The Republican party has evolved into the party of disenfranchisement, dishonesty, and outright treachery. One place you might point to as the beginning of this sordid history is the presidency of the primeval ratfucker-in-chief, Richard Nixon. Newly discovered documents show that he intentionally scuttled negotiations to end the Vietnam War for political gain.

Richard M. Nixon always denied it: to David Frost, to historians and to Lyndon B. Johnson, who had the strongest suspicions and the most cause for outrage at his successor’s rumored treachery. To them all, Nixon insisted that he had not sabotaged Johnson’s 1968 peace initiative to bring the war in Vietnam to an early conclusion. “My God. I would never do anything to encourage” South Vietnam “not to come to the table,” Nixon told Johnson, in a conversation captured on the White House taping system.

Now we know Nixon lied. A newfound cache of notes left by H. R. Haldeman, his closest aide, shows that Nixon directed his campaign’s efforts to scuttle the peace talks, which he feared could give his opponent, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, an edge in the 1968 election. On Oct. 22, 1968, he ordered Haldeman to “monkey wrench” the initiative.

John Kerry once said, How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?. He should have said, “How do you ask a man to die in order to elect Richard Nixon?” Then later we get Reagan and Iran-Contra, and George W. Bush and the mega-cluster-fuck in Iraq.

Of course, the problem goes even deeper than that, to a winner-takes-all two party system that fosters insane levels of partisanship. I think we need to burn it all down and start over.

Oh, and there’s even more.

Time has yielded Nixon’s secrets. Haldeman’s notes were opened quietly at the presidential library in 2007, where I came upon them in my research for a biography of the former president. They contain other gems, like Haldeman’s notations of a promise, made by Nixon to Southern Republicans, that he would retreat on civil rights and “lay off pro-Negro crap” if elected president. There are notes from Nixon’s 1962 California gubernatorial campaign, in which he and his aides discuss the need to wiretap political foes.

Also the party of racism.

I knew a child prostitute once. She was 14 or 15 years old, and hung out near a bus stop in Seattle — I used to work late at the university while I was an undergraduate, and it would often happen that I’d have to wait a half hour or so at the stop before transferring, and I kept bumping into this scantily dressed girl shivering on the street. I bought her donuts. We’d talk, briefly. She was miserable and hungry, and there wasn’t much I could do other than a cruller and a little distracting conversation while she was warming up in the donut shop.

I guess I was handling the situation all wrong. I should have had her arrested.

The Tea Party is outraged because California legalized child prostitution…only they didn’t. California passed a law that changes the status of children in the sex trade from criminals to victims.

Does SB 1129 actually legalize child prostitution? No. No, it does not, and that’s an incredibly unfair reading of the law. What the law does is to actually transform a child prostitute — who is not legally capable of providing consent — from a criminal into a victim. The law is designed to aid child prostitutes pimped into the system by sex traffickers.

Sex traffickers and pimps will still be prosecuted. Men and women who sleep with child prostitutes will still be prosecuted. However, rather than arrest child prostitutes and put them in the juvenile detention system, the law provides money to pay for social services so that these children are protected. Police will continue to temporarily detain underage prostitutes, but rather than lock them up in jail, they are diverted into the dependency system, which centers on caring for abused and neglected children.

But you should see the online shrieking of the Trumpkins. All they see is that the damned liberals are trying to sell children into sex slavery, which is exactly the opposite of what’s going on. They are unable to see a young girl in a desperate situation as someone who needs help, rather than further abuse and shaming.

I sometimes wonder what happened to that kid at the bus stop. I graduated and left Seattle; I heard later that the donut shop got closed down because the owner was arrested for being the local fence. That area around 3rd & Pike (I think it was) wasn’t exactly a safe place back in the 1970s.

I believe Russia did meddle in American politics, at least in the sense of assisting Republican propaganda. I could easily accept that their tinkering, and partisan influence from what should be non-partisan bureaucracies (like the FBI) shifted the vote margins by a percentage point or two. You can even argue with me by how much of a percentage and I’d just shrug and go along with it.

But what made an even bigger difference, what really made Trump possible, was an incompetent, smug, conservative Democratic party that bumbled the election at every point. It looks like Matt Taibbi shares my opinion.

Did the Russians do it? Very possibly, in which case it should be reported to the max. But the press right now is flying blind. Plowing ahead with credulous accounts is problematic because so many different feasible scenarios are in play.

On one end of the spectrum, America could have just been the victim of a virtual coup d’etat engineered by a combination of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, which would be among the most serious things to ever happen to our democracy.

But this could also just be a cynical ass-covering campaign, by a Democratic Party that has seemed keen to deflect attention from its own electoral failures.

The outgoing Democrats could just be using an over-interpreted intelligence “assessment” to delegitimize the incoming Trump administration and force Trump into an embarrassing political situation: Does he ease up on Russia and look like a patsy, or escalate even further with a nuclear-armed power?

Emphasis is mine. All the news about Russian interference is just playing to the media and giving the DNC an excuse, all while distracting the party from actually confronting their deep internal problems and doing something about it.

Because, I fear, they don’t want to do anything about it.