I have ranted on several occasions about the inability of Democrats to get their message across and their tendency to undermine themselves by their inept communications strategy. The Republicans, by contrast, have done a great job of manipulating the media and their base, enabling them to pursue policies that hurt their own voters at least as badly as they hurt everyone else, moreso in some cases. But the Republicans are not perfect, and I hereby predict that they are about to embark on a public relations disaster.
The Republicans are nonentities in cities, and are rapidly losing the relatively affluent suburbs, maintaining maximum strength in those places where folks are losing intellectual capacity through extensive inbreeding. That’s why they need to suppress votes, but they wouldn’t have to suppress quite so many if they could pump up their numbers back to where they were when they once ruled in the suburbs. One of the many things driving suburban types away from the Republicans is their attempt to transform the insurrectionists into a band of harmless tourists. It will work on the brain dead, who they already own, but it won’t work with people who saw it live at the time and whose brains have not been thoroughly Foxified. Not everyone lives in an Orwellian world in which, despite the evidence of their own senses, they believe whatever they are told to believe.
Which brings us to the news that Nancy Pelosi has announced that she is going to form a special committee to investigate the attack on the Capitol. Kevin McCarthy will presumably decide which Republicans will be on that committee. He could appoint people who would sit quietly through the hearings and investigative process, neither helping very much nor impeding. If he did that it would not rankle any of those former Republican leaning types who might, properly coddled, return to the fold. But he won’t do that. He will appoint folks in the Jim Jordan/Devin Nunes mode, maybe even the more extreme nutcases (seemingly impossible, yet true) like Lauren Boebert. They will proceed to argue incessantly that nothing happened that day; that they weren’t hiding out from a rampaging mob, and those conspirators testifying to the contrary in the hopes of getting their sentences lowered are actually Antifa or FBI plants. That sort of thing will simply solidify Democratic gains among the suburban demographic, a demographic that, for the most part, the Republicans have not marked for suppression and which would be harder to suppress if they tried.
It is to be hoped that Pelosi will appoint a chair who is a skilled media manipulator, but that may be asking too much.
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