Looking at that list of largest Facebook groups, I’m most concerned about getting on the wrong side of the Instant Pot mafia. You talk smack about the instant pot and you’re in for a beating.
At some point the GRU will infiltrate and the group will split into a faction that believes the Instant Pot is a gift from God and a faction that believes the pot is actually Alien technology.
From your keyboard to the Goddess's ears, Roy. I can all too easily see Trump simply declaring the election one giant fraud and refusing to step down--followed by McConnell also declaring it a fraud and refusing to seat the newly elected Democrats. Followed by litigation that leads to Roberts and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruling that there's too much confusion and Trump needs to stay as president until it's all sorted out in 3 or 4 years.
I keep hearing this and variations on it. We have:
A president who has made it crystal clear that there is no law he will not break, no rule he will follow. He has openly broken the laws, even going so far as to hold the RNC in the fucking White House.
A Senate majority leader who is absolutely committed to keeping Trump in office, and who will also ignore the laws and the Constitution to get what he wants.
A Supreme Court that has made it clear that the Constitution is whatever serves Conservative ends at this very minute.
A Department of Justice that is now Donald Trump's personal law firm and enforcement arm.
So Pelosi might be president under the Constitution, but that's about as good as me declaring that I am president.
At which point somebody with a bump stock shoots into a crowd on Lafayette Square and we see levels of civil disturbance nationwide that’ll make Milwaukee look like the “Ascot Gavotte” scene in 𝘔𝘺 𝘍𝘢𝘪𝘳 𝘓𝘢𝘥𝘺.
I think this "Seven Days in May" gaming is fun but not realistic. Put on a hazmat suit and read Cohen's book. Of all the stuff out there, his is the one by a person who worked with him doing lots of horrible shit. Basically, Trump loves to win, hates losing, really hates Obama and is a coward. What he's doing right now, with Republican compliance, is all he can try to do to stay President - cheat and hope to win the election. The bullshit about the vote is a classic Trump distraction. It will give him an excuse when he loses but he won't do anything about it except whine and bitch. He'll blame Don Jr ("You have the worst judgement of anyone I've ever met"), Kushner, Meadows, O'Connell, everyone. The Oval Office will be a toxic cesspit of Trump cursing, yelling, lying, insulting for three months.
And then he'll go home and look for ways to continue to get his name in the news without exerting himself beyond Tweeting and being interviewed - call in, if necessary.
This is not 1860, Trump isn't Calhoun, and there is no Robert E Lee willing to take on the American military. This is as bad as it gets, which is plenty bad, but if neither Trump nor Biden win in November, Pelosi becomes President and you can bet McConnell would hate that more than anything else.
*If* democracy holds, indeed. Out here in flyover country the Republicans have spent the last six decades attempting to destroy democracy. With or without Trumpism we're going to need to turn that trend around.
I think a better question is how democratic do we (America) want America to be. The Constitution was written 231 years ago, what the writers wanted to achieve is not binding on us
This is an important point & it's terrifying to ponder. Because there's not much room for compromise. "Okay, we'll protect the blahs, but only if you let us murder the fags." Bipartisan solutions
I agree everybody on Trump’s team, and possibly/likely Trump himself, know he’s absolutely going to lose the popular vote. Their only hope is the EC, and they know he’s likely to lose THAT unless they can suppress/discredit/invalidate the vote. All their efforts are bent not on winning but on trying to steal the election. Their plan is so obvious it’s visible from space.
The excellent Greg Sargent at WaPo writes that Trump just wants to get "close enough to cheat." Trump probably figures (to the extent that he "figures" anything and is conscious of his own motives), "Yeah, what the fuck. Win, and I go down in history. Lost, and it's because it was rigged, and I'm a martyr, and I go down in history." The funny (or "funny") thing is, he already WILL go down in history. Just not in the way he hopes and, weirdly enough, probably thinks.
Donnie got the Electoral College win thanks to a number of tailwinds including a hatred of Clinton (helped by Comey, James Kallstrom, the FBI NYC office and the Times) and a number of voters seeing Donnie as a hope for change -- I don't mean right wing nut jobs but people who saw or sensed the system failing them. Former isn't happening and latter are you fucking kidding me? He's a documented failure and has made nothing better while in office. Killed Americans, allowed an economic depression to be triggered, allowed the North Koreans to keep on developing their nukes (spoiler: I see that as a middling problem at worst, far less of one than the media and establishment claim); delusion of peace in the Middle East; and so on and so forth. So the mystery is: Given the lack of tailwinds and now with additional head winds, how does he get reelected? I know media reporting is skewed by greed, but still.
And the theory: I think Donnie wants to lose but on his terms. Close enough to spend a couple of months smearing shit all over the system -- indeed, the nation -- and then he'll be gone, having done what few POTUS's have ever done: Leaving the nation in far worse condition than it was on entering office.
And just a reminder: The down ticket races are at least as important as dumping Trump. Need a shit ton of wins, senate on down.
According to Michael Cohen, Trump will do everything he can to avoid losing. That’s what we’re seeing now. When he does lose, he’ll blame everyone but himself, declare he’s still the best President ever, and spend the rest of his life hating on Obama and Biden. I hope Twitter and the media finally get tired of his whining and fartblarging and ban him for life.
I don't know if he wants to win or not. I suspect he doesn't know. Losing makes him hurt in ways few other things apparently do, but he clearly fucking hates the job. What I suspect is, he and his people, them mostly ignorant of what I suspect is deep ambivalence on his part, will do everything they can to get him a second term. And if they can't, he'll be gleeful about the fact that it will unleash a wave of domestic terrorism and violence against the country. He'll egg it on. He will want, and he will get, revenge. He'll be a living martyr to all the things his nutjobs hate, and he'll love that part. Some, maybe most, conservatives, will memory hole him after a brief bout of We Were Robbed, but there's going to be a bunch of crazies who think the pedophile baby eaters have won and will do crazy shit, and Trump will see it all as what it ultimately is: worship of him. He'll love it. He'll move to another country if he can so that none of it blows back on him, but he'll be obsessed with it.
I know we keep saying he doesn't care if people die of covid, but I don't think that's true either. I think he thinks people dying in his name, or because they were against him, means he's important. The bigger the pile of skulls, the more important he is. The man's a psychopath, and while he's also a wimp, he's managed to arrive in power at a time when it doesn't actually take toughness to do so. He's not so much a predator as a parasite, and parasites kill lots of people all the time.
Well, clearly he can't abide losing, so his backup there is that it was rigged and stolen; he's set that up and gotten his acolytes ready to refuse to accept anything else. I think he will lose and I don't know what happens after that, with the vast majority of Republican congresscritters asleep at the wheel, and the entire government seeded with people bent on looting and stripping every last drop of value out of the country, and the corporations tapping their fingers on the table and saying "Get it done already". It's going to be horribly messy for at least a generation. It's going to be really bad while we dig out, but I think we can. *At least* a generation: look how we're still fighting the Civil War.
In the unlikely event that he wins, he won't have to do the job any more. I agree, he hates the job. He'll just golf and toss out executive orders and appoint interim placeholders, and judges for life. Stephen Miller and Mike Pence will finish off the country. Do Not Want. It is so confounding. We've got us a pandemic out of control, and we're a huge country. It's hard to expect massive crowds of protesters like we've seen in Hong Kong, Minsk, and even Kyiv. I'd suit up and drive a couple of hours to DC but you can't do that from the left coast. Scattered demonstrations don't have the same media-ready appeal.
Meanwhile, on my local NextDoor, someone just thanked the anonymous person who replaced her Biden/Warren sign after she reported that someone else had stolen the original. It's a rare bit of good cheer from NextDoor.
One of the most important reasons why the Trump phenomenon exists is because, as you said, "we're still fighting the Civil War". Of course, it is the interest of the oligarchs to keep fighting the Civil War because it distracts from the looting.
On the government official looting, in the event that Biden wins, all those people are gone. They will even prevent "burrowing in" (the phenomenon in which some political appointees attempt to convert themselves into Civil Service; actually pretty difficult). So I am less worried about that than the devastation that Trump's people have done to the body of expertise and experience in critical agencies, especially State, EPA, DOI and USDA.
The loss of expertise and experience, not just to those people being pushed out of the government but also the deaths from covid, will haunt this nation for generations, and we can't afford to not have them there *now*, let alone in the years to come. Potentially a ray of hope, Reagan and Bush mauled the everliving shit out of FEMA, and Clinton managed to reconstruct it by putting James Lee Witt in place. There are still people out there who know how important that shit is, and some of it can be corrected pretty quickly.
That would be the best poetic justice for DJT and make a good ending for a Twilight Zone episode, but the country really doesn't need a retrograde asshole in the White House with a veto, the nuclear codes, and the Federalist Society telling him what judges to nominate.
Looking through the countries that have refused extradition, Switzerland seems Trump’s best bet. Maybe Bolivia (coca leaves!). Not Venezuela. Iceland? I think not. Ecuador, too much yellow fever. Zimbabwe, not a chance, too dark.
Yeah, Trump probably has a Rhodesian flag, like Dylan Roof, in a closet. RW chuds hate Zimbabwe more than they hate South Africa. Colonists lose there.
"....sometimes I feel as if I’m just making everybody feel worse by doubling-underlining the atrocities and misgovernance that characterize current American life."
He wants to lose, yes, in a way where he can make it seem like he didn't. He'll cry voter fraud for the rest of his life, and it'll be believable to his rube base given the higher rate of mail-in voting; he'll tweet about it constantly, show up on Hannity's show a couple nights a week to whine about it, and that's all he'll do until the day he dies. The only way there's a coup and he steals the election is if there's enough coordination between federal courts and Republican-run states tossing ballots in such a way that he runs the table with the electoral college again. I don't know how likely that is or whether they're competent enough to pull it off, but it shows that as big a threat as Trump is, the problem doesn't lie solely with him: the entire party is corrupt and must be destroyed.
Trump is indeed a wimp (insert a thesaurus worth of negative synonyms here). He and his nutjob followers may have fascist dictator dreams for him, but he's no Pinochet, and he'd tell you himself if he knew who that was. And I'd love to be even a teensy bit encouraged that Trump will not still be president come January 21. But what worries me isn't what he'll do "when the votes run against him" or whether he'll lose the popular vote or what happens with the electoral college. It's that Trump's (and Putin's) sabotage of the election itself will make any counting of votes moot, since the Trumpist GOP is doing its damnedest to ensure there isn't a legitimate vote in the first place. The blatant crippling of the USPS, the recent Wisconsin & Florida Supreme Court vandalism, GOP election officials fucking with the vote in every state they hold power (see Kemp, Brian), etc., is all intended to turn the election into chaos that will make Florida 2000 seem like a minor dispute at a PTA meeting. (Not to mention the decision in April by the U.S. Supreme Court disallowing a 6-day extension for absentee ballots in Wisconsin -- a case instigated by the GOP (surprise) and a foreshadowing of what we might be in for if a disputed election reaches their authority).
Sorry for the lack of humor, but I'm inclined to be less sanguine than bilious about this one.
The only real alternative is, if the absentee ballots were mailed before the end of the election, they must be counted otherwise the courts are invalidating one person-one vote. Dare the SCOTUS, in particular, to side with electoral fraud.
I haven't a clue. It's a popular trope that exposing the truth about what bad guys are up to is the first step in shutting them down, and sometimes that actually happens. But in this case, the Trump GOP is doing it right before our eyes, it's all in the papers and TV. Even some institutions that would normally be safeguards are abetting the destruction. Is there anyone left in the GOP -- politicians or citizens -- who care how they acquire power, or even democracy itself? We'll see.
What's disturbing about the QAnon loons is that such people exist and probably have driver's licenses. What's truly frightening are the right-wing nutjobs with the guns and diseased minds receptive to this shit. Only an atom of sanity prevented the guy who shot up Comet Ping Pong from turning it into a Pittsburgh synagogue or an El Paso Walmart.
You've hit the nail. The point is these deluded violent folks rise only to the level of random mass shooting. They are not organized enough in their thinking or skills to form up and engage in a significant firefight. I doubt most of them can read a map let alone plan a multi-person coordinated act of more than a couple of minutes, kind of like one getting down on all fours behind some unsuspecting kid while the other walks up and shoves the kid from the front, and they run off laughing. That seems to be the level consciousness and emotional intelligence of even the most violent ones. When arrested they expect to get a candy bar and a soda on the way to the lockup and their violence doesn't even seem real to them. It's part of their fantasy.
I'm glad you wrote this, because I agree with it, and it's not said enough. Trump's full of shit. He'll ratfuck as much as he can, but forget the BS that he and his ilk -like Roger Stone - fantasize aloud about.
I'm keeping my head down, my powder dry and a stiff upper lip. That's all. If the fascist party isn't defeated then I'll take stock of my circumstances then.
In any fair election the fascist party would lose - but, well, you know.
Re: NATO, something that people keep forgetting (not our host, of course) is that it actually is a ratified treaty; it's not like the Iran Agreement, the Paris Agreement or any number of treaties that the US signed but which various GOP Senates refused to ratify starting with the League of Nations. The only way that the US will leave NATO is if the Senate votes to revocate the treaty and even this GOP Senate, as wretched a bunch of assholes as it is won't agree to that so let's just drop any serious discussion of that.
As for the rest, I agree that a lot of Trump's ravings are just ignored by the vast majority of Americans, i.e. except for the base. And I discount a lot of those online supporters on Twitter and FB; a large number of them are Russian bots just like in 2016.
The gravest problem, as it has been since the beginning of the campaign is the GOP's determination to undermine and invalidate the election itself. I'm glad that Biden is putting together a large team of election litigators; he will need them. Basically unless Biden wins the swing states by large double-digit leads then the ratfuckers will busily go to work discrediting the vote.
Over at Charlie Pierce's place I made the following comment in reply and since it seems apropro I'll copy here as well.
From Charlie Pierce:
"First of all, and this is a warning for all those yahoos in camo, anyone who thinks that the likes of Michael Caputo, let alone Cadet Bonespurs in the White House, are going to be out there on the front lines of anything is radically overestimating the size and weight of their cojones. This is the most "Let's You and Him Fight" administration of all time*. If you look around at the revolution, and you can't figure out who the sucker is, it's you, George Lincoln."
Me:
Aye. The I live in the Oregon countryside and some of my neighbors are those "yahoos in camo" you talk about. No need to worry about them, they're mostly aging, balding, fat, out-of-shape, wheezing old dotards who think if they put on a bullet proof vest and grab an AR-15 that makes them tough. Maybe one out of five of the militia types I see could actually ever get himself and his gear up over a 2500 ft. ridge without blowing out his heart and having a stroke.
Don't worry about them doing anything in any effective way. But they might get some people killed.
Looking at that list of largest Facebook groups, I’m most concerned about getting on the wrong side of the Instant Pot mafia. You talk smack about the instant pot and you’re in for a beating.
I wonder how Instant Pot Polls?
Or instant Pol Pot?
I kinda want in on the ant thing but not enough to start logging into facebook.
At some point the GRU will infiltrate and the group will split into a faction that believes the Instant Pot is a gift from God and a faction that believes the pot is actually Alien technology.
From your keyboard to the Goddess's ears, Roy. I can all too easily see Trump simply declaring the election one giant fraud and refusing to step down--followed by McConnell also declaring it a fraud and refusing to seat the newly elected Democrats. Followed by litigation that leads to Roberts and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruling that there's too much confusion and Trump needs to stay as president until it's all sorted out in 3 or 4 years.
And while all that’s going on, Pelosi is President.
I keep hearing this and variations on it. We have:
A president who has made it crystal clear that there is no law he will not break, no rule he will follow. He has openly broken the laws, even going so far as to hold the RNC in the fucking White House.
A Senate majority leader who is absolutely committed to keeping Trump in office, and who will also ignore the laws and the Constitution to get what he wants.
A Supreme Court that has made it clear that the Constitution is whatever serves Conservative ends at this very minute.
A Department of Justice that is now Donald Trump's personal law firm and enforcement arm.
So Pelosi might be president under the Constitution, but that's about as good as me declaring that I am president.
So what do we do about it?
Honestly, I have no idea. I am definitely not one for bloodshed.
We do the same thing they're doing right now in Belarus. And Ukraine, multiple times.
At which point somebody with a bump stock shoots into a crowd on Lafayette Square and we see levels of civil disturbance nationwide that’ll make Milwaukee look like the “Ascot Gavotte” scene in 𝘔𝘺 𝘍𝘢𝘪𝘳 𝘓𝘢𝘥𝘺.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNgsAcSJdAg
I think this "Seven Days in May" gaming is fun but not realistic. Put on a hazmat suit and read Cohen's book. Of all the stuff out there, his is the one by a person who worked with him doing lots of horrible shit. Basically, Trump loves to win, hates losing, really hates Obama and is a coward. What he's doing right now, with Republican compliance, is all he can try to do to stay President - cheat and hope to win the election. The bullshit about the vote is a classic Trump distraction. It will give him an excuse when he loses but he won't do anything about it except whine and bitch. He'll blame Don Jr ("You have the worst judgement of anyone I've ever met"), Kushner, Meadows, O'Connell, everyone. The Oval Office will be a toxic cesspit of Trump cursing, yelling, lying, insulting for three months.
And then he'll go home and look for ways to continue to get his name in the news without exerting himself beyond Tweeting and being interviewed - call in, if necessary.
This is not 1860, Trump isn't Calhoun, and there is no Robert E Lee willing to take on the American military. This is as bad as it gets, which is plenty bad, but if neither Trump nor Biden win in November, Pelosi becomes President and you can bet McConnell would hate that more than anything else.
It would be nice if Trump were 1860 John C. Calhoun who had been dead for 10 years
*If* democracy holds, indeed. Out here in flyover country the Republicans have spent the last six decades attempting to destroy democracy. With or without Trumpism we're going to need to turn that trend around.
Maybe it's age, but I wonder how democratic the Founders wanted America to be.
I think a better question is how democratic do we (America) want America to be. The Constitution was written 231 years ago, what the writers wanted to achieve is not binding on us
This is an important point & it's terrifying to ponder. Because there's not much room for compromise. "Okay, we'll protect the blahs, but only if you let us murder the fags." Bipartisan solutions
Whatever helped rich whitey stay on top. Just like now. But with better Latin.
If only a dyspeptic privileged moron back then knew how to put “fuck your feelings” on a flag in Latin
I agree everybody on Trump’s team, and possibly/likely Trump himself, know he’s absolutely going to lose the popular vote. Their only hope is the EC, and they know he’s likely to lose THAT unless they can suppress/discredit/invalidate the vote. All their efforts are bent not on winning but on trying to steal the election. Their plan is so obvious it’s visible from space.
Visible from space? In that case, we take off and nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
The excellent Greg Sargent at WaPo writes that Trump just wants to get "close enough to cheat." Trump probably figures (to the extent that he "figures" anything and is conscious of his own motives), "Yeah, what the fuck. Win, and I go down in history. Lost, and it's because it was rigged, and I'm a martyr, and I go down in history." The funny (or "funny") thing is, he already WILL go down in history. Just not in the way he hopes and, weirdly enough, probably thinks.
A mystery and a theory:
Donnie got the Electoral College win thanks to a number of tailwinds including a hatred of Clinton (helped by Comey, James Kallstrom, the FBI NYC office and the Times) and a number of voters seeing Donnie as a hope for change -- I don't mean right wing nut jobs but people who saw or sensed the system failing them. Former isn't happening and latter are you fucking kidding me? He's a documented failure and has made nothing better while in office. Killed Americans, allowed an economic depression to be triggered, allowed the North Koreans to keep on developing their nukes (spoiler: I see that as a middling problem at worst, far less of one than the media and establishment claim); delusion of peace in the Middle East; and so on and so forth. So the mystery is: Given the lack of tailwinds and now with additional head winds, how does he get reelected? I know media reporting is skewed by greed, but still.
And the theory: I think Donnie wants to lose but on his terms. Close enough to spend a couple of months smearing shit all over the system -- indeed, the nation -- and then he'll be gone, having done what few POTUS's have ever done: Leaving the nation in far worse condition than it was on entering office.
And just a reminder: The down ticket races are at least as important as dumping Trump. Need a shit ton of wins, senate on down.
According to Michael Cohen, Trump will do everything he can to avoid losing. That’s what we’re seeing now. When he does lose, he’ll blame everyone but himself, declare he’s still the best President ever, and spend the rest of his life hating on Obama and Biden. I hope Twitter and the media finally get tired of his whining and fartblarging and ban him for life.
I don't know if he wants to win or not. I suspect he doesn't know. Losing makes him hurt in ways few other things apparently do, but he clearly fucking hates the job. What I suspect is, he and his people, them mostly ignorant of what I suspect is deep ambivalence on his part, will do everything they can to get him a second term. And if they can't, he'll be gleeful about the fact that it will unleash a wave of domestic terrorism and violence against the country. He'll egg it on. He will want, and he will get, revenge. He'll be a living martyr to all the things his nutjobs hate, and he'll love that part. Some, maybe most, conservatives, will memory hole him after a brief bout of We Were Robbed, but there's going to be a bunch of crazies who think the pedophile baby eaters have won and will do crazy shit, and Trump will see it all as what it ultimately is: worship of him. He'll love it. He'll move to another country if he can so that none of it blows back on him, but he'll be obsessed with it.
I know we keep saying he doesn't care if people die of covid, but I don't think that's true either. I think he thinks people dying in his name, or because they were against him, means he's important. The bigger the pile of skulls, the more important he is. The man's a psychopath, and while he's also a wimp, he's managed to arrive in power at a time when it doesn't actually take toughness to do so. He's not so much a predator as a parasite, and parasites kill lots of people all the time.
Well, clearly he can't abide losing, so his backup there is that it was rigged and stolen; he's set that up and gotten his acolytes ready to refuse to accept anything else. I think he will lose and I don't know what happens after that, with the vast majority of Republican congresscritters asleep at the wheel, and the entire government seeded with people bent on looting and stripping every last drop of value out of the country, and the corporations tapping their fingers on the table and saying "Get it done already". It's going to be horribly messy for at least a generation. It's going to be really bad while we dig out, but I think we can. *At least* a generation: look how we're still fighting the Civil War.
In the unlikely event that he wins, he won't have to do the job any more. I agree, he hates the job. He'll just golf and toss out executive orders and appoint interim placeholders, and judges for life. Stephen Miller and Mike Pence will finish off the country. Do Not Want. It is so confounding. We've got us a pandemic out of control, and we're a huge country. It's hard to expect massive crowds of protesters like we've seen in Hong Kong, Minsk, and even Kyiv. I'd suit up and drive a couple of hours to DC but you can't do that from the left coast. Scattered demonstrations don't have the same media-ready appeal.
Meanwhile, on my local NextDoor, someone just thanked the anonymous person who replaced her Biden/Warren sign after she reported that someone else had stolen the original. It's a rare bit of good cheer from NextDoor.
One of the most important reasons why the Trump phenomenon exists is because, as you said, "we're still fighting the Civil War". Of course, it is the interest of the oligarchs to keep fighting the Civil War because it distracts from the looting.
On the government official looting, in the event that Biden wins, all those people are gone. They will even prevent "burrowing in" (the phenomenon in which some political appointees attempt to convert themselves into Civil Service; actually pretty difficult). So I am less worried about that than the devastation that Trump's people have done to the body of expertise and experience in critical agencies, especially State, EPA, DOI and USDA.
The loss of expertise and experience, not just to those people being pushed out of the government but also the deaths from covid, will haunt this nation for generations, and we can't afford to not have them there *now*, let alone in the years to come. Potentially a ray of hope, Reagan and Bush mauled the everliving shit out of FEMA, and Clinton managed to reconstruct it by putting James Lee Witt in place. There are still people out there who know how important that shit is, and some of it can be corrected pretty quickly.
Your comment is in line with Colin Woodard's book about the ten cultures that comprise America, "American Nations."
Deep, deep, deep down, Donnie knows he's a loser despite all the denial.
I believe that for the most part, Donnie's not happy being POTUS.
OTOH, fuck his feelings.
And now that I think about it, maybe best would be Donnie reelected while the GOP is voted out of power.
That would be the best poetic justice for DJT and make a good ending for a Twilight Zone episode, but the country really doesn't need a retrograde asshole in the White House with a veto, the nuclear codes, and the Federalist Society telling him what judges to nominate.
Looking through the countries that have refused extradition, Switzerland seems Trump’s best bet. Maybe Bolivia (coca leaves!). Not Venezuela. Iceland? I think not. Ecuador, too much yellow fever. Zimbabwe, not a chance, too dark.
Yeah, Trump probably has a Rhodesian flag, like Dylan Roof, in a closet. RW chuds hate Zimbabwe more than they hate South Africa. Colonists lose there.
Extra points for the Dylann Roof reference.
(There's already a dacha in Russia for Trumpov, plus no extradition treaty with USA.)
It'll be like the song by The Village People. He can hang out with all the boys!
"....sometimes I feel as if I’m just making everybody feel worse by doubling-underlining the atrocities and misgovernance that characterize current American life."
Yeah, but it's groovier hearing it from you Roy.
Amen. Roy has a much better style and vocabulary to be outraged and cynical in than most of us.
Pshaw.
He wants to lose, yes, in a way where he can make it seem like he didn't. He'll cry voter fraud for the rest of his life, and it'll be believable to his rube base given the higher rate of mail-in voting; he'll tweet about it constantly, show up on Hannity's show a couple nights a week to whine about it, and that's all he'll do until the day he dies. The only way there's a coup and he steals the election is if there's enough coordination between federal courts and Republican-run states tossing ballots in such a way that he runs the table with the electoral college again. I don't know how likely that is or whether they're competent enough to pull it off, but it shows that as big a threat as Trump is, the problem doesn't lie solely with him: the entire party is corrupt and must be destroyed.
Once again Roy, MAKE THIS COLUMN PUBLIC.
Trump is indeed a wimp (insert a thesaurus worth of negative synonyms here). He and his nutjob followers may have fascist dictator dreams for him, but he's no Pinochet, and he'd tell you himself if he knew who that was. And I'd love to be even a teensy bit encouraged that Trump will not still be president come January 21. But what worries me isn't what he'll do "when the votes run against him" or whether he'll lose the popular vote or what happens with the electoral college. It's that Trump's (and Putin's) sabotage of the election itself will make any counting of votes moot, since the Trumpist GOP is doing its damnedest to ensure there isn't a legitimate vote in the first place. The blatant crippling of the USPS, the recent Wisconsin & Florida Supreme Court vandalism, GOP election officials fucking with the vote in every state they hold power (see Kemp, Brian), etc., is all intended to turn the election into chaos that will make Florida 2000 seem like a minor dispute at a PTA meeting. (Not to mention the decision in April by the U.S. Supreme Court disallowing a 6-day extension for absentee ballots in Wisconsin -- a case instigated by the GOP (surprise) and a foreshadowing of what we might be in for if a disputed election reaches their authority).
Sorry for the lack of humor, but I'm inclined to be less sanguine than bilious about this one.
So what do we do about it?
The only real alternative is, if the absentee ballots were mailed before the end of the election, they must be counted otherwise the courts are invalidating one person-one vote. Dare the SCOTUS, in particular, to side with electoral fraud.
I haven't a clue. It's a popular trope that exposing the truth about what bad guys are up to is the first step in shutting them down, and sometimes that actually happens. But in this case, the Trump GOP is doing it right before our eyes, it's all in the papers and TV. Even some institutions that would normally be safeguards are abetting the destruction. Is there anyone left in the GOP -- politicians or citizens -- who care how they acquire power, or even democracy itself? We'll see.
JFC I needed that. Thanks.
What's disturbing about the QAnon loons is that such people exist and probably have driver's licenses. What's truly frightening are the right-wing nutjobs with the guns and diseased minds receptive to this shit. Only an atom of sanity prevented the guy who shot up Comet Ping Pong from turning it into a Pittsburgh synagogue or an El Paso Walmart.
"Yeah, but [they] need a majority."
You've hit the nail. The point is these deluded violent folks rise only to the level of random mass shooting. They are not organized enough in their thinking or skills to form up and engage in a significant firefight. I doubt most of them can read a map let alone plan a multi-person coordinated act of more than a couple of minutes, kind of like one getting down on all fours behind some unsuspecting kid while the other walks up and shoves the kid from the front, and they run off laughing. That seems to be the level consciousness and emotional intelligence of even the most violent ones. When arrested they expect to get a candy bar and a soda on the way to the lockup and their violence doesn't even seem real to them. It's part of their fantasy.
I'm glad you wrote this, because I agree with it, and it's not said enough. Trump's full of shit. He'll ratfuck as much as he can, but forget the BS that he and his ilk -like Roger Stone - fantasize aloud about.
I'm keeping my head down, my powder dry and a stiff upper lip. That's all. If the fascist party isn't defeated then I'll take stock of my circumstances then.
In any fair election the fascist party would lose - but, well, you know.
Re: NATO, something that people keep forgetting (not our host, of course) is that it actually is a ratified treaty; it's not like the Iran Agreement, the Paris Agreement or any number of treaties that the US signed but which various GOP Senates refused to ratify starting with the League of Nations. The only way that the US will leave NATO is if the Senate votes to revocate the treaty and even this GOP Senate, as wretched a bunch of assholes as it is won't agree to that so let's just drop any serious discussion of that.
As for the rest, I agree that a lot of Trump's ravings are just ignored by the vast majority of Americans, i.e. except for the base. And I discount a lot of those online supporters on Twitter and FB; a large number of them are Russian bots just like in 2016.
The gravest problem, as it has been since the beginning of the campaign is the GOP's determination to undermine and invalidate the election itself. I'm glad that Biden is putting together a large team of election litigators; he will need them. Basically unless Biden wins the swing states by large double-digit leads then the ratfuckers will busily go to work discrediting the vote.
Over at Charlie Pierce's place I made the following comment in reply and since it seems apropro I'll copy here as well.
From Charlie Pierce:
"First of all, and this is a warning for all those yahoos in camo, anyone who thinks that the likes of Michael Caputo, let alone Cadet Bonespurs in the White House, are going to be out there on the front lines of anything is radically overestimating the size and weight of their cojones. This is the most "Let's You and Him Fight" administration of all time*. If you look around at the revolution, and you can't figure out who the sucker is, it's you, George Lincoln."
Me:
Aye. The I live in the Oregon countryside and some of my neighbors are those "yahoos in camo" you talk about. No need to worry about them, they're mostly aging, balding, fat, out-of-shape, wheezing old dotards who think if they put on a bullet proof vest and grab an AR-15 that makes them tough. Maybe one out of five of the militia types I see could actually ever get himself and his gear up over a 2500 ft. ridge without blowing out his heart and having a stroke.
Don't worry about them doing anything in any effective way. But they might get some people killed.