Mark Sanford is the former Republican South Carolina Governor who went “hiking on the Appalachian Trail,” leading to his resignation. I am not sure I have ever seen a politician engineer a more impressive comeback as a serious person with serious ideas, and serious adherence to his true political ideals.

He won a congressional seat from South Carolina post-scandal, and he then lost that congressional seat because he flatly refused to sell his political soul to the Trump movement. I can respect that.

He took to the pages of the New York Times to pen an Op-Ed that spared his party absolutely nothing. He told the truth, that the GOP has knowingly allowed Trump to take the nation to economic (and social, in my mind, even worse) ruin.

President Trump’s abandonment of fiscal responsibility will prove disastrous — whether we think about it or not. His State of the Union address underscored his own thinking; it was long on pander and did not address our country’s bleak financial state.

Yet amazingly, conservatives whom I have long respected somehow look the other way.

No, not at all “amazingly,” your Republican party was never really “conservative,” not in a generation at least. But we can respect those of you that at least believe enough in your political ideology that you can’t be led from it – even though we vehemently disagree.

Now, the most terrifying paragraph in the Op-Ed, one that rings true, if you sit back and consider it for a moment:

First, despite the president’s words, financially we have never been as vulnerable as a country since the Great Depression and World War II. We have never run deficits this big in peacetime. What happens to them when the economy cools?

We go in the absolute tank and run the risks of a depression-recession that the Democrats – once again – have to fix. If there is a pattern established in the last two generations, it is that Republicans get elected on the promise that tax cuts will set the economy “loose,” which works for a bit of a sugar high.

And then the debts come due, the economy craters, and Democrats are elected to mop up all the shit. Which they then do, only to be rewarded by Republicans getting themselves elected on the same thing all over again – and lately, by minority numbers.

We can agree that Trump’s spending along with his tax cuts is driving the country over the fiscal cliff. Not that he cares. And if one were to believe conspiracy theories (it is only that, a theory) this is all part of Trump’s job, as directed from Eastern Europe. Trump doesn’t care if the country goes down, so long as he stays “up.”

Keep fighting Mr. Sanford. We won’t ever align with you ideologically. But we can damn sure align with you putting the country over the dictator.

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Peace, y’all

Jason

[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom