This week I read a post at Tea Party Nation promoting the view that “one way to defeat this out of control president is to immediately stop all investigations into past administration scandals (which have been forgotten anyway) and focus everyone’s attention on “current affairs.”

This proposal is so transparently illogical that I would let it go without comment, except for the fact that it reflects the de facto Party line of the GOP’s quisling congressional leaders. The author of the post claimed, however, that it would “Turn the tides. Make big waves. Get the people’s attention.” He concluded that “otherwise, Obama owns the Republicans.”

In fact, the problem isn’t just that Obama owns the Republicans. It’s that a factional clique, which believes that it has overthrown the constitutional republic, owns the controlling leadership in both parties. It is futile to keep coming up with strategies based on the assumption that the GOP quislings will do something if only someone can come up with a clever enough suggestion as to how they do it. They don’t have the will to act on behalf of the Constitution. Their allegiance is now to the factional forces who provide the money, and control the institutions (especially the elitist faction media) they depend on to use their positions in the government against the will of the people they pretend to represent. What will it take to convince self-professed conservatives of this obvious fact?

Begging people who have and will continue to refuse to hear you is a fruitless waste of scarce resources. At some point, like George Washington after the string of British victories in New York, you must stop fighting on their terms and dare to go against the odds to achieve victory on terms that concentrate your smaller forces against your adversary’s vulnerabilities. This requires that you accept the fact that they are your adversaries.

In the present instance, the elitist faction’s vulnerabilities lie precisely in the fact that the acts of treason Obama has already committed are everyday more clearly proven by the evidence that keeps coming out. So is the GOP’s collusion in them. Letting the past go means:

1. Approving Loretta Lynch for attorney general just as if her declared support for the unconstitutional executive orders Obama has already issued  doesn’t disqualify her from holding any position of trust that requires swearing to uphold the U.S. Constitution;

2. Approving ex post facto “fast track” negotiating authority for the U.S. Senate’s vote on the TPP just as if Obama respected the “advise and consent” role of the U.S. Senate before and during the secret negotiations that produced it, just as if Obama’s calculated disregard for the role the U.S. Constitution assigns to the U.S Senate never happened;

3. Pretending Obama and his collaborators (including the quislings in the GOP leadership) can be trusted to deal with issues such as the growing threat of Iranian nuclear weapons and/or hegemony in the Middle East, and the global (including U.S. domestic) and increasingly dangerous implications of the Obama faction’s self-contradictory, self-defeating policy toward ISIS in particular and the Islamic Jihad in general don’t matter; and

4. Giving short shrift to the investigation into the Benghazi debacle, though it’s increasingly clear that it involved policies that gave aid and comfort to America’s enemies, in deadly ways that have already exacted a tragic cost in terms of the innocent lives of Americans, and of people from nations allied with or friendly to us.

The past is precedent. If precedents that turn the Constitution into scrap paper, and treason into a forgettable offence, are not challenged and overturned, they become “the new normal,” and the Constitution becomes little more than a coffee table magazine, useful to help gullible Americans beguile themselves, while their liberty is being conclusively extinguished. The “forget the past” strategy is like trying to stop the proliferation of a noxious weed by lopping off new branches and leaves here and there. It is a recipe for failure, a mask for capitulation.

Some of those promoting this illogic don’t intend it that way, but in fact that’s what it amounts to. On the other hand, I’m sure the GOP’s quisling leadership in Congress fully intends it to aid and abet their unwavering collaboration with Obama.  They will go with anything that gives them an excuse for failing to call Obama to account.  They’ll say they’re governing.  But what they’re really doing is enabling the doom of constitutional self-government of, by, and for the people of the United States.