree has the evangelicals damaged the GOP party and what can be done about it? Oh, it's a big question. And I think it's more what has the reverse question is also true, what has the party done to evangelical Christianity or Christianity in general? And, you know, we have very good folks of faith who are Christians who probably rightly feel that their religion has become mixed up in this craziness and they didn't sign up for that. There was a really good article in Vox, I believe, about how Christianity, evangelical Christianity and the Republican Party had just sort of become one. And that was, I think came out today in an interview with David French who identifies as a conservative evangelical Christian. And I thought that was a good article. Other articles, you know, Jay is normally a little more pessimistic than I am. And I'm gonna go a little more pessimistic than Jay today. We are in a battle for this. And will Mitch McConnell come out on top? Probably, but there's so many people. I love the article, didn't love it, but the one that says the main health crisis facing America after COVID is a mental health crisis. And just the fact that we have so many people that we have elected members of Congress who are queuing on supporters or that elected a queuing on supporter in this. And while she may have clicked some likes and stuff on Facebook, and we shouldn't all be held to that, you know, I make sure there's not anything calling for elimination of public officials in a life way. You know, I mean, we may want some people not to be elected, but there's a difference between that and what she has been promoting or that Sandy Hook didn't happen or Parkland and all of that, it's nonsense. But there's on the other side, you know, the Guardian came out with an article and it says it's long past time to admit the blindingly obvious that Republican party has been hijacked by fascist extremist. It is now a far right organization in league with neo-Nazis who've made it painfully clear that they wanna overthrow democracy and seize power using violence if necessary. Every decision the so-called leaders make at this point defines which side they are on. The United States as we know it or white supremacist mob. That was from the Guardian Richard Wolfe and that came out today. I thought representative Kitzinger, also said he was on a call and he said, the reality is this, this is the time to choose and my goal in launching countryfirst.com is just to say, look, let's take a look at the last four years, how we've come in a bad way, how far we come in a bad way, how backwards looking we are, how much we peddle darkness and division and that's not the party I ever signed up for and I think most Republicans didn't sign up for that. So for Jay, I would say, okay, you've got this thing here, you know, Boston Globe has one that says the post-Trump, the GOP's post-Trump pivot isn't happening. Sure, Donald Trump is an insurrectionist, but he's our insurrectionist. So right now we're here. Are we going to applaud Liz Cheney or are we gonna applaud the QAnon lady? And you got Kevin McCarthy this week going down to kiss the ring of Donald Trump. He's speaker of the house. He said this, that the insurrection is Donald Trump's responsibility and now he's backtracking on that. So I don't know what games Mitch McConnell is playing and where he's gonna be in there, but he can't have it both ways. He can't leave Liz Cheney hanging out to dry for three weeks and now decide that she's great. So I think regardless of where you are religiously or politically, this is really the battle that the GOP, it is true. It's the battle for the soul of the party and therefore in many ways the nation, but at the end of the day, they need to make some hard choices here and marginalize people that are just crazy and don't share in a vision of America that the vast majority of us do. Okay, thank you. I think his good point is the battle of the soul for the party and I believe that you need a too healthy two-party system in this country and I'd like to see the GOP repair itself and not be in this position that they find themselves to be in. Absolutely. Since you're real quick, you've talked about the influence of evangelicals in the GOP party on many, many shows. Does the GOP finally separate itself from the evangelical vote and do they court the evangelicals moving forward? I think that the Republicans are going to court whomever that they can to get the votes that they need because of their dwindling numbers. So I think that's why they haven't totally separated themselves from Trump at first they were going to and then they're like, well, maybe we better not because they realized, you know, they'd already lost 30, what was it, 30%? No, 30,000. 30,000 Republicans had already left the party. They can't afford to lose even one more. So do you know that Reverend Graham, Billy Graham's son, Franklin Graham, he likened the people who vote, the Republicans who voted for impeachment, right? They, he likened them to Judas Iscariot, the guy, you know, the one who betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. Excuse me, Trump is not Jesus. And those Republicans are not anything like Judas Iscariot and they didn't do it for the money either. They did it for the con for their level of conscience, right? And they were supposed to vote by conscience and they did. Well, let's look at that because, you know, for 30 years, 40 years since Ronald Reagan, you know, be it on Pat Robinson or a lot of these, you know, the 700 club or whatever club you wanna watch, they've been castigating Democrats as evil, that they're the devil incarnate. And so no, 40 years later, it's no wonder that a belief system is taken hold in the GOP party, not a rational political system. And so it's not any surprise to me that we find ourselves where we find ourselves with the crazies in the party. And they seem to be now kind of steamrolling over the old guard. So I go to the question is, does at some point, does someone, you know, the old guard say, in order to preserve our party, we're going to have to do something and come up with a set of ideas and policies versus crazy belief systems, just so we can get votes. That we amend the party and come up with a reasonable platform in the future that competes with the Democratic platform. And we win them on the basis of ideas and policies, not on just voting numbers. Well, you know. Can I jump in here for a minute, Tim? Of course. I just wanna say that it goes beyond politics. The country has turned to religion. The separation of church and state under the First Amendment has seriously deteriorated. And I became aware of this when George Bush got up there, W got up there at his inauguration and talked about a faith-based government. He said, what's going on here? And instructed his attorney general to protect the faith organizations and not to enforce the separation of church and state. What's going on here? And now we find that this is like all over, this is ubiquitous. The evangelicals are only a part of it. The country has turned to religion and religion overcomes politics in many ways. And until we get back to separating those things, and I hope Biden's administration can do that, we have a problem. Houston has a problem with, we have a program coming on next week involving an expert on the question of terrorism and religion and how religion has created a number of elements of terrorism. Well, this, you know, interaction and all and what's going on in the Republican party is a kind of terrorism, isn't it? It's destructive of our democracy and a lot of it comes from religion. I don't know how we fix that, but I think the fundamental point is not so much where religion is in politics, it's where religion is in our society. Good point. And yet, the yet church attendance is way down in this country. That's one of the points I was going to make. And is it okay if I answer to it? Yes, of course. One of the things that has really undermined that the religious doctrine over these last probably 20 years maybe is that individual churches, the non-denominational churches that are popping up everywhere, the so-called conservative Christians, evangelicals, they don't answer to anybody. There's no body that sort of oversees, like with the Methodist church, every year we have to go to all these meetings, we have to set new rules, we have to agree on the rules. Then there's the consequences, if you don't follow the rules, all that sort of stuff in every major denomination. Now you've got all these individual churches that can do whatever they want. They don't answer to anybody. So they kind of make up the stuff as they go along, they get further and further and further away from the actual teachings of the Bible and get further into their own crazy ideas of what they think it should be. And that's where I really think we took a left turn. That's right turn. We took a left turn as we came out the door. And that's really where religion, I think, in my mind anyway, took a left turn. Okay, thank you. Hey, Stephanie, that's gonna be hard for you because I'm gonna ask you a whole bunch of questions and if you don't remember them, that's okay, just ask me again. But number one, does the GOP party, does the house, the GOP members themselves, force representative Green out of her committees, the Education and Labor Committee? That's one question. Two is, what happens with Kevin McCarthy? Does he lose his leadership for following this path of destruction for the GOP party? And I'll let you answer those and then I'll get another one for you. I wanna say, interesting Cynthia's comments, everybody's, of course, but with Cynthia's comments, remember that the majority of our leadership in this country is Roman Catholic, okay? So I think your point is very good. So we've got all this going on across the spectrum, the totally independent, like the Republican party, remember they have no platform, like all these people you're talking about have no guidance or sign-ons or whatever their principles are that are guiding them for the work they do for Christ or whoever. But anyway, so there is a big issue here on religion. So, and it's covered across the board, they're represented in ways never like before, for the first time ever. So anyway, as far as Tim, your questions are so good, they're so hard. And the only hard to answer to prognosticate about because first of all, I think that this is a positive context we're in now actually for the first time in a long time because the Wizard of Oz curtain is back, the curtain is back, the whole Senate and the House too. We see where these people are because they have no guiding principles, they have no framework that they're coming out of, okay, the Republican people. So now they're all kinda like when you push your phone and everybody starts shaking everything, all the apps start shaking. So they're all trying to figure, oh, good, here we are. And so they've got so many things in place that they built like all of the gerrymandering that guarantees so many seats across this country. So they've got some stuff that's pretty tight and on hold and it's gonna take a while to make that anywhere near equitable for all of us across the country as far as a representation in the House especially. Well, that's one of the things that, excuse me, that President Biden wants to reform is the gerrymandering process as part of his election reform package which is a very important package. Yes it is, but the thing is they haven't even finished the census yet and like the post office, we had all this kinda screwing around with the census and the shutting it down and not going long enough and not being able to get off. So if for the first time in a century, the function of the census was disrupted. So we don't even know, we'll find out more about this. I think they're supposed to report this end of this month or so about what they've got and how much they got. And I'll bet you not enough, not anyway. So that's a 10 year thing, right? So that doesn't happen again for another decade and all the decisions will be based on what they got out of this census. And that's where, you know, whether there's gerrymandering or not. So I mean, that's connected to the gerrymandering. I'm hardly an expert on how that all works. But anyway, that is feeding into what's being gerrymandered and how to adjust that. And it certainly does need it. So Biden, yes, has got the right ideas as far as I'm concerned and he's helping to sort of put the ship, you know, the fleet back on course again, because right now it's all over the Pacific Ocean, boats going in every direction and not even in any big majority. And the Democrats- Okay, but what is the DOP, what are they gonna do with their own, specifically Representative Green? What are they gonna do? Are they gonna put her, as Mitch McConnell said, put her in the fur, excuse me, Karl Rose said, put her in the furthest building away from the house floor. Do they do that? Do they strip her of her committee work and do they put Representative Green in the furthest building away from the house floor? Well, there you go. That's not gonna shut her up and it's not gonna erase her egregious accusations or statements about what's happened in this country. But it would, I believe that they might surprise us and start coming around because at some point they're gonna get real here that when they do this voting on the president's impeachment trial, I mean, he's already been impeached. Like, wish they just shut up about all that because he's been impeached while he was in office. That was the first step. This is the trial. It's nothing that doesn't necessarily have to get in the way of that. But my point is, they're gonna say, oh, hey, this is gonna go, this is getting written down on the record, the congressional record is about as precious as the constitution. And I'm in that for all my historical value to the nation. So at some point, I think these people are gonna get serious about, and then this, and I bring this back up to this green woman, is the first, is kind of a preview maybe of, hey, this is serious. Do I wanna go down in history as signing up for this idiot? I mean, so what? What? So I don't, now it's just, I don't believe that they're gonna turn around and all of their views and all of their ideas are gonna go with logic and get all that done. That's all, as we know, values and norms. And all of that has been stripped out of the Senate. And that's one thing we can see in that party. There are no values that we recognize. There's no principles guiding them that we all have common understanding and belief in. So they have managed to really unroot themselves. So I think with the beginning of a rerouting or turning this fleet around or going sort of in the same direction. Okay, thanks for your, you mentioned the word history or historic. So thank you, Stephanie. Jay, historic moment gonna happen here in a week. Whether the trial is going to be for or against Donald Trump, we have an event that will be in the history books for at least 7,500 years. And that is the storming from our own citizenship, the Capitol. The children will be reading about this forever. The question I have for you is, by the trials in, what transformative lessons will be learned? Will it shape our society? And remember, go back to the phrase, eternal vigilance for democracy. Does that start to work its way through our society again that the importance democracy is paramount and this trial will put that subject in the spotlight. Yeah, and the other quote that comes to mind is public confidence is the firmest pillar of justice. And if he is acquitted, which I'm afraid to tell you, my guess is, I mean, I'm interested in everybody else feels, but my guess is that he will be acquitted because that's the way it sets up. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of conviction only because we're a week away. And as we have seen, things could turn upside down in a week anytime in this crazy world. But the likelihood is he will be acquitted and the Republicans will look terrible over it because when you take both of these impeachment proceedings, in each case, they didn't give the impeachment managers half a chance. However, in the course of this trial next Wednesday and thereafter, I don't know how long it's gonna last, you know, Nancy Pelosi and well, and Biden wanted to last very quick, but in the course of this trial, we're gonna see evidence come out that it's gonna be remarkable. It reminds me of the thing yesterday with what's his name, Cyknic, the fellow who died in the insurrection, the Capitol Police officer. Well, they really put a lot of time and effort into that proceeding. And Joe Biden himself and his wife visited and it was really heavyweight. And I understood they were gonna try to do another proceeding, another event about that this morning. And then why is that important? It's because the world is watching and so you can hardly avoid it on television. Assuming it's now. Well, actually, I hate to interrupt, but Fox did not mention it. They did not report on it. That's disgusting, that's predictable. So my point though is that, you know, you have these events that stress what happened. You have these events that replay the insurrection, they try to make sense of it. And at that trial, there's gonna be a lot of, you know, data that comes out. It's gonna be all those thousands of phone movie clips and comments by people who were there or who had friends there. You know, we're gonna hear all of it at that trial. And it's going to accentuate what happened. And so what you get is this weird Alice in Wonderland kind of thing where they come in with all this evidence. It's undeniable. And then you parse out the language of Trump's inciting remarks nearby. And you can only come to one human logical conclusion that he incited. And then the Republicans all vote against conviction. This is kind of remarkable. And it goes to what I was saying before. It goes to public confidence. You know, what kind of an individual who sees all that evidence, then sees an acquittal and manages to, you know, still support the government in general, because of those clowns in Washington that can't seem to get anything done, including the COVID relief act. You know, what kind of a government do we have? How can we be confident in this at all? I also wanted to mention, since I have the floor for a moment, what I have been thinking the last few days, that is Trump's big defense, okay, is that, depending on what lawyers he has, Trump's big defense is that this whole thing is unconstitutional because he wasn't president. He isn't president at the time of the impeachment trial, which is a ridiculous argument because A, I think there is precedent for that. And B, that means if you take that seriously, it means that a president can do the most God-awful things in the last days of his administration and defer with McConnell's help, defer the trial until afterward and fully get away with it. But here's my point. On the one hand, he says it's unconstitutional because it's too late because he's no longer the president. But his other argument is I am still the president. So which one is it? Those two are mutually exclusive. How is this possible? Well, I was being rather flippant last night when the question came through and I really do go to Rene Descartes and that is I think therefore I am and in Donald Trump's world, he thinks anything and therefore he is all these things. So that's a typography that we've talked about. So trying to make rational sense of the defense for this trial, there is no defense and there's no rationale to it. But now, can I just say this? I always think like Nancy Pelosi, not certainly at that level in dignity and everything, but it's about the children. Imagine all of our high school students in this name, all our adolescents, they see these jerky people running in and clobbering the Capitol with sticks and stones and probably guns and nothing happens. So how is it that we can even discipline in our families with our children if the government is not willing to give any consequences? And who are these people who've never had, obviously they don't have jobs. They were all there on a Wednesday, getting there on a Tuesday and going home on a Thursday. And a lot of them were military, but who knows if they were coming out on a good conduct discharge or not. You don't ever know that when you see a military person just because they've got those camouflage on, doesn't mean they've served the country with the honor and the dignity all the way. Well, we were not in the same situation, but we had similar situations for a year and a half, two years, three years in 1968. The stain could be said about what about the kids watching all that on TV. And I was one of them. Okay, thank you Stephanie. Yeah, I mean, there's no punishment for anything for these people. They can have jobs that they can go without working, they can go serve and not, you know, anyway, that's my point. There's no consequence. Thank you Stephanie. We're almost out, in fact, we are out of time, but hey, Wist, I wanna get to you on one point here. And that is assuming Jay's right that there is an acquittal of the trial. Is there anything positive that comes out from the evidence about what occurred, who was behind it and connect the dots? Is there anything positive that comes out of next week? It's a mess. I think Lindsey Graham is right. He says, oh, be careful what you wish for. Well, they're gonna bring out all the mud they can and then they're gonna realize that this is just a lot. It's a lot of people who are doing this. And it says, Kathleen Parker, I just wanna throw a couple of things. For those of you like Jay, who believe the Republicans can be salvaged, there's an excellent article in National Review, nonetheless, called Restoring the Conservative Conscience. And it's on from January 21st. That it was a very good article. In NBC News says, GOP senators at Trump impeachment trial are dooming the party. They need to repudiate him. And Washington Post, Kathleen Parker on the 29th had a wonderful article that says, the GOP isn't doomed. It's dead. She just says, there's no way that they can go along with this anymore if you're not voting against this, you're associated with a colleague, the green that calls for the speaker's murder, promotes QAnon that Trump was leading a war against Satan worshiping pedophiles and cannibals. And he says, you Republicans, you own all this, your party isn't doomed, it's dead. The chance to move away from Trump isn't towards a more respectful, civilized approach to governance that acknowledges realities of a diverse nation and that doesn't have to surrender to the clenched fist has slipped away. What comes next is anyone's guest, but anyone who doesn't speak out against myth and lies of fringe groups, domestic terrorists and demagogues such as Trump deserves only defeat and link the exile and infamy. Good riddance. We'll see what happens this week. Yeah, we'll see what happens. There's so much coming out. I have hope for the GOP. I think again, we need a healthy two-party system. I used to be in the GOP and someday it will come back strong and healthy. I don't know when. So we have run out of time. We get the information out if the Fox is not presenting anything. These people writing these illustrative and illuminated and intelligent articles, they are not being read by these people. And if they're... Well, that's another show, Stephanie. That is the media and the message. And right now that's gotta be fixed. Just the disaster, yeah. I really don't think we progressed and move forward until the media and the message is repaired. And that goes to the FCC, which that's a whole another show. So we'll have to tackle that later. All right, I want to say thank you to everybody. Thank you for joining us, a great discussion. And I love the fact that we get together once a week and we have such great minds here and great opinions. And I thank you one and all. So Jay Fidel, Winston Welch, Stephanie Dalton, Cynthia Leeson, Claire, thank you for joining us on the rediscovery in America. We'll see you Wednesday, 11 o'clock next week. I'm Tim Appetell, your host, Aloha.