PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE:  This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

I bumped into a new word this morning – risible.  At least a new word for me.

It came in this paragraph IN column written by Washington Post writer Max Boot:

“In all, 64 per cent of the House Republican caucus showed that defeating Democrats matters more to them than preserving U.S. democracy.  What made this suit all the more RISIBLE is that some of these lawmakers hail from the very states whose votes they were trying to overturn.  None of them, needless to say, claimed that their own victories were tainted by fraud.

What does the word mean?

The dictionary says this:

“Inclined to laugh, or laughable.”

And the context illustrates the point.  U.S. Republicans have been laughable in their inability to accept the fact that “their” candidate, Donald Trump, has been confirmed to be a loser by the Electoral College vote yesterday to confirm the presidency of Joe Biden.

So, again for me, words matter as commentators write about politics – and the word “risible” matters, which means I will know how to use word from now on. 

The conduct of many public officials – led by Republican Members of Congress – is risible.

There are other words to describe Republican conduct.  Abhorrent.  Treasonous or nearly so.  Anti-democracy.  Lunacy.  Cowardly.  To name just a few.

And, while risible is a term of derision, the actions of many Republicans these days makes me want to cry, not laugh.  One recent example struck closer to home than Washingto, D.C.  It occurred a few days ago when some Republican members of the Oregon Senate made the risible decision to sign on to a legal brief supporting the State of Texas appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out votes in four other states.

If the Oregon Rs would have waited only a few more minutes before acting on the brief, they would have seen that the Court threw out the Texas case as being – well – risible.

Washington Post writer Catherin Rampell also dealt with Republican intransigence in her column this morning:

“Over the years, Republican politicians seemed many times to be on the cusp of a reckoning — a realization that a lunatic fringe had seized control of the party’s more pragmatic center and that conspiracy-theorizing, race-baiting, science-denigrating demagogues had transformed the GOP base into ungovernable paranoiacs.  The situation seemed untenable; the fever had to break eventually.

“Yet, the party’s radicalization continued, and the reckoning never came.  Today, U.S. democracy is paying the price as millions of Americans refuse to acknowledge the results of a legitimate election, and their leaders appear too cowardly or too powerless to disrupt the collective delusion.”

A few months ago, a former partner of mine in CFM Advocates contended that ALL Republicans were complicit in Trump’s efforts to become a dictator, thus trampling on democracy values.

I demurred, saying that not “all” Republicans were bowing at the Trump altar.  I still believe that to be the case, but so-called “Republican leaders” in Congress risk giving the entire party a bad name by their failure to stand up for America.

To repeat, their conduct is risible.