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The wrong bogeyman

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Over at the Palmer Report, we are assured that the threat of Donald Trump refusing to leave office is an illusion:

We can’t stress this enough: this an imaginary narrative that pundits have manufactured for the sake of ratings. Donald Trump is playing into this fake narrative because he’s hoping to use the empty threat of refusing to leave office in order to perhaps get certain things to go his way during the transition period. But Trump will only have that leverage if the public is gullible enough to believe that he can actually somehow just not leave office. Your job is to not fall for this crap when you hear it from the worst of pundits.

They’re right, as is Lawrence O’Donnell, about whose bursting of this bubble they were reporting.

The thing is, that’s not the threat.

It is entirely possible that Trump will get more electoral votes by stealing the election in plain sight, and there may be nothing that can be done about it, given the current make up of the Supreme Court.

First, the Republican Party itself may launch a massive intimidation campaign. It was under an injunction to refrain from such activities, but that injunction has lapsed.

Second, he could use his Gestapo to occupy the cities of swing states and prevent the people of those cities from voting. The rather subdued media reaction to the occupation of Portland, Oregon presages the reaction nationwide when the storm troopers roll in to strategically chosen American cities.

All of this is reviewed at more length here, in an article I’ve linked to before.

That’s the real threat. Despite the fact that all of this will have been done in plain sight, there is no reason to think that Congress or the courts can (in the case of the Democrats) or will (in the case of the Republicans) do anything about it. See the 2018 gubernatorial election in Georgia, which was stolen by slightly less blatant means, but was still stolen in plain sight.

We may very well find ourselves in a situation where only a military coup can restore our republic. Such coups have been staged in other countries for that purpose, but somehow, the republic never seems to get restored.

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There’s something happening here

Sunday, July 19, 2020

What it is, is exactly clear.

(With apologies to Stephen Stills)

When Trump unleashed a fairly mild (in comparison) version of Nazi Stormtroopers on protestors so he could hold up a Bible, it made headlines. Apparently, he learned his lesson. So long as you start the process somewhere other than D.C. or New York, the media will little notice nor long remember what you have done. Stormtroopers are patrolling the streets of Portland, arresting and detaining people totally at random. It is an action unprecedented in the history of this nation. It is not just a little like the Gestapo. It’s a lot like the Gestapo. But, being as it was started in Portland, Oregon, and it was done by Trump, who has done lots of outrageous things, it’s immediately the new normal, and while it is somewhere buried deep in the bowels of today’s papers, it’s simply not worthy of front page coverage.

Maybe they’ll cover it more intensely when he orders his storm troopers into America’s cities on Election Day to make sure only the right votes are counted.

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Sounds familiar

Thursday, July 16, 2020

Yet another sign of hope, assuming of course that they can’t steal the election:

Brian Kilmeade gave hope to worried Trump supporters.

“But of people who believe that Donald Trump will be successful they talk about a secret vote, the underground vote because if you wear are a red hat or bumper sticker on your car you’re open to derision, maybe physical visit attacks so people keep their mouths shut,” Kilmeade told viewers. “There’s a lot of people who believe there’s underground support for the president.”

Co-host Steve Doocy then took over and ranted about how reliable the polls are with this new “secret voter” information.

This is what they do when they’re behind and they know it. Remember back in 2012 when a guy with no credentials convinced the Republican world that the polls showing Obama was ahead were “skewed”, and Romney was really heading toward victory? This is a repeat of that. I’m not quite sure what purpose it serves for the Republicans, but maybe Fox thinks it’s good for ratings. Anyway, the fact that they’re beating this drum tells you they think the cause is lost.

Of course, if they can, they’ll steal it, but they may not be able to do so if current trends continue.

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The Times edges toward saying the obvious

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

It has long been obvious to the casual, somewhat informed, halfway intelligent observer that the very stable genius is, in fact, a very unstable, seriously mentally ill individual, possibly mixed with a heaping helping of incipient senility. For purposes of this piece I’m going to assume it has been even more obvious to the New York Times reporters who cover him on a daily basis, since by definition, anyway, they should be somewhat informed, halfway intelligent observers.

But, of course, since Trump is a Republican it is verboten to state the obvious about him, since that would be a failure to maintain journalistic objectivity or something of the sort, though, of course, it’s entirely okay for the same newspaper to literally make up Joe Biden lies to maintain the fiction that both sides do it in equal measure.

Still, one can’t help but feel that reporter Peter Baker is trying to send a message in this report on Trump’s public breakdown yesterday:

What followed instead was an hour of presidential stream of consciousness as Mr. Trump drifted seemingly at random from one topic to another, often in the same run-on sentence. Even for a president who rarely sticks to the script and wanders from thought to thought, it was one of the most rambling performances of his presidency.

He weighed in on China and the coronavirus and the Paris climate change accord and crumbling highways. And then China again and military spending and then China again and then the coronavirus again. And the economy and energy taxes and trade with Europe and illegal immigration and his friendship with Mexico’s president. And the coronavirus again and then immigration again and crime in Chicago and the death penalty and back to climate change and education and historical statues. And more.

“We could go on for days,” he said at one point, and it sounded plausible.

At times, it was hard to understand what he meant. He seemed to suggest that his presumptive Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., would get rid of windows if elected and later said that Mr. Biden would “abolish the suburbs.” He complained that Mr. Biden had “gone so far right.” (He meant left.)

Even for those who follow Mr. Trump regularly and understand his shorthand, it became challenging to follow his train of thought.

For instance, in discussing cooperation agreements with Central American countries to stop illegal immigration, he had this to say: “We have great agreements where when Biden and Obama used to bring killers out, they would say don’t bring them back to our country, we don’t want them. Well, we have to, we don’t want them. They wouldn’t take them. Now with us, they take them. Someday, I’ll tell you why. Someday, I’ll tell you why. But they take them and they take them very gladly. They used to bring them out and they wouldn’t even let the airplanes land if they brought them back by airplanes. They wouldn’t let the buses into their country. They said we don’t want them. Said no, but they entered our country illegally and they’re murderers, they’re killers in some cases.”

The entire thrust of the article amounts to an implied shout that Trump is mentally ill and/or senile. Of course, Baker never comes out and says that, but he comes close.

On a final positive note, there is a link at the Times website at this article linking to another article discussing “Trump’s Falsehoods”. Again, close, but no cigar, as they continue to avoid the much shorter and more accurate term.

On the negative side, neither the title of the web article (The White House Called a News Conference. Trump Turned it Into a Meandering Monologue) or that in the print edition (White House News Conference Takes a Rambling Turn) come close to conveying the disturbed mental faculties that were on display. The print article was on page A17, and I dare you to claim that it would have been placed there had Clinton or Obama performed in such a fashion.

Irrelevant postscript: While I was typing the word Obama on my Ipad, Apple helpfully suggested “Obamagate” by way of its autocomplete function. I guess they’ll allow any right wing fantasy to creep into their algorithms.

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If you made this up people would think you were crazy

Monday, July 13, 2020

Many years ago Tom Tomorrow inked a good cartoon, in which he posited that George W., Dick Cheney, et. al., were a bunch of leftists who figured they could destroy the Republican Party from within by governing in a manner so obviously bad that people would turn en masse to the Democrats.

What brings this to mind is the current election campaign by the incumbent who I shall not bother to name. If you were to write a dark comedy, in which that group of leftists was in power during a plague, they could not have done worse than follow the genius’s playbook in order to assure overwhelming defeat. Such a comedy would go nowhere, because it would have been considered far too implausible.

The latest atrocity is yet another example of what appears to be a deliberate attempt to get even the most stupid Americans to vote Democratic for a change. The genius and Cruella de Ville Betsy Devos are threatening to defund schools unless children are forced to put their own health, and that of their teachers at risk, to say nothing of the health of those back home. I’m sure that many parents are in a terrible fix trying to make ends meet and take care of home bound children, but it goes without saying that they’d rather deal with a bad situation, which could be made much easier for them by truly enlightened governmental action, than risk their children’s health. Given that the genius’s grades for handling the pandemic are already in the tank, how does it make sense for him and his lackeys to once again dismiss the experts and make pronouncements that are transparently all about winning an election.

And there’s the conundrum, isn’t it? It is clear as day that these things are being done because the genius thinks they’ll help him in the election, yet it’s also clear as day that they serve only to harden the attitudes of a large national majority that has decided not to vote for him under any circumstances. The school issue is not an isolated example. Every move he has made in response to the pandemic has been a transparent attempt to improve his electoral prospects, and not a single one has done so. Sometimes I suspect that the stable genius isn’t stable or a genius.

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There must be a word for this

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

“Hypocrisy” comes to mind, but I’m not sure that captures the essence of it.

The Texas Republicans are planning to hold a convention in which they cram people together like cattle. But…

The Republican Party of Texas is moving forward with its controversial in-person convention during the coronavirus pandemic — but elected officials including Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick will be giving their scheduled speeches virtually.

“All the elected officials are switching from a live, in-person speech to videos,” Kyle Whatley, the party’s executive director, said during a town hall livestreamed Tuesday night. “They’re doing that for us in order to focus all the attention on the business of the meeting and to get everybody in and out of here as quickly and as safely as possible.”

Don’t you just love the bullshit explanation for their refusal to mix with the herd? I guess it’s nice to know that Republican politicians expect even other Republicans to die for them, and aren’t reserving that privilege solely to the lower orders.

Postscript: As it turns out, saner heads have prevailed, though they don’t necessarily belong to Republicans:

Editor’s note: On Wednesday, the operator of Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center canceled the Texas GOP convention.

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You read it here first!

Saturday, July 4, 2020

I just came across this:

It is easy to imagine [Trump] is the worst leader the US has ever had. It is a view endorsed by the American Political Science association, which canvassed some 170 historians who ranked Trump dead last—a largely bipartisan verdict, too, since even self-identified Republicans on the panel rated him fortieth against the forty-four other contenders. C-Span has conducted similar surveys of presidential historians in 2000, 2009, and 2017 (none of these, naturally, include Trump). The bottom ten in the most recent survey were James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren G. Harding, John Tyler, William Henry Harrison, Millard Fillmore, Herbert Hoover, Chester Arthur, and Martin Van Buren. (There were some shifts in the group over the three surveys, with, for example, George W. Bush making the bottom ten in 2009, but just missing the cut in 2017.)

My faithful readers will recall that I covered this story back in December, 2016, in a post which surely bears rereading. I reported:

It’s official. The American Historical Society announced today that it had taken a poll of its members, and there was surprising unanimity: Donald Trump is the worst president in American History. Well, actually, Donald Trump will be the worst president in American history, once he’s sworn in.

Unfortunately, the concluding paragraph was far too prescient:

Journalists attending the press conference at which the Society announced its conclusion went away puzzled. They noted that while all of the points the Society made about Trump were well founded as a matter of fact, that facts themselves clearly didn’t matter anymore, and that to them, Trump’s presidency was looking more normal by the day. Trump himself tweeted: “History on the way out. No one reads it and no one learns anything from it. So repetitious. Sad!”

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Math Lesson

Friday, July 3, 2020

I was a bit struck by this from an article on Crooks & Liars about a poll that found that Trump has not had much luck painting Biden (of all people) as a dirty fucking hippie:

There is at least one cause for hope for Trump in the poll: Forty-one percent of voters agreed with the statement that Biden is “more liberal than me,” and 20 percent didn’t know or had no opinion on the matter, meaning that they may be persuadable.

Okay, first let me say that I am going to skip any rant about this question presuming that “liberal” is a pejorative term, understood by all in that sense, even though literally everything we have in this country that’s any good was a product of liberalism, such as, by way of a microscopically small partial list:

  • Public schools
  • The end to child labor
  • Workplace protections and legalized unions
  • The New Deal
  • Social Security
  • Medicare
  • The 13th through 15th Amendments
  • The 19th Amendment

Okay, now that I’ve skipped that rant, let me get to the math lesson. Trump has a solid base consisting of the 41% of the most stupid people in this country. They all watch Fox News and all consider liberals to be evil. They will never vote for Biden under any circumstances. Since they consider themselves to be the chosen people and conservative, by definition, to them, all Democrats are more liberal than them. All this question proves is that the nutcases are the only people with a (presumably) negative opinion of Biden’s liberalism. Biden more than likely has a bigger problem with people who don’t consider him liberal enough. You know, the Bernie dead-enders. We all know one or two of them.

This question might have some upside value for Trump if it could be shown that somehow a significant number of the same people who told the pollster they were voting for Trump also felt Biden was not more liberal than they. What are the odds that any Fox viewing nutcase thinks he or she is more liberal than Biden, or even as liberal as Biden?

As to the 20% with no opinion or didn’t know, the overwhelming likelihood is that these are people who don’t think in ideological terms. As the article points out “ roughly the same percentage of voters said they didn’t know or had no opinion on whether Trump was more liberal or conservative than them”. We don’t know for sure, but I’d lay odds that almost everyone who “didn’t know” about Biden also “didn’t know” about Trump. Some people just don’t think in those terms. It’s unlikely that Trumpian name calling is going to make much difference to them.

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The Enemy of my Enemy…

Thursday, July 2, 2020

…is my friend.

For as long as my enemy is a threat, but after that, maybe not so much. This is a lesson that we must hope the national Democrats will finally learn.

This is all by way of directing the attention of the reader to Driftglass’s latest post, in which he documents the history of the Never Trumpers, and makes an unfortunately obvious prediction about what we can expect if Trump doesn’t steal the upcoming election. Read the whole thing, but this is the meat of it:

A future where virtually all of the inconvenient Republican history prior to 2016 will be swiftly and efficiently bulldozed down the memory-hole. Just as all the hugely inconvenient fuckery that Republicans were up to during the Clinton Administration was bulldozed down the memory-hole the moment five Republican Supreme Court justices helped Dubya steal the 2000 election.

And all of those inconvenient Republican catastrophes that took place during the Dubya Administration were bulldozed down the memory-hole the minute the Kenyan Usurper was sworn into office.

And all of that embarrassing Republican slander and sedition that took place during the Obama Administration was bulldozed down the memory-hole the day President Stupid was sworn into office.

See the pattern? Because it’s perfectly plain to anyone with eyes.

No one gets a bigger kick out of the Lincoln Project ads than me, but we must bear in mind who these people are. We shouldn’t forget that these folks cut their teeth developing malicious and mendacious ads against Democrats. This time, their job is easier, because they don’t even have to make up any lies; they can just tell the truth using the techniques so well honed by destroying Democrats. They deserve no moral credit for what they’re doing now, as they bear a good share of responsibility for the right wing propagandizing that has created the Republican base, composed now mostly of the brain dead and/or racists. They have never, and will never, acknowledge that they had a front and center role in creating the polarized society in which we now live.

As Driftglass predicts, if Biden wins, their pasts will once again be forgotten. It is an unfortunate fact that Biden may have been the only Democratic contender who would want to burnish his credentials with such people. The only way the Democrats can hope to retain control after a Biden victory is by delivering real reforms that help real people in concrete ways that actually make an immediate difference in their lives. These guys will be in the forefront of those opposing anything of the sort, and they will use their reputations as “Never-Trumpers” as a lever to argue that their opposition is principled and reasonable. Their actual history will be forgotten by the media, unless Democrats loudly remind everyone of that history.

In a word, they are friends now, but they’ll be enemies quite soon.

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Am I missing something?

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

This has me wondering:

Washington Post reporter Robert Costa says that things are so bad for Trump’s reelection hopes, they’re hoping Clarence Thomas resigns and gives them a Supreme Court nomination to run on.

Joe Scarborough was discussing just how dire things look for the Trump team, especially with the Supreme Court.

“Well, to that point about nailing down the base first, Joe, I have a little bit of new reporting,” Costa said.

“There are some people inside of the White House that are around this president who are hoping at this point, knowing that it may not happen, but they are hoping that there might be a Supreme Court vacancy. Clarence Thomas, the justice since the early ’90s, could decide to retire. and as this White House really looks to galvanize that base, they are quietly preparing for the possibility of a Supreme Court vacancy, looking like people, like the judge Amul Thapar, a favorite of majority leader Mitch McConnell, Amy Coney Barrett from Indiana, another federal judge, and they’re looking at the possibility of an opening.”

Costa said they’re hoping to stoke the base with a SCOTUS culture war, but the suburbs are more focused on bringing back the economy

The only rational explanation I can think of for this sort of thinking is that their internal polling shows waning enthusiasm among the whackjobs. That’s a good thing, if it’s the case, though the fact is that rational explanations aren’t usually relevant when it comes to the very stable genius. If this is his idea, his minions may have no choice but to push it in order to make him happy.

Let’s deconstruct it and start by putting aside the fact that replacing one nutjob with another doesn’t make any substantial short term change on the court, except that the new judge will likely outlive the loathsome Thomas.

In order to please the base, which is already committed to vote for him, he would have to pick a total whackjob to replace Thomas, which is apparently true of both of those mentioned in the article. That person would have to be nominated, but not confirmed, prior to the election, in order to galvanize the base. McConnell would have to defer ramming the nomination through until after the election in order to keep the juice flowing.

Almost by definition, that person would be anathema to the now vast majority of people who have pretty much decided they will never vote for Trump, and the nomination would only provide further incentive for them to turn out and vote against him. Moreover, it would spell trouble for those Senators (looking at you, Susan) who are running for reelection in non deep red states. They will have to commit themselves one way or the other, and, particularly Susan, would not be able to get away with claiming to be “concerned” but waiting to hear what the nominee has to say.

The strategy hitherto has been to appeal to the nutjobs sub silentio (sort of) but minimize the perception of craziness to the maximum extent possible. That’s why they are seeking to have Obamacare declared unconstitutional, but also urging the court to not make it official until after the election. The public perception of the base is not good, and if they wind them up even more, it will simply rebound on the genius.

In short, it’s hard to see how an open Supreme Court seat helps them given the current state of polling, unless it is true that the base is getting tired of the genius. If that’s the case, the media appears to have missed it entirely, but then, most of the diners in the Midwest are probably closed, so they have no way of checking up on the deplorables.

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