And Now A Word From Josh Marshall (On Trump And Tyrants)

I have been pondering this same thing:

If you look around over the last week there are a number of highly sophisticated Republican voices arguing that Donald Trump is the sort of demagogue and potential strongman our political system was designed to prevent from gaining power in our country. They are portentous and ominous words and true in many respects. But they would be far more credible if so many Republicans - not necessarily the same writers, but countless formal and informal spokespersons including numerous high-ranking elected officials - hadn't spent the last seven years ranting that the temperamentally cautious and cerebral Barack Obama was a 'dictator' who was trampling the constitution.

Yea, like this piece by Diana West in the Tribune-Review (it's only from August, 2014). She begins:

How will future generations look back on our gravest national emergency of all time? And how will they regard what their forebears didn't do about it?

And then asks a series of "what they will ask about us in the future" sort of questions. Like this one:

“Seriously,” they will say to a granny whose granny told her. “You're telling us that in 2014, the people still had the vote? Still had the Internet? That they still could elect a Congress with the powers of the purse, which could, at the very least, have provided funds to states for the National Guard to stop the invasion of 2014-2024? And they did ... nothing?”

“That's right,” she will croak. “They did nothing.”

“Why? Tell us again why they didn't love liberty enough to defend the former Constitution and impeach the tyrant?”

By the way Diana West has a different opinion about Donald Trump:

Brent Bozell has called on conservatives to rally around Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for the Republican presidential nomination. Ted Cruz is a good man and a fine candidate — my own second choice — but I believe GOP frontrunner Donald Trump is the candidate for American patriots to rally around.

Yea, you can just smell the freedom.

And then there was this from 2011.  It's about a tea-party rally (of course it is):

A second speaker, Kitty Werthmann, who grew up in Austria under the Nazis, warned about the growth of tyranny under the Obama administration. She equated the modern environmental movement to Communism, declaring that "green is the new red."

The master of ceremonies for the event, Southwest Pa. Tea Party organizer Darin Donnelly, said after Werthmann's presentation that "if we don't listen to people like Kitty we are doomed."

And then a few paragraphs later:

Donnelly characterized Obama as "a dictator in the White House."

I wonder how these folks will explain away Trump's promise to reinstate torture when he was quoted as saying:

I would absolutely authorize something beyond waterboarding.

I mean, they do understand that it's against the law, right?  And for a president to "authorize" torture he'd have to be doing it in a dic-ta-tor-ial fashion, right?

The only way for Trump to "authorize" torture is to be a dictator.

What say yee, teapartiers?  Ms West?