The headline is from a wonderful old Willy Murphy cartoon which, alas, I cannot find online; but I could as well have used Groucho Marx or any one of number of shyster double-talk comedians to represent the latest lawyerly conservative defenses of Tubby against his indictment for trying (as we all fucking saw) to overturn the 2020 election.
But there's plenty more where that came from, by other conservatives who portray Trump as an innocent victim being persecuted for his Free Speech, e.g. "Jack Smith’s dangerous criminalization of dissent" at the rightwing pennysaver Washington Examiner. "Smith has plenty of evidence that Trump was told he was wrong but scant evidence that Trump believed what he was told," the editors plead, as if Trump's many documented and witnessed attempts to foist fake ballots on the Electoral College, and, in the last ditch, try to murder Congress were OK because he was rilly sincere about it.
The "not a criminal, merely a dangerous lunatic" defense may comfort MAGA choads but it ain't fooling normal people, which is why Trump and his patsies are screaming to get his trial moved from DC, where his crimes were committed, to some dismal holler whose citizens might consider it their solemn duty to nullify on behalf of white supremacy. It's no crazier nor more desperate than anything else they've tried -- and they're only going to get crazier and more desperate, and quickly, so we all better watch out.
Yeah, I've done a few posts this week and already dished out the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies therein. (There are other unlocked items at the website, by the way, and even if it's been a few weeks or months or years they're still good readin' because, like whatshisname said, literature is news that stays news. OK?) But I figured I'd make an appearance because it's Friday and I'm sentimental!
You may have heard that the Michigan AG did what more Democratic motherfuckers should do and indicted a bunch of local Republican operatives -- including a former Michigan GOP co-chair and a Republican national committeewoman -- who tried to submit fake electors in the 2020 presidential election as part of Tubby's criminal scheme. Good. These idiots seemed to think they were going to get away with it and here's hoping the Finding Out stage of the proceedings will be instructive to them as well as to other crooks, current and would-be:
Funny sidebar: A lot of the rightwingers are complaining, not because they don't think the AG has them dead to rights (well, some pretend to think that, but they're too ridic), but because they suggest the culprits are too old to be indicted. "Michigan Charges 16 Elderly 'Fake Electors' With Felonies," says Fake Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge; "The average age of these legitimate electors is 70-years-old. They could face up to 94 years in prison," cries a typical choad. The average age of the indictees is 69; Donald Trump is 77.
Florida’s public schools will now teach students that some Black people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful skills, part of new African American history standards approved Wednesday that were blasted by a state teachers' union as a “step backward.”
The Florida State Board of Education’s new standards includes controversial language about how “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” according to a 216-page document about the state’s 2023 standards in social studies, posted by the Florida Department of Education.
Other language that has drawn the ire of some educators and education advocates includes teaching about how Black people were also perpetrators of violence during race massacres.
One is tempted to laugh because it's so insane -- as are the conservatives defending it, like the rightwing pennysaver Washington Examiner, sticking up for Florida's requirement that, when teaching about racist pogroms like the Tulsa massacre, schools must assert that black people share some of the blame:
When discussing incidents of racial violence, such as the four mentioned, the state wants teachers to include any known details about violence committed by both groups. Are we supposed to believe that whites were never among the casualties? Again, these are just relevant, neutral pieces of information.
Also, did you know that in World War II, Jews sometimes fought back against the Nazis? Our kids aren't getting the whole story here. And at Newsbusters:
It is just a fact that many of the skills, especially agricultural skills, that these people acquired while working on plantations probably benefitted them immensely when they gained emancipation and were able to work their own land and earn money for themselves.
See, it wasn't all bad! And wait until we tell you how slaves were fed and clothed. Shoot, my boss doesn't do that for me!
But laughter is insufficient; even apart from sympathy for the poor Floridians who will have to live with this nonsense, we should consider that this is what conservatives want for all of us -- not just this inversion of historical fact, but the normalization and promotion of slavery. (They will be helped in this by bothsider prestige press headlines, like Reuters' "Florida introduces new guidelines on teaching Black history, critics give poor grade" -- wow, wonder what the hubbub is about; guess people just like to complain!) We all know how prices on housing, food, and other necessities are getting jacked up, how earnings are becoming increasingly insufficient, and how the corporations that sell these goods and services get ever richer; the endgame for this is a slave state, and don't think for a second they're sentimental about preserving any illusion of freedom for you. They just have to lay the groundwork first by removing slavery's stigma by teaching in schools that it wasn't so bad.
RIP Burt Bacharach. I love this one, which for all its tricky syncopations is fresh and free and swinging.
The State of the Union is seldom intrinsically interesting; I do recall the first of Bill Clinton’s ass-breaking-long SOTUs showing his tendency to bury the opposition under an avalanche of proposals, but I have no memory of which if any of those proposals ever saw life.
The same is true of the Biden 2023 edition, but it had a couple of amusing outcomes: First, it got the Republicans to scream (literally, in the case of the less well-bred Republicans in attendance) that Biden was lying when he said they wanted to fuck up Social Security and Medicare. This was the easiest out in the world for Biden because every American, liberal and conservative alike, knows Republicans want to rip open both programs and spill their contents into the pockets of their major donors, and post-SOTU polls suggest they haven’t changed their minds.
Nonetheless conservatives sputtered like the parents in a 90s video that it was a dastardly ruse – “BS,” huffed Byron York at the Washington Examiner – notwithstanding the voluminous documentary evidence of Senators like Mike Lee, Rick Scott and Ron Johnson admitting as much, which the White House cleverly provided in an official “fact sheet.” Mitch McConnell effectively telling Scott to shut the fuck up was a sweet bit of lagniappe.
But the weirder development, for me, is Peggy Noonan calling Biden’s speech “Trumpian” – which I wrote about in an essay at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down that I’m releasing to non-subscribers today. As it turns out, the Crazy Jesus Lady isn’t the only one trying that one. “Biden’s State of the Union address last night was conspicuously heavy on what could only be described as Trumpian economic themes,” said National Review’s Nate Hochman; Ross Douthat at the Times claims the speech’s “key themes and most enthusiastic riffs could have been lifted — albeit with more Bidenisms and fewer insults — from Trump’s populist campaign.”
These guys are all bought into the idea that Trump is a “populist” despite his never having achieved the support of a majority of voters. To them the term seems to mean “acting like a vicious dumbass and pretending to give a shit about the proles.” Trump was always great at the first part, but I doubt anyone outside the deranged yokels one used to see at his rallies ever believed the second part, and if they did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with its massive giveaways to the rich, convinced them otherwise.
Conservatives seem to think that the damage they’ve done to American institutions over the past several years is all to their own benefit – that by ruining faith in education, for example, they’ve brought to life the Florida Golem with his Don’t Say Gay (or Black) Laws that they expect to sweep the nation. They don’t seem to realize that while chaos may inspire the feral types of the Republican base to tear down what’s left of the rubble, most of us -- old folks who remember and young folks who dream – want government to, at the very least, do what it used to and insulate us from the caprices of the rich and the insane. The main difference between Biden and Trump is the former can call up that vision and be believed.
To tide us over while we're waiting for Kissinger's fast train to Hell, we have the passing of Ken Starr, a first-class piece of shit: Grand Inquisitor of the Clinton Investigation (who then defended Trump from his own, more richly deserved impeachment!), enabler of widespread sexual abuse at Baylor, Jeffrey Epstein mouthpiece, and more.
Funnier still are the conservatives sticking up for Starr. For example, the also-loathsome Andrew C. McCarthy at National Review:
...he had the patriotic devotion to take on the most thankless task in modern American history: independent counsel in the investigation of President Clinton.
You see this a lot in conservative salutes to Starr: His actions described as "thankless," meaning "all decent people were disgusted by them."
For that, the media-Democrat complex spared no effort to destroy him . . . personally.
That is, they noticed his malfeasances (like Baylor and Epstein, which go unmentioned by McCarthy) and reported them accurately, which is the worst thing you can do to a Republican .
The best, though, is Quinn Hillyer at the Washington Examiner, under the already-answered-by-my-tshirt headline "Ken Starr, not a villain, did his duty with good intentions":
Former federal judge and independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who died today, was an eminently decent man and dedicated public servant who did not come close to deserving the calumny he received from most of the establishment media.
This is not to say that Starr’s judgment, especially when involving political ramifications, was always the best. But it is to say that he did his duty thoroughly and, importantly, fairly and without malice.
Yeah, he ran those people over, but he was on his way to church!
...As it happened, both as a staffer on Capitol Hill and as an editorial writer in Little Rock, I became deeply involved in investigating the scandals of the Clinton era, trying to separate wheat from chaff. One bit of chaff (among many) was the persistent rumor that Clinton friend Vince Foster’s suicide had been staged. Some conservatives absolutely would not accept the suicide story and insisted that Foster was murdered.
Starr, with his then-young staffer Brett Kavanaugh playing a lead role, meticulously put that conspiracy theory to rest. And Starr’s team had Kavanaugh walk me through the report they presented, noting key clues that, while public, were ones the media missed. The effect was to exonerate the Clintons further on that score, even as Hillary did lead a cover-up of some materials in Foster’s possession when he died. If Starr had been “out to get” the Clintons, he and Kavanaugh would not have been so intent on noting even more of the exculpatory materials about the Clintons than the media had gleaned.
To recap: The liberal media and the Clintons themselves were to blame for the rumor that Hillary killed Vince Foster, but Ken Starr saved them. And look at the thanks he got!
The highlight:
As it was, Starr went on to a productive career in academia, again sometimes showing better judgment than at other times.
I wonder if they honestly don't know how funny this is. Nahh, they can't be that dumb.
I don't think Hoagy could write a bad song if he tried -- and he may have here.
Yes, only one free story from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down this week – and I remind you, Satan-to-Jesus-in-the-desert style, that all this – i.e. five days a week of deathless prose on contemporary topics – will be yours if you send me seven measly dollars a month. Considering he was only offering Jesus a bunch of hot sand, I'd say you'd be getting the better deal.
Based on the continued ineducability of Damon Linkeret alia, I guess it can never be made plain enough for some people. But at least some of us are trying. And now there’s the White House Twitter account mainstreaming the “This You?” attacks on Republicans who blubber about student loan forgiveness but turn out to be PPP pigs. I think it’s awesome that Biden’s people are smacking these wretched hypocrites around, for the usual petty reasons but also because it does the great public service of acknowledging that the civility with which liberals are always expected to treat conservatives is not only never reciprocated but also continually exploited.
I mean, these people worship Donald Trump, for fuck’s sake. All the hardcore rightwing ragebait emails I get are filled with stories like “DeSantis BLASTS Fauci to Kingdom Come: WATCH” and other equally combative rants. And Republicans candidates are pretty much expected to show themselves shooting or leading airstrikes against their unseen liberal enemies.
American politics is a free-fire zone – except it’s only free going one way, toward the left. And yet, as the many citations of Murc’s Law have shown, when liberals even so much as point out how crazy these people are acting, they draw a red card from the prestige media.
Well, fuck that shit. The civility train left the station a loooooong time ago. I’m only disappointed that Biden called them “semi-fascist.” Uh uh, Dark Brandon, they’re full fash, and letting people know and giving the evidence is simply good citizenship.
UPDATE. I try not to be too "cry harder" about this, but really how can you resist when it's Timothy P. Carney at the Washington Examiner:
Did you know that if you ever took any form of federal aid, you’re never allowed to criticize any other form of government aid?
? No, I did not know that. What --
That’s the only reasonable interpretation of the snarky tweet campaign spearheaded by the White House on Friday, comparing the forgiveness of student debt to the forgiveness of the Paycheck Protection Program...
What they clearly believe is that giving money to anyone — in any circumstance — buys the White House the right to say “shut your mouth” any time that person criticizes a government program.
The White House "snarky tweet campaign" was just this: they ran Republicans' rages against the loan forgiveness next to the amounts of said Republicans' (often quite substantial!) forgiven PPP loans. That's it. The simplest kind of mockery. And this has reduced Carney to a full-body sputter of persecution mania:
In that light, you can better understand the unending desire to expand government. The more thoroughly you get everyone on the dole, even if you do it by first cutting off their access to nongovernment money, the more you get to boss everyone around.
We'll subsidize your electric car, but then, you have to shut up. We'll subsidize your crops, but then, you can never criticize us. We'll subsidize your home purchase, but then, you have to agree with us on everything.
The only sensible response is to get government out of every part of our life we can so that we preserve the standing to criticize the government. I don’t generally support that take, but that’s what’s required by Biden’s behavior.
You liberals have forced me to pretend to be a libertarian, again! Yeesh, what a whining little bitch. Makes you want to creep under his window at night and stage-whisper BAKE ME A CAAAAAAAKE.
• I got through the entire week without dropping a single free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down episode – that’s how committed I am to driving you chiselers into the paid-subscription corral. (Sign up now it’s cheeeeeeap.) But since you alicublog readers are the O.G. late-night real people, I have unlocked my latest fantasia – The Mar-a-Lago Raid as The Alamo, as the Duke might have imagined it. (Of course you have to remember he’d be 115 years old and hella senile.) Feast your eyes!
• I also want to share with you my logical atrocity of the week. Surprisingly it has nothing to do with Mar-a-Lago, directly; it’s about Liz Cheney. I have no brief for her – she sucks, and while her standing up to Tubby on this one particular thing (i.e. trying to destroy democracy) shows admirable grit it doesn’t excuse a lifetime of rightwing malfeasance. But the conservatives who are excited that she lost her primary because she displeased The Boss are even worse, and include a lot of what I am accustomed to call Just the Tip Trumpers – rightwingers who used to find Trump de trop but now defend his every thuggish act. This definitely includes Byron York, late of National Review and now at the Washington Examiner, who offers the worst equivalence between Cheney and Trump I’ve seen:
There have been dozens of headlines in recent months suggesting that radical supporters of former President Donald Trump hope to start a new civil war in the United States…
Now a new voice is talking about civil war, or more accurately, Civil War. In her concession speech Tuesday night, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), soundly defeated in a GOP primary, invoked Civil War imagery to describe her determination to "do whatever it takes to ensure that Donald Trump is never again anywhere near the Oval Office." Cheney's words were filled with martial imagery and indirect comparisons of today's atmosphere to the 1861-1865 war that claimed as many as 750,000 American lives…
In any event, Cheney's speech shows that Trump supporters are not the only ones engaging in dreams of civil war.
See, Trump may have incited his goons to insurrection, and since his joint was raided may have stepped up his rhetoric to the point where Republican candidates can comfortably call for the murder of federal officers – but he’s not the only one inciting civil war: Liz Cheney used martial imagery, and also vowed to keep The Boss out of office, which when you think about it is like slavery -- except, you know, ha ha [pushes in nose] so even worse.
As has been made abundantly clear, even putatively housebroken conservatives are full-bore MAGA shitheads. In fact even the anti-Trump ones are monsters (I'm still waiting to see whether Jen Rubin's conversion is sincere). And the ones who are Trumper on the Downlow are probably the worst of all.
I already talked about this when the Dobbs decision was first leaked, but let me add a few things. I mentioned then, as others have, that as bad as Dobbs is (and it's a nightmare), it's not all they want to do; conservatives continually dump on all the other rights based on privacy, such as those decided in Griswold (contraception), Lawrence (non-procreative sex), and Obergefell (same-sex marriage), and those will certainly be next. The weak sisters in the conservative coalition swear up and down in the Dobbs decision that, oh no, they don't mean you guys, abortion is special because the Jesus people say it's babies. But Clarence Thomas blows their scene, saying out loud that of course we should revisit those cases.
Don't tell me Thomas is only one guy, and particularly twisted -- he represents the mad MAGA berserker tendency of conservatism; I'm sure a few of his fellow Justices would love to get all the way to the promised land, and the next time a minority-elected Republican president gets to replace any liberal Justice, all bets are off. I already think of this as the Thomas Court, and Roberts' wistful, whattaya-gonna-do concurrence in Dobbs suggests that he's totally given up trying to make the shit look like shinola.
I know I'm not telling you good people anything you don't already know, but there seem to be a lot of people out there who think the real thing to be worried about is cancelculture or some trans kids taking hormones. So make sure to tell them.
As for the shock troops on the ground, this Washington Examiner essay is a good indicator of where they're at: They're promising lots of love for the little ones women will be forced to bear, even including expensive legislation for pregnant women and babies -- legislation that, for some reason, they didn't find it necessary to promise before today. But the driver of it is not love, at least not as you or I would understand the word. "The goal," the author says, is "to make abortion politically unpopular, legally unobtainable, and culturally unwanted." The bookends they have not in 49 years been able to achieve, and there's no reason to think they can do it now; but the iron fist of the middle proposition will do all the work for them.
UPDATE 2. I should mention a bit of typical (but, in context, especially ominous) rightwing shtick that’s going on now: Right-to-lifers claiming that they’re the real victims, because they heard somewhere that crazed abortion rights supporters are going to attack them. In the midst of its ululation over the reduction of women to brood-slaves, for example, National Review makes this clumsy transition:
Our fellow citizens who reject the right to life for all human beings, tragically misguided as they are, have the right to protest against the Supreme Court’s decision.
(LOL like they believe that.)
They have no right to threaten, intimidate, vandalize, or commit acts of violence. One of the worst causes in American history — the defense of a judicially imposed regime of abortion-on-demand — appears likely to end in further disgrace. The Biden administration will be derelict in its duties if it fails to keep the peace.
“Appears likely,” huh? From communiques pulled out of their ass, I suppose. Meantime I just saw footage of a truck running down abortion-rights protestors in Cedar Rapids. Every Republican accusation is a confession. And, since this is in fact fascism we’re looking at, expect more of it.
The days are busy, and as full of bad faith and mendacity as they are I can’t keep up. (Though I make an effort at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down. Subscribe, cheap!) But sometimes a piece of pixelcrap emerges that I just can’t let it pass.
At the Washington ExaminerByron York writes about George W. Bush’s unfortunate moment during a recent speech at SMU, in which he meant to say "wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Ukraine” but had to correct himself after saying "wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” York’s conclusion seems mildly sympathetic to the old war criminal:
But most of all, Bush's words at SMU conveyed the sense of a man who made a career-defining mistake that still troubles him, two decades later. It troubles the country, too.
Boo fucking hoo. But the real howler for me is York’s portrayal of how support of the invasion and war went:
The war in Iraq has roiled American politics for nearly 20 years. In the early years, opposition to the war became a litmus test among Democratic politicians. Two of the party's presidential nominees, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, voted to authorize the war as senators, while a third, Barack Obama, avoided the test because he was not in the Senate when the authorization vote was taken.
In the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, candidate Donald Trump agitated the GOP when he openly described the war as a disaster. Trump did it in part to rattle his competitor in the primaries, Bush's brother Jeb. But Trump did, in fact, strike a nerve among Republicans who supported the war when it began but came to believe it was a mistake. Now, no one would be surprised if Trump at some point makes use of the new Bush blunder as new ammunition in Trump's battle against what used to be called the Republican establishment.
If you had missed the past 20 years of American history, you might get from this the (clearly intended) impression that the war was pushed through by GWB and the Democrats, and opposed by Republicans, especially the ones who would later become the MAGA movement. *
Since the start of the war, there has been a wide partisan gap on the question of using force in Iraq. In March 2003, with major combat operations ongoing, the gap was substantial: 93% of Republicans supported the decision to use force, compared with 66% of independents and 59% of Democrats. This gap persisted through the first year of the [war]. Across all surveys conducted in 2003, 90% of Republicans backed the decision to use force, compared with 66% of independents and 50% of Democrats.
Over the ensuing years, support for the war has plummeted among independents and Democrats plummeted, while Republicans have remained largely supportive. In surveys conducted in 2008 — the last year of George W. Bush’s presidency — just 17% of Democrats said it was the right decision to take military action in Iraq, compared with 73% of Republicans. Since President Obama took office, support for the decision to go to war in Iraq has increased among Democrats.
However, Americans are ready to move on — 56% believe that the U.S. has mostly accomplished its goals in Iraq, and three-quarters of the public support Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. combat troops by the end of 2011. (emphasis added)
Also a lot of us marched and otherwise made our anti-war feelings known, as Republicans pointed and laughed at the dirty liberal hippies.
If you’re of a suspicious turn of mind -- and with York why wouldn’t you be -- you might think he’s trying to erase the cold fact of a massively liberal anti-Iraq-war opposition to make it easier to peddle Trump and his minions as Right From The Start. If that seems like a stretch, think what other fantasies MAGA, QAnon, and all the big Republican constituencies have accepted in similar defiance of evidence and common sense.
* Oh, and in case you were wondering, York was a big Iraq War fan once upon a time -- see his June 2003 column, “The Truth About Bush’s ‘Lies’”:
…if the administration's case was a lie, then everybody, including much of the political opposition, was in on it. Just as importantly, if it turns out that prewar estimates of Iraq's capabilities were incorrect, the Bush administration can say — truthfully — that it erred on the side of protecting American national security.
Presumably without access to The New York Times, The Washington Post and television news, millions of Iraqis say their lives are better than they were last year, better than they were before the United States invasion, and will likely be better a year from now than today.
Among the measures of victory cited by York: “In 2003 (in another poll), 32 percent [of Iraqis] had a satellite dish. Now it’s 86 percent.”
While some old-time Republicans like Karl Rove have apparently decided they have nothing to lose by truthfully saying the MAGA mob “violently attempted to overturn the election,” those still on the payroll are trying to blow it off. At the Washington Examiner, Byron York scoffs at “Jan. 6 week”:
…the House Democrats who created the [January 6] committee want to use it to get Trump -- either by ensuring that he is legally prohibited from running for president in 2024 or, failing that, by damaging him so much politically that he will lose if he does manage to run.
This is rather like saying, “Having failed to convince the American people that Hitler poses a threat to America, FDR’s Democrats have resorted to war on Germany.” York also suggests that Trump was actually trying to reverse the attack he launched throughout the afternoon by tweeting messages like “No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order” etc., because “at the time perhaps Trump's main mode of communication.”
Cut to QAnon Shaman Jacob Chansley looking at his phone mid-pillage, then holding up a hand: “Hang on, guys!” he cries. “Trump says WE are the Party of Law & Order!” Everyone stops smashing down doors, shitting on the floor, and hunting Nancy Pelosi; they rub their chins and murmur, “never thought of it that way before. Could we have misunderstood him when he told us to march on the Capitol and ‘fight like hell’?”
Yeah, you know it’s bullshit. Thereafter York offers legal counsel for the insurrectionist Trump (“Dereliction of duty is not a crime”) and does his best to signal to the goons and mouth-breathers in his readership that he, too, considers the investigation of the attack on Congress a mere political stunt:
You can count on [Democratic lawyer Marc] Elias to follow through. After all, his party reaped enormous political benefits from the dossier caper, and he is always looking for new ways, legitimate or not, to roil the system in favor of Democrats.
This is a little slicker than your buddies on Facebook yelling about false flags, but the intention is the same: to make it look like the attempted overthrow of your government was nothing so serious as to require consequences.
UPDATE. York has more January 6 bullshit today. The gist is that the coup wasn't a big deal because it was unsuccessful. It then devolves to a new mutant strain of bullshit:
It is still not entirely clear why so many House Republicans chose to support the challenges, given that all the states had certified their results...
Some Republicans felt they stood on a precedent already established by Democrats. After all, some House Democrats objected to the certification of Electoral College results in the last three presidential elections won by Republicans...
York does not mention that those scattered and speedily voted-down Democratic objections did not come after a concerted attempt by supporters of the Democratic candidate to nullify the election and murder elected officials.
• Good news if you’ve been on the fence about subscribing to Roy Edroso Breaks It Down: I’m holding a Black Friday sale! Go to https://edroso.substack.com/AFFILIATE10 by tomorrow and get monthly or yearly subscription at 15% off! That means your annual sub price goes from the already absurd $70 to, ludicrously, less than $60, and the monthly from $7 to $6. It’s almost criminal negligence not to subscribe at these fantasyland rates.
Here’s a little taste up front: A free-to-the-general-public item on a weird Matt Taibbi Thanksgiving column, in which he complains not everyone loves the holiday the way he does -- that is, as a boo-yah in-your-face sack dance over wokesters. He’s not ignorant of the genocidal backstory, he just doesn’t care, or rather makes a strenuous pretense of not caring because it Owns The Libs.
• At least Taibbi’s approach reveals something interesting about conservatives who basically concede liberal points but want to make them not matter. Most of these guys are far too lazy to go beyond “Happy Thanksgiving to everybody but you Biden rad libs.” This Washington Examiner Thanksgiving thumbsucker runs the “House Divided” play:
There is no civil war today as there was when Lincoln first set a national day of thanks, and thank goodness for that. But the nation is clearly divided to an extent perhaps not seen since then.
An insurrectionist rump trying to delegitimize the government because they no longer control it isn’t exactly a House Divided scenario -- it's more of House Stormed by Shitheels scenario -- but maybe that’s just me. (Republicans love the civil-war theme because, as I’ve said elsewhere, they yearn for a rerun of Civil War I in which their side finally wins, and also because it makes them look more powerful than they are because they’re the ones making the war faces.)
If that part of the WashEx essay hasn’t broken your bullshit meter, get the gaffer’s tape ready for the very next line:
Woke police have so captured higher education and corporate America that most people are now scared to speak their minds in the classroom and at work.
People have been “scared to speak their minds in the classroom and at work” for decades, if by “scared to speak their minds” you mean aware that if they started dishing out slurs and insulting their colleagues and fellow students they’d suffer consequences. And as their silence when the “free speech” issue is school boards banning books shows, their own personal right to call Sue from Accounting a tranny is all that term means to them.
• Hey look, a new COVID variant is on its way! Let me take this opportunity to remind you that back in early days of COVID vaccinations, conservatives were yelling that people who still wore masks in public -- whom they presumed to be liberals, because public health measures are liberalism now -- were actually making COVID worse by discouraging vaccination, because masklessness was a benefit of vaccination and, since Americans could not be expected to do anything that doesn't result in immediate gratification, they wouldn't get the shot unless it meant they could rip off the "face diaper" and dive head-first into a ballpit of virus, and masked-and-vaccinated people were making them feel like they couldn't. I will also remind you there have been little revivals of this rightwing anti-mask thing ever since, including recently, after the spread of booster shots, as shown by this Noah Millman column at The Week ("the pressure for continued restrictions is itself an expression of lack of confidence in vaccines... It thereby contributes to the anti-vaccine sentiment that is the primary cause of America's continuing high death toll from COVID"). Millman compares attempts by the fascist CDC to get us to observe these measures to the unheeded commands of decaying despotic regimes, and suggests that requiring masks in schools helped elect Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. If a new COVID wave, enabled by the recalcitrance of red states to masks and vaccination, sweeps the country, I predict neither Millman nor any of his fellow yahoos will reconsider, and will instead blame it on the 6.2% inflation rate.
• Tell you what, here’s another freebie for REBID non-subscribers who remember the good old days of Liberal Fascism: The inevitable next step for Jonah Goldberg, whom we may expect to try and cash in on his post-Fox-News cred. Lots of low humor!
When I saw the headline in the Washington Examiner, "The unvaccinated deserve medical care too," I was intrigued; who was arguing that they should not receive medical care?
It would appear (though it's hard to be sure from her ass-coveringly opaque prose) Kimberly Ross -- who adds "it is unethical to suggest unvaccinated individuals should be relegated to the sidelines or refused medical treatment" -- means:
Dr. Jason Valentine, who "will reportedly refuse to see unvaccinated patients starting October 1" (I believe Dr. Valentine is not the only physician in Mobile, Alabama);
"In Florida, dozens of doctors walked out in protest at the number of unvaccinated patients coming to their hospital" (No, they didn't);
"NC Policy Watch recently posed the question 'Should the unvaccinated be a lower priority for health care?'" (OK, this one's close, though the NCPW author is talking about triage in overwhelmed hospitals, not refusing treatment);
"On Twitter, actor George Takei..." (LOL come on).
So what's Ross' actual problem? From her lede:
On Saturday, conservative radio talk show host Phil Valentine died from COVID-19. He had been a vocal skeptic of vaccines for months. While he was suffering from the virus, his stance on vaccines changed , and he vowed to advocate for them in the future. The news of his death spurred cruel mockery from some who believe he got what he deserved.
A similar reaction came when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas tested positive for the virus. Abbott is fully vaccinated but has refused to implement another round of mask mandates, a decision that was met with anger. In the eyes of some, his positive test for COVID-19 was nothing but karma.
Clearly Ross' beef is that people are laughing at politicians and propagandists who not only loudly refuse to protect themselves from COVID but also try to convince others not to protect themselves either -- and, in Abbott's case, would use the force of law to prevent them from protecting themselves -- and then get hit in the face with a big COVID pie.
For months we've been listening to rightwingers from Trump on down tell us that COVID is a hoax and public health officials are Hitler and vaccines are sus and wearing masks is delusional. You still see lunatics going off in town meetings and attacking schoolkids for wearing masks. Even when they're not literally violent, these people are usually enraged, belligerent, and offensive. You don't see many chill COVID skeptics and mandate deniers.
And we've all been bothsided about this: Be respectful, they have rights too, how do you know they're not right, it's a free country... Meanwhile the virus spreads through their homelands and surgeries and other medical care are delayed because of it.
And then the virus speaks by killing some of these fuckers.
It's like the airlock scene in Avenue 5 (above), where nuts on an outer-space vacation gone wrong convince themselves they're not really on a spaceship and clamber to "freedom" only to die immediately in the airless, frozen dark. It's funny. Grimly funny, but funny.
And there is nothing on God's green earth that burns a conservative's butt more than being laughed at.
Something else about conservatives: When they realize their routines aren't landing, then, and only then, do they resort to pleas for comity and understanding. Thus Ross pivots to a sympathy pitch -- "In the midst of this pandemic, some are forgetting the humanity of others.. .There is simply no room for mockery, indifference, or active cruelty in the face of even the most tragic choices."
Been in an early-Dylan mood. I like to imagine Mitch Miller hearing it for the first time and going "what the hell is this?"
• OK, I have one Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie for you this week (subscribers get five shots a week! It’s almost wasteful not to subscribe!). It’s about Buddy Brown, a country singer the culture warriors have picked up on because he does anti-woke and frankly racist tunes. As mentioned in the item (and at greater length in the comments), this is not an unprecedented niche in country music, but whereas someone like, say, Johnny Rebel would put out the rawest n-word-enriched shit and stand on it, and only the Klu Kluxers would pay any mind at all, with his slightly subtler material Brown is getting the free speech hero treatment from the likes of The Daily Wire. I have to say Johnny Rebel strikes me as the more honest act, at least. Me, I don’t want to ban anyone, but when people demand good citizenship medals for being asswipes I get annoyed.
Donald Trump’s cultural and long-term political legacy will be debated for decades. But his legacy for the Republican Party will be tested far sooner than that. He has the power to leave the GOP and the conservative movement intact or disastrously divided. It will all depend on whether Trump runs for president in 2024.
For the good of the country, his party, and himself, he shouldn’t.
One can almost hear the crowd growing ugly and breaking off table legs. Mandel rushes to assure them that “It’s true and recognized by people with open minds that Trump catalyzed some overdue policy shifts in Washington while making inroads with crucial voter blocs” – an interesting way to describe a candidate who lost his last election by seven million votes.
Having mollified the crowd, Mandel returns to his point:
But that doesn't mean the party needs Trump as its nominee in 2024. For the 2020 gains were the party’s as a whole, not his alone. He was running in 2020 as a candidate more clearly aligned with his party than he had been in 2016, when the conventional wisdom was that he would govern significantly less conservatively than would other Republican candidates. Four years later, he had nominated three conservative Supreme Court justices and energetically defended religious liberty and Second Amendment rights — long-standing conservative and GOP causes.
This shows the conservative policy program is not in need of drastic reform.
Really? It sounds like he doubled down on “long-standing conservative and GOP causes” and (I must repeat) lost. (Maybe Mandel is trying to signal in a coded way that, like most Republicans these days, he thinks Trump really won.) It’s hard to say that Republican policy is broadly popular when the most high-profile Republican policies right now are 1.) Biden stole the election and 2.) Vaccination is a communist plot.
But Mandel thinks Republicans can win in 2024 so long as they cut loose of Trump, who alienates voters and divides the party, and unite the GOPs’ “ideological and establishment wings” behind one of the non-Trump-but-Trump-influenced candidates who “don’t scare either wing.” His “possible consensus” candidates are – drumroll, please -- Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, the two biggest pig-eyed scumbags in the party that have not yet tried to murder Congress to steal an election, probably owing only to lack of opportunity. The governor selling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” hats while his constituents’ COVID rates are soaring, and the one who let his people freeze in the dark and signed the looniest anti-abortion law in the country. That’s what I call a derp bench!
This is why I keep saying conservative intellectuals are so weak these days because they don’t even have to try to make sense anymore. Hell. Mandel and all the rest of them know it’s all about voter suppression – the rest is just vamping for paychecks.
• At National Review Michael Brendan Dougherty affects to advise his readers on how to go about “Convincing the Skeptics” to get vaccinated. He doesn’t really do that, though – he mainly tells us that our public health officials lie and big tech is Big Brother and that’s why anti-vaxxers don’t trust them so too bad for you needle Nazis.
Public-health messaging that is constant but doesn’t address your actual concerns will, quite understandably, feel sinister and propagandistic. That’s doubly true when public-health authorities and major corporations have become so much more interested in censoring “misinformation” about COVID-19. Skeptics could already point to the lame attempts to suppress conversation about the lab-leak hypothesis.
The most serious phenomenon feeding skepticism, among the skeptics in my life, is the ongoing and bizarre public-health treatment of children.
Then Dougherty puts up a tweet about Fauci advising parents to mask their toddlers. (Note I say “advising” because, thanks to a certain interpretation of our beloved freedoms, we are hardly able to force anyone to do anything to retard the spread of COVID.) “People can see with their own eyes that our public-health establishment is not only anxious to censor dissent,” says Dougherty, “but is also habituated to lying about the risks in order to justify unnecessary public-health interventions.”
Dougherty then gives his own idea of how someone might try coaxing the vaxxless:
An ad might acknowledge that indeed there aren’t long-term studies and cannot be any when we are responding to a sudden pandemic, but it could offer medical reasoning to trust that long-term health complications due to these vaccines are unlikely, given how few short-term complications there have been.
Wow that sounds convincing.
A public-health campaign would give context to the information about vaccine reactions reported on the government’s own websites — such as the VAERs system — and explain how the government assesses them.
Think about the “skeptics” you’ve met or seen on your Facebook feed or elsewhere. Does this sound like something that would make them more likely to get a shot? Or would they just scream THEY ADMIT IT FAUCI LIES and demand hydroxychloroquine?
Well, then, guess that’s that – not even kissing the anti-vaxxers’ asses will do much good now. Guess we just have to hope against hope those scientists are wrong, and maybe buy some magnets and crystals.
If conservatives had the kind of power and brainworms in 1955 that they have now, we never would have eradicated polio. You know it and I know it. I am sick of these motherfucking wingnuts in this motherfucking polity.
The first Tim Burton Batman movie was pretty stupid, and so's this! But I'd rather watch this.
I know I just mentioned it, but the OAN guy calling for the execution of those he blamed for stealing the election from Trump is just too perfect an object lesson in modern conservative discourse to leave alone.
First let us be clear about what this guy Pearson Sharp actually said. After some of the usual righgtwing bullshit claims of electoral interference, he uttered these exact words:
Despite their best efforts, the radical Democrats left fingerprints all over the country, providing a trail of evidence that the 2020 election was not only tampered with, but was actually overthrown, which raises even more questions over exactly how many people were involved in these efforts to undermine the election? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? How many people does it take to carry out a coup against the presidency?”
And when all the dust settles from the audit in Arizona and the potential audits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin, what happens to all these people who are responsible for overthrowing the election? What are the consequences for traitors who meddled with our sacred democratic process and tried to steal power by taking away the voices of the American people? What happens to them?
Well, in the past, America had a very good solution for dealing with such traitors: Execution. Treason is considered the highest of all crimes and is the only crime defined in the U.S. Constitution which states that anyone is guilty of treason if they support America’s enemies,
So far, there have been numerous indications that foreign governments, including China and Pakistan, meddled in our election to install Joe Biden as president. Any Americans involved in these efforts—from those who ran the voting machines to the very highest government officials—is guilty of treason under U.S. Code 2381, which carries with it the penalty of death.
If you want to see his junior-high-debate-club delivery, or to make sure he’s not holding up a sign saying JUST KIDDING FOLKS, there’s a video, but those are the words, the meaning of which is clear to anyone who has attained the age of reason: He believes Democrats overturned the election and must be executed as traitors for it.
Later the guy claimed that wasn’t what he was saying at all -- He was saying that certain people might be traitors and thus need to be executed. Talking Points Memo:
“No, neither myself, nor OAN is ‘embracing executing thousands of people,’” Sharp replied. “OAN is simply pointing out that if election fraud is proven, then it could very well constitute treason. And according to our laws, treason is punishable by death…”
“I’m simply reporting that conspiring against the government to overthrow an election, with the help of a foreign government, would be treason,” Sharp said in a subsequent email. “If that is investigated, and if that is proven, then US laws maintain that execution is a legal punishment for those crimes. That is the extent of the report.”
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is bullshit. Talking about how Democrats “left fingerprints all over the country” proving that they did the treason, then saying traitors should die, is saying those Democrats should die. Sharp also tries to cloud things up with a lot of yap about involvement by foreign powers, who of course not being American would not be guilty of treason – only their alleged American enablers would.
Talking Points Memo follows this with a video of some guy yelling about hanging on TikTok, offered as proof that the message was received as intended. But that’s unnecessary – like I said, if you are capable of reason, you can see what’s going on here.
Maybe this explanation is unnecessary, too. Because we already know what these guys think, and how they’ve updated the fake-irony tactic of fascism: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies,” as Sartre observed, “…they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.”
If anything is perhaps necessary to point out, it is, first, that Sharp is being defended by conservatives who are not willing to say such things themselves (so far) but want it known that there’s no penalty for doing so. The rightwing Washington Examiner, for example, brushed it off as simple he said-libs said, saying on the one hand “the headlines that ensued… said he was calling for, or at least suggesting, that people be executed on the premise the November contest was rigged, as Trump has claimed,” but on the other Sharp said “neither I or OAN are suggesting anyone should be executed," so Opinions Differ; they also let him go on for many paragraphs about how the election was stolen.
Second, it’s that this ruse gets thinner every day and when it falls completely away, and they feel no need to offer even their current laughable defenses, there will be plenty of people who’ll say they have no idea these people were fascists. They’ll be lying too.
I see that conservatives are having one of their periodic "crime wave" waves, claiming that, in the words of James W. Antle III at the Washington Examiner, "Surging crime rate spells trouble for Democrats in 2022 elections" (with neolibs like Ezra Klein saying pretty much the same thing) and, in the words of the Manhattan Institute's Jason L. Riley, "Shrinking Blue States Have ‘Defund the Police’ to Blame." (Blue states haven't really lost much population, but Riley thinks "lackluster population growth" is just as bad.)
Crime rates are up, but that can hardly be laid to "defunding," since recent big-city PD cuts have been small and sometimes, as with Minneapolis, resulted in zero force reductions. And many other things besides crime are out of whack now, considering we're coming out of a historic pandemic with its various dislocations. Also the increases are -- you will be unsurprised to learn -- not as dire as the professional panic merchants put them -- from my most recent Roy Edroso Breaks It Down newsletter issue*:
From the most recent CompStat crime statistics report, for the week of May 10-16, from the New York Police Department: Murders in New York City are up in 2021 from this time last year by 22%; rapes are up 2%; and felonious assaults are up 5.9%.
Chaos! Death Wish! Etc. But the actual number of murders year-to-date 2021 vs. 2020 are 155 and 127 — meaning there have been 28 more than this time last year. Rapes went from 491 to 501 — 20 more. And there are 7,182 assault in 2021 vs. 6,782 in 2020, or 400 more.
The population of New York is about 8.4 million. Meaning, even if we leave out the tourists and other outlanders, the percentage of the city’s population that has been murdered so far this year is 0.00184%. The raped population is 0.006% and the feloniously assaulted population is 0.08%.
We won’t even speak of the decline in robberies (-9.9%), burglaries (16.1%), and grand larcenies (-9.3%) in the same period...
Nonetheless you'll see the usual suspects at City Journal and elsewhere talking about it like the return of Death Wish. It's been such a long time since those rates actually rose that I'm not sure if the old Ooga-Booga is going to work like it used to -- especially since there are more voters in the system now who have other things to worry about, and conservatives are basically talking about crime the same way they used to scare your grandma with it back in the old days. But it'll be interesting to see.
* I'm not making this issue available to non-subscribers because I'm trying to cut back on the freebies and get more paying customers in the door, hint hint. But here's yesterday's, about the future of Texas education laws -- still fresh, possibly evergreen!
Tucker Carlson's bizarre rant, calling for his followers to report parents whose children wear masks outdoors to call child protective services, has been widely noted. But Carlson is only pushing the current conservative line. For a long while the more prominent conservatives were cowed out of bitching too loudly about social distancing and other rudimentary public health measures because their hero Trump had so disastrously (and, for hundreds of thousands of Americans, fatally) bungled the pandemic, and Biden's return to sane policy and practice was clearing it up quickly: The drop from Jan. 11, when there were over a quarter million new COVID-19 cases, to yesterday, when there were 47,430, has been spectacular.
But paradoxically, that progress is emboldening rightwingers to yell that they're being oppressed by Biden, Fauci, and all you liberal mask-wearers.
Among other things, Biden has been doing what a leader should be doing, and what Trump most egregiously did not: modeling responsible behavior by wearing a mask in a public. Today the Washington Examiner editorializes "Ditch the mask, Mr. President." You can see with what good faith this is offered in the very first line:
It’s a tough call as to which time President Joe Biden looked more foolish in a mask.
Was it the picture of Biden alone in the middle of Arlington National Cemetery, vaccinated, outdoors, and physically distanced to the extent that nobody else appeared in the intentionally crafted shots showing hundreds of gravestones?
Or was it the Zoom meeting?...
You might think it better that Biden overdo it than, as his predecessor did, summon hordes of bugchasers to mob up maskless at rallies and at the White House, spreading contagion. But the Examiner argues -- well, it's not really an argument at all; merely a line of bullshit that a maskless, virus-insouciant Biden would encourage vaccination by "showing the hesitant that vaccination has benefits would help the cause of ending this pandemic."
Ha! No one on God's green earth believes that. Surveys show most of the vaccine avoiders are Republicans who probably think Biden is Satan and who would take him dropping the mask as Liberal Elitist Hypocrisy Cuomo Newsome Think Yer Too Big To Wear a Mask Well I Ain't A-Gonna Do Nothin' Bleargh.
Herd immunity is widely considered to be achieved at 70% vaccination/infection (though there are arguments that this may not be sufficient). The most recent partly-or-wholly vaccinated American number is 141.8 million; 32.2 Americans have been infected, and if we remove the 573,000 unfortunates who died of COVID-19, that leaves about 172.6 million. The population of the United States is 328.2 million. Figure it out. We're closing in but we're not there yet.
So it's really great the CDC has approved masklessness in uncrowded outdoor settings, but the Examiner editors, like all these guys, have no interest in beating the pandemic or even sensibly sliding out of lockdown, and will merely use it as a further excuse to bitch and moan because they're not getting their way.
I've unlocked an issue of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down today about the right's gamification of racism -- that is, the way they confront the overwhelming evidence of systemic racism in our society with whatabout stories of black crime. This is an ancient strategy, really, old enough that I recall it from my childhood when relatives would tell me how those people were animals, always robbing, raping, and stealing; I've talked about the internet-enabled version in my "ooga-booga" essays, which when published in the Voice always drew an avalanche of racist and sometimes threatening reader responses.
Hence the gamesmanship, which increasingly resembles the racist taunts of my youth. For example, here's an article at the Washington Examiner by Eddie Scarry called "Joe Biden is about to lock up a lot of black people." Tee hee, what a fun headline! What's it about? Before citing several cases of black people beating up Asian-Americans, Scarry sets up his gag:
The New York Times reported that part of Biden's initiative will be "prioritizing prosecution of those who commit hate crimes" against people of Asian descent.
I guess that's a good thing, but what happens when prioritizing the prosecution of anti-Asian hate crimes disproportionately affects the black community?
You can see he's enjoying himself.
It will. Anyone tracking the sporadic incidents of violence against people of Asian descent lately will have noticed a pattern. The attackers are almost exclusively black men...
True, there was the recent violent rampage in Atlanta wherein a young white man killed Asians and a couple of white people at some Asian-run spas, which he said he did because of some weird sex addiction. Lightning strikes every now and then.
But as we've seen, this isn't a matter of white supremacy. It's very much not that.
This is right off the playground -- you libtards care so much about racism, well what about black-on-Asian crime? Undoubtedly in rightwing publications like the Examiner it gives mirth and comfort to conservatives; I wonder what anyone else thinks.
UPDATE. Thanks to commenter keta for unearthing this story on Scarry's other service to wingnut comedy -- creepshots of butts.
Horseshoe theory holds that at a certain point, the political left and the political right bend around and begin to get closer together again. You can see it on economic issues when Senator Josh Hawley is talking with Matt Stoller. I noticed it often among my fellow “restrainer” foreign-policy friends.
And here's Stoller himself on December 5, after Hawley "joined" (for some sense of the term) Bernie Sanders in requesting $1,200 checks for stimulus relief in the senate:
"Josh Hawley, populism's philosopher-in-chief," swooned Charles Fain Lehman in a long, lubricious ode at the Washington Examiner that had Hawley denouncing the Pelagian heresy "that you can 'emancipate yourself from God by creating your own self'" and extolling "the original Populist Party" of the early 20th Century:
"It was a moment of significant social, economic, international upheaval, which we’re experiencing now as well,” Hawley said. “The late 19th, early 20th century was also a moment when the existing political coalitions were in a state of collapse and reforming, which is clearly what we’re in the midst of right now."
Populist and anti-Pelagian -- a 2024 dream candidate! Hawley also joined the more recent Sanders push for $2,000 checks -- even less likely to go through than $1,200 (and it hasn't), but a great way to keep the rubes paying attention.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced Wednesday that he would object next week when Congress convenes to certify the electoral college vote, a move that all but ensures at least a short delay in cementing President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
Turns out the dreamboat is just another crackpot grifter like Louie Gohmert and Tommy Tuberville. Being a boring old-fashioned type of liberal I could smell Hawley walking in. Here's your humble narrator in June 2019 on Hawley's lionization at The Federalist as one of two "Brand-New Senators" who "Cast Light on the GOP's Post-Trump Future" (the other one was, lol, Rick Scott): "Josh Hawley's the young, hip kind of theocrat creep who's bound to appeal to hypothetical young people who think like Roy Moore."
But gratitude only extends so far. When we talk about Trump being succeeded in the hearts of conservatives by cleverer fascists, this is what we're talking about.
Back on November 10, days after rational people accepted the election results, the Washington Examiner's Eddie Scarry was not quite ready to concede them -- but he was willing to consider (just for the sake of argument, mind) whether Trump's litigation was actually something less than a noble crusade:
There are really only two possible reasons President Trump's reelection campaign is now throwing itself into legal fights over the election. Either the president truly believes there were enough invalid ballots counted to cost him the election, or he simply doesn't want to concede defeat until every avenue has been exhausted.
In the former case, the Trump campaign is right to head to the courts — you know, the place where liberals were most at home these past four years chasing the president's tax returns and stopping or slowing every part of his policy agenda.
Had to get that in there, because the next part, mild as it is, might offend his readers:
If it's the second reason, the lasting impact of Trump simply delaying the inevitable with a bunch of baseless charges of fraud and cheating is only going to depress his supporters and puncture a Republican Party otherwise set up for political success in the near future.
Not that Trump's trying to enrage his rubes with a new Lost Cause for future grifts -- no, he's just misguided; he doesn't know what damage he's doing to his beloved Republican Party!
Trump came out of nowhere, exposed a lot of our country's problems, and was even good enough to fix a few of them. His presidency was a success. Now it's time to move on.
"Fix a few of them," Scarry's link to another of his own columns reveals, refers to immigration -- though on what grounds he counts this fixed (or plural) is unclear; lines like "Immigration came up in neither of the presidential debates" and "No one has talked about the wall since last year" seems to lean toward a "you can't pin that on him" defense.
Now, with approximately 99.9% of top Republicans still refusing to admit defeat, Scarry's got another column today, and guess what it's about:
The Left's post-election spite
It's fascinating to see how spiteful liberals can be, even when they win...
I'll mostly spare you -- since their (still unacknowledged by most Republicans!) Presidential victory, liberals were mean to Jared and Ivanka -- "literally, his children," weeps Scarry, as if they were Romanoff toddlers -- and think the people who helped Trump carry out his policies should not be rehired. But here's the howler:
Conservatives generally accept electoral defeat and wait for the next time when, hopefully, the results will be in their favor.
Generally, huh? Meanwhile Lindsey Graham is still trying to rig the election results and Giuliani is trying to do his legal Rip Taylor routine in a Pennsylvania federal court. Conservatives are accustomed to having it both ways, so it's no shock to see some of them denouncing the victorious Biden supporters while others refuse to acknowledge they've been victorious at all. I assume this'll be the shtick -- "So-called 'President' Biden signs bill -- but is it legal?" -- for a good long while, maybe four years.
Rightwing yahoos are still screaming they were robbed, and their claims just get wilder -- here's a genius who seems to believe (insofar as meaning can be discerned in the morass) that Massachusetts really voted for Trump, and claims footage that is almost certainly from 2016 is of UMass kids protesting Biden.
Meanwhile good-taste conservatives, who are more sensitive to self-ownage, are sloooowly backing off that position -- but they're not all the way there yet. Byron York, for example, has been feeding the faint hope of diehards for days at the Washington Examiner. Two days after the election he was telling 'em, "There are plenty of anecdotal reports of things that look fishy, but it is up to Trump to present some evidence of irregularities." A week after the election he was telling them about "The election lawsuit Trump should win." He was talking about the one against the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision to allow ballots received after Election Day to be counted. But those late Pennsylvania ballots were segregated from the others by court order, and total about 10,000 -- Biden won Pennsylvania by 60,000 votes. Maybe York didn't know that when he filed -- whatever the case, he sure didn't share with his readers, though he allowed in the last graf of his column that "In the end, the case might have no effect on the presidential election results in Pennsylvania. But that's not the issue at hand."
York got a little closer to the reality the rest of us had acknowledged on Thursday, admitting the GOP "has not filed any challenge that appears likely to overturn the results in any state." He even pulled the traditional move of beaten conservatives -- crying about how mean liberals cancel-culture them out of everything they deserve:
Indeed, rather than focus on mail-in ballots or election observers in Michigan, it makes more sense to look at Trump's loss as the result of that daily beating -- a media establishment, an entertainment industry, academia, the government's permanent bureaucracy, and a massive special counsel investigation all trying to bring Trump down every single moment of his presidency. It took a toll. It had too [sic].
With the cause lost, York may have wanted to completely unstick himself from the humiliation before the weekend. But he scored an interview with Trump, which seems to have affected his exit strategy. Trump babbles on to York about how irregularities cost him "millions of votes" in Michigan and Pennsylvania; York glumly observes, "It was definitely an optimistic scenario and one at odds with the current state of the race."
You almost feel sorry for the guy. But then you remember that all this bellyaching is in the service of yet another Trumpkin distraction. Because fucking with elections is self-evidently the Republicans' stock in trade. Trump flunky DeJoy’s USPS smash-up mishandled tens if not hundreds or thousands of mail ballots and the GOP pulled out all the voter-suppression stops, including the drive-through fuckery in Texas -- not to speak of the GOP's years-long gerrymandering and disenfranchisement drives.
It seems Democrats have found some ways to fight back, particularly under Stacey Abrams in Georgia, and Republicans are scared to death by it. So while the screaming fits of the dead-enders are probably more chemical imbalance issues than anything else, the Republicans' extended indulgence of this "voter fraud" bullshit is at least partially motivated by a desire to get people thinking once again that their opponents are actually guilty of the crimes that they themselves got caught committing.
