MASTERS OF THE BLUFF AND MASTERS OF THE PROPOSITION.

I know Tim Kaine is the kind of tryhard MOR liberal Democrat that makes us smart-alecks want to go all worser-the-better helter-skelter but holy shit as of last night’s primary he’s running against an actual Republican white supremacist:

In 2012 during his run for lieutenant governor, [Corey Stewart] bragged about Prince William County’s “crackdown” on undocumented immigrants via a 2007 law that required police to check the immigration status of anyone detained or arrested if there was “probable cause” that the person might not be a citizen…

And for Stewart, with Trump has come an all-out embrace of neo-Confederate viewpoints and the alt-right. In 2017, he attended the “Old South Ball” in Danville, Virginia, and gave a speech saying Virginia was the state of “Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson,” adding that the Confederate flag “is our heritage, it’s what makes us Virginia, and if you take that away, we lose our identity”…

After the violence and racism of the Unite the Right rally, in which a young woman, Heather Heyer, was murdered, Stewart was alone among Virginia Republicans in refusing to criticize the alt-right rally attendees and instead called out his fellow Republicans for being “weak”…

And then there’s Stewart’s relationship with anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, too-racist-for-Twitter Wisconsin Republican House candidate Paul Nehlen…

In case you needed more evidence Stewart’s a racist, he went on CNN to accuse the Democrats of “playing the race card,” which in my experience is dispositive. Further evidence, as if it were needed: Trump endorsed him, and Stewart celebrated his nomination by leading a chant of “Lock her up.” He also wants to put Tim Kaine in prison, for no reason he felt the need to articulate.

In short, Stewart is one of those flaming garbage candidates like Roy Moore who have flourished under Trump, so naturally Stewart received a defense at The Federalist, in this case from David Marcus. Though Marcus appears to find Stewart’s “apparent complete lack of concern over the death of [Heather Heyer]” a net negative, and admits Stewart’s ties with obvious racists “offered no nuance,” still, he says, “the question of whether Stewart is a racist is a complicated one.”

You and I both already know, even before Marcus explains himself, that this is bullshit because, having paid attention to Republican politics for a minute, we know the current vogue is neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” black people who protest police brutality as "sons of bitches" who should be thrown out of the country, tearing immigrant children from their parents and telling refugees fleeing threats on their lives to go back and die to scare them off and thus whiten up America for the edification of the dying racist dotards who elected Trump etc. The chances that Stewart only appears to fit this template, the way a kid might only appear to have been beating off because he happened to be holding his dick a funny way, and to have spilled Baby Magic on it, are vanishingly slim.

But thanks to our sappy, gotta-have-both-sides tradition, we're compelled to give Marcus a hearing, so let’s take this one for the team:

But do these things qualify him as a racist today? At a time when even slight, unconscious actions earn that label, indeed when many on the Left argue that racism is the natural and unavoidable state of all white people, who is a racist? And who, if anyone, isn’t? Do we need some new term for “really, really bad racists,” or do we need to scale back the rate of such accusations?

Uggggh yes it was just as bad as I imagined. Readers more scrupulous than I can continue further down through “both sides have gone off the rails," “Democrats taking photos with Louis Farrakhan or Jeremiah Wright,” etc. But I am old and feel keenly the shortness of life.

The time has come to acknowledge this hard fact: conservatives have gone nuts and will continue to be nuts until crushed. Republicans will continue to nominate Nazis and Klansmen; conservatives will continue to tell us that the Nazis and Klansmen are not so bad and anyway you liberals are the real Nazis and Klansmen; unless prevented by vote-thieves, Democrats will, thanks to this conservative habit, continue to beat most of these Nazis and Klansmen in elections (as happened last night in Wisconsin, despite Scott Walker’s best-and-by-best-I-mean-viciously-undemocratic efforts to prevent it); conservatives will come back and tell us that liberals with their swearing and socialism are making them nominate Nazis and Klansmen, and indeed all America shares their This Is Why Trump Won feeling, despite our many post-Trump victories, and stand contentedly on this chosen ground with their arms folded as they are buried in an avalanche

Like so much these days, it puts me in mind of Dylan:

Well, my baby went to Illinois
With some bad-talkin’ boy she could destroy
A real suicide case, but there was nothin’ I could do to stop it
I don’t care about economy
I don’t care about astronomy
But it sure do bother me to see my loved ones turning into puppets
There’s a slow, slow train comin’ up around the bend