Republicans: All you Blacks and Spics should be voting Republican because Democrats are the REAL racists!
Also Republicans: We're working hard--so very VERY hard!--to make sure the Blacks and the Hispanics can't vote at all, or if they do vote, that their votes aren't counted.
Also also Republicans: Hey White people! Ooga-booga! Scary minorities are coming! They'll rape your daughters and give out candy-crack for Halloween! If you don't vote Republican, you'll have THOSE people living right next door!
Also also ALOS Republicans: "Why won't these minority people vote for us!?!?! Look at all we've done for them!
Also a couple of specific Republicans: "Let's kidnap a bunch of Venezuelan migrants and send them to Massachusetts to pwn the libs! And if the locals help them and treat them with compassion, we'll just lie and claim the opposite because the truth doesn't fit our narrative."
"All you Blacks and Spics should be voting Republican..."
Hey, don't forget DA JEWS. Who better get their act together, or else. Said by a man who practically screams "Got my act together" every time you see him.
Trump's claiming he's so popular among Israeli Jews that he could run for prime minister and win got thoroughly mocked by the LGM crew yesterday. Top comment:
That Last Supper is so weird. Everybody's on one side of the table so crammed together they can't eat, and they're all complaining the other guy's takin' too much space. And they're all facing the wrong way – the view is out the back, guys! Sheesh.
Any non-white person who gets aboard the MAGA train gives white conservatives an invaluable fig leaf. And it’s important to remember there are Black people who are actual conservatives – but the great majority of them won’t vote for Republicans because the GOP is so nakedly the party of white supremacism. So the majority of ethical Black conservatives are politically homeless.
And let’s not forget Herschel Walker. The cynical racism of the GOP in choosing Walker – “let’s pick any old Black guy to go up against the Black Democrat” – is on full display. And Walker is exactly who white racists would like all Black men to be: he affirms all their prejudices and stereotypes, and he’ll be very, very tame and vote how he’s told to vote.
Fame and fortune goes to those who promote the establishment. If the establishment turns racist -- correction; overtly racist -- then it follows that some POC accept that promoting racism is OK because personal ambition is what matter; means/end, and all that.
You know; how the GOP base keeps electing people who make their lives worse. Similar.
Now you’re triggering my rant that I hate to touch which is the religious basis for their antipathy to progress. Such a frigging third rail of a subject, I hate it.
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
True, in fact they think EVERYTHING is a pose. Oh, you claim to care about migrants? We'll show you how fakey-fake that is by sendin' you a bunch o' them! Oh, concerned about climate change, are you? Then how come AL GORE HAS A BIG HOUSE, HUH?
I don't mind that they're incapable of a single empathetic thought, some folks are just built that way, what bothers me is when they assume the rest of us are just as broken.
As I said on Twitter, they think we think like they do because they have no idea how we think and assume we're of a same mind, just pretending we aren't. (This is universally why conservative attempts at portraying the left are so bad.)
Once I was talking to a woman whose husband was a clergyman - some inoffensive flavor of Protestant - and his ministry included prisoners housed in the medical facility in Vacaville. What struck him, he said, was seeing how deeply those prisoners hated themselves, and how convinced they were that everyone else was pretty much like them.
Great point. And if we're all really as selfish, sadistic, and hypocritical as they are, then (to them) we're merely *pretending* to be decent. This goes hand-in-glove with their hostility toward self-knowledge. That's also why their comedians, tv shows, and movies deal in nothing but stereotypes.
One thing I've noticed arguing with Republican men is they all carry around a smug sense that they're the ones who REALLY know what human nature is made of, and "selfish, sadistic, and hypocritical" is as good a summary as any other. That's why we need all the cops, see, because everyone would be rapin' the neighbor's wife without 'em. Also why we need all of the religious proscriptions, what man wouldn't jump into the sodomy if the church wasn't tellin' him not to? Hey, wait a minute... did I say that last part out loud?
This last point is something I've been trying to get at lately. If you think (and condemn) being gay is a choice, then you must, by definition, see something in it that you think is worth choosing.
Right! Of course the reply they'd give is, "Being straight was not a choice *I* had to make -- but some people are not as straight as me! THEY had to choose." Which of course begs TWO questions -- not only as you say 1) Given the social cost, what do you think makes it attractive enough to choose? but also 2) If you think some people are born so straight they don't choose, then doesn't it stand that other people are born so gay they likewise do not choose? Obviously the idea of a spectrum with only one end and a middle is ridiculous -- so either it's all middle (in which case we all choose, which your "it's a choice" folks are not going to want to admit) or there are people on both ends for whom it was never a choice (which obliterates the "it's a choice" belief).
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
Who has the energy for all that hate? I bet it's those energy drinks.
The New York Times Morning brief thing I get just to give my blood pressure a jolt is a warm inspiring story about how The Plucky Marjorie Taylor Green has made a Comeback. Not once does it say anything about her being a racist piece of shit. There are glamor shots.
(To be fair, maybe they did mention it. I just opened it, saw what it was about and said " Ha Ha oh fuck no!" And deleted it.)
This came up in conversation with my daughter last week. Truer words and all that.
Saw that too -- and it's months behind relevancy. More recent revelations strike me as floundering & desperate. The Barnes/Greene debate showed her testy, interrupting, & ready to go off the rails into incoherence as ever.
On other things, it's always great to see how US white supremacists can retrofit one of their own insults to be victimized by. "Race traitor" was a KKK word for white people who dated interracially.
Also the Warnock/Walker debate had a great moment when Warnock stated that Walker was given to impersonate a police officer, and Walker's reply was to flash his badge & say, "But the badge is real."
When I first saw that, I didn't know what it was he had in his hand, and assumed it was a small bible. And I thought, "Oh, shit, I guess he's won now" because "Walker scolded by Secular Liberal Media for bringing a Bible to debate" would put him over the top for sure. Now I wonder why no other Republican has thought of this: Agree to a "no props" rule and then bring a bible as your prop. "Just as they crucified Our Lord Jesus Christ..."
I didn't find the Times article all that terrible; it's in their "here are the facts as we see them" anemic version of objectivity. But in this case, the focus is less Greene's insane awfulness and more her success at making herself a national figure and what got her there. In some ways, it's another example of the problem with access journalism (at one point she's quoted as calling the reporter "Robert") where most of the quotes in the article are from Greene herself, about herself and her beliefs, or from GOP politicos praising her pugnacious perspicacity or performative combativeness or such-like. In other words, you come away from reading it not so much horrified at what and who this monster represents as wondering what she needs to do to rise even higher in the party.
To be fair, there's this end note:
This article is adapted from “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind,” published this month by Penguin Press.
There's a Never-Trump Republican who appears frequently on MSNBC who claims it started with Palin. That's about 30 years off, by my reckoning, but I do think it's interesting that an OctoBox full of liberals and Never-Trump Republicans can chew this question over for an hour and nobody asks, "Gee, why is it that the Democratic party never took the Hyperloop to Crazytown?" Like in the Andromeda strain, you could understand the virus better by looking at the people who didn't fall victim to it, but I guess not.
Goldwater ("In your guts, you know he's nuts!")? Nope.
Ike (Yeah, sure the HUAC hearings are completely off the rails. But I AM NOT going to say anything . . .)? Nope.
Hoover? ("Look, this so-called Great Depression is really just some kind of fad. Like goldfish swallowing or flagpole sitting! It will 23-skidoo right outta here if America just keeps on starving!") Note that Hoover was instantly followed by Father Coughlin, the rise of the American Nazi movement, and Republicans throwing in with Hitler and Mussolini until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
So I'd date the GOP losing its mind to sometime in the 1920s.
The 20's is such an interesting time, because the popular conception of it (flappers, speakeasys, etc.) is so at odds with what it really was: Massive resurgence of the Klan and lynchings, religious fundamentalists at the peak of their power, attaining their fondest wish in national prohibition, eugenics as respected science leading to the most restrictive immigration laws in history, plus the Palmer Raids, strike-breaking with the National Guard, etc. Easily one of the worst periods in our history, but how 'bout them FLAPPERS!
Dunno about "losing its mind," but the GOP was always top-heavy with grifters -- Lincoln was a transcendent figure but the con men arrived early and by the 1876 election they had a plurality at least.
Reminder that Greene ran unopposed in 2020. Her Democratic opponent had to leave the state or lose custody of his children, and Georgia state law prohibits a replacement on the ballot after primaries.
There are always people willing to join the group they see as winning, even if those winners clearly hate their kind. I think that explains Sen. Scott. As for the Republican base, the presence of a black, Hispanic, gay or woman joining their group feeds their confirmation bias, evidence they aren’t as racist, homophonic or sexist as we know they are.
Again, because I am now, as we approach the election in cynical, lo-hope, dotard mode:
The most unhinged POS GOP candidate can be trusted to vote the party line. So we libs getting upset over a RoJo or Walker or whoever is a waste of time. Focus and energies should be on that party line.
So there's Black Republicans condoning if not supporting racism. BFD. The party's racist (among other pathological positions), been that way since the 50s, and who's or what's on the party line is irrelevant.
And while we obsess one way or another on the provable traitor Trump, Walker, or whoever ad nauseam, the GOP will be entrenched in power -- that is, cannot be voted out of office -- within the next two cycles.
I should qualify that shit ton of hopelessness there and again note that all that is at the federal level, the top-down stuff. As Rebecca Solnit for one noted (it's just that she noting it is my favorite) there's the potential, possibility of pressure from the bottom up.
But the feds? Didn't SCOTUS say that they don't have the power to do anything progressive?
I'll play Little Miss Sunshine here and say that the fact that the Dems are still competitive in ANY of these races, given a President with an approval rating in the low 40's and nearly nine percent inflation is a goddamned miracle.
My favorite example is Trump calling Tish James, the New York Attorney General now prosecuting him for fraud, "racist." Nothing further is said (or needs be said) about what makes James "racist", she's black and he's white, and she's bein' mean to him, ain't that enough?
I suppose, if there's any long-term plan to this, it's to drain the word "racist" of all its meaning and moral force, simply through over-use.
They already claim that it has been drained of all meaning, but still makes folx upset. Ergo, it can be mobilized as a weapon when needed.
It's not uncommon, in a resignedly ironic tone, for my queer friends & I to recount personal irritations to each other like so: "My pencil eraser leaves smudges all over my homework. That's a homophobia."
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
A perfect title for a thoughtful piece. I love how the bigot brigades claim it's people supporting civil rights and racial justice who are the natural cause of their own racism. It's as if the students who tried to patronize the Pickrick Restaurant were just "playing the race card," forcing real victim Lester Maddox to whip out his pistol and chase them out at gunpoint.
I keep wanting to point out that this country elected Obama twice, but I'm wary of the response of "yeah, and that's what triggered this latest racist-going-on-fascist wave" like I'm supposed to kinda wish we hadn't elected him. No. Will not wish that.
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
I know what you mean. I think of the election of Obama -- and even more so his re-election -- whenever I need a tiny dose of optimism, sort of like a political popper that lasts about as long. And then I try to remind myself that the Trump monster was not reelected so maybe the American electorate isn't.... oops that just wore off, too.
I’m willing to take Tim Scott’s “conservatism” at face value, i.e., that he holds the threadbare tenets of that blinkered, cartoon-like and illogical ideology as sincerely as any white person of that ilk. I don’t think it’s necessary or useful to posit that Scott (and others, like Maya Flores) may be just along for the ride because it beats walking with the Dems and progressives. Who knows what he “really” thinks? Who cares? I guess if the political winds shift our way enough we’ll find out.
But sometimes the cynicism displayed by them is so breathtaking you can’t help but think they don’t really believe this crap.
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
Reminder that Herschel, like Tim Scott (and Clarence Thomas), is The Black Person White People Picked. There was and is no support for either of them in their respective Black communities (especially in Herschel's case; he was literally brought in from Texas). Those people have always existed; they used to call them "straw bosses" and "overseers". They provide a brown veneer to White supremacy.
There's a car at the Tops Supermarket gas station near me which I assume belongs to the cashier in the tiny booth, as it's often there. There's a "Hispanics For Trump" bumper sticker on it and it always makes me sad someone could be so willingly blind.
Oct 17, 2022·edited Oct 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
We can choose a political party for all sorts of loopy reasons, including that one hot girl in college that we wanted to get close to who was a member of the College Republicans. But once we're in, we're in, we buy the full package and there's no getting out.
Flores is 36, she claims she voted for Obama in 2008 when she was 22, but shortly after leaving college she was already working for the county Republican party on Hispanic outreach. I mention all this because Trump wasn't in view when she joined, but she made a decision to stay after he became the Republican party, root and branch, so not deciding to leave is on her.
I don't think there's really any difference between Democratic voters and Republican voters on this question of what to do when your party nominates a monster. Republicans were tested in 2016 and 95% failed the test, but I don't want to flatter myself by thinking I'd do any better in similar circumstances.
If there's a difference between the parties, it's not in the force of party loyalty, which is baked into our tribal human nature, but in the ideologies of the two parties, which makes the Democratic party less likely to produce a monster ("less likely" because lookin' at you, Woodrow Wilson).
"I don't want to flatter myself by thinking I'd do any better in similar circumstances" but I'm willing to be tested! Reanimated Reanimated Robespierre in '28!
When you believe that an issue were fundamenrally bullshit—Republicans seem to believe variously that racism weren't real, is real but were just, or is real but were only addressable by a Freed Market—you can do anything you like with it with a clean conscience.
You don't have to treat tissues like 30-lb cream bond.
Is it okay to say "class traitors"? With racism as intersectional.
Republicans: All you Blacks and Spics should be voting Republican because Democrats are the REAL racists!
Also Republicans: We're working hard--so very VERY hard!--to make sure the Blacks and the Hispanics can't vote at all, or if they do vote, that their votes aren't counted.
Also also Republicans: Hey White people! Ooga-booga! Scary minorities are coming! They'll rape your daughters and give out candy-crack for Halloween! If you don't vote Republican, you'll have THOSE people living right next door!
Also also ALOS Republicans: "Why won't these minority people vote for us!?!?! Look at all we've done for them!
Also a couple of specific Republicans: "Let's kidnap a bunch of Venezuelan migrants and send them to Massachusetts to pwn the libs! And if the locals help them and treat them with compassion, we'll just lie and claim the opposite because the truth doesn't fit our narrative."
"All you Blacks and Spics should be voting Republican..."
Hey, don't forget DA JEWS. Who better get their act together, or else. Said by a man who practically screams "Got my act together" every time you see him.
Trump's claiming he's so popular among Israeli Jews that he could run for prime minister and win got thoroughly mocked by the LGM crew yesterday. Top comment:
"Aim higher, Donald: King of the Jews!"
Second comment:
"Does he get crucified? Count me in!"
Now I want to see The Last Supper re-enacted with a table piled high with McDonalds.
That Last Supper is so weird. Everybody's on one side of the table so crammed together they can't eat, and they're all complaining the other guy's takin' too much space. And they're all facing the wrong way – the view is out the back, guys! Sheesh.
Any non-white person who gets aboard the MAGA train gives white conservatives an invaluable fig leaf. And it’s important to remember there are Black people who are actual conservatives – but the great majority of them won’t vote for Republicans because the GOP is so nakedly the party of white supremacism. So the majority of ethical Black conservatives are politically homeless.
And let’s not forget Herschel Walker. The cynical racism of the GOP in choosing Walker – “let’s pick any old Black guy to go up against the Black Democrat” – is on full display. And Walker is exactly who white racists would like all Black men to be: he affirms all their prejudices and stereotypes, and he’ll be very, very tame and vote how he’s told to vote.
Fame and fortune goes to those who promote the establishment. If the establishment turns racist -- correction; overtly racist -- then it follows that some POC accept that promoting racism is OK because personal ambition is what matter; means/end, and all that.
You know; how the GOP base keeps electing people who make their lives worse. Similar.
"keeps electing people who make their lives worse."
True, but they're also making MY life worse, so maybe that's enough for them?
Now you’re triggering my rant that I hate to touch which is the religious basis for their antipathy to progress. Such a frigging third rail of a subject, I hate it.
Faith Free in 2023!
They think it's a game because they think racism is as natural and inevitable as breathing; therefore, anti-racism to them is a mere pose.
True, in fact they think EVERYTHING is a pose. Oh, you claim to care about migrants? We'll show you how fakey-fake that is by sendin' you a bunch o' them! Oh, concerned about climate change, are you? Then how come AL GORE HAS A BIG HOUSE, HUH?
I don't mind that they're incapable of a single empathetic thought, some folks are just built that way, what bothers me is when they assume the rest of us are just as broken.
As I said on Twitter, they think we think like they do because they have no idea how we think and assume we're of a same mind, just pretending we aren't. (This is universally why conservative attempts at portraying the left are so bad.)
One useful observation I've gotten out of Maggie Haberman on her book tour is about Trump: "He thinks everyone is just like him."
Once I was talking to a woman whose husband was a clergyman - some inoffensive flavor of Protestant - and his ministry included prisoners housed in the medical facility in Vacaville. What struck him, he said, was seeing how deeply those prisoners hated themselves, and how convinced they were that everyone else was pretty much like them.
Thanks, I can only hope that your comparison of Donald Trump to prisoners becomes even more relevant and accurate as time goes by.
"inoffensive flavor of Protestant "
Next time, try a little priest!
Maybe he should have tried something other than Christianity on them.
Great point. And if we're all really as selfish, sadistic, and hypocritical as they are, then (to them) we're merely *pretending* to be decent. This goes hand-in-glove with their hostility toward self-knowledge. That's also why their comedians, tv shows, and movies deal in nothing but stereotypes.
One thing I've noticed arguing with Republican men is they all carry around a smug sense that they're the ones who REALLY know what human nature is made of, and "selfish, sadistic, and hypocritical" is as good a summary as any other. That's why we need all the cops, see, because everyone would be rapin' the neighbor's wife without 'em. Also why we need all of the religious proscriptions, what man wouldn't jump into the sodomy if the church wasn't tellin' him not to? Hey, wait a minute... did I say that last part out loud?
This last point is something I've been trying to get at lately. If you think (and condemn) being gay is a choice, then you must, by definition, see something in it that you think is worth choosing.
Right! Of course the reply they'd give is, "Being straight was not a choice *I* had to make -- but some people are not as straight as me! THEY had to choose." Which of course begs TWO questions -- not only as you say 1) Given the social cost, what do you think makes it attractive enough to choose? but also 2) If you think some people are born so straight they don't choose, then doesn't it stand that other people are born so gay they likewise do not choose? Obviously the idea of a spectrum with only one end and a middle is ridiculous -- so either it's all middle (in which case we all choose, which your "it's a choice" folks are not going to want to admit) or there are people on both ends for whom it was never a choice (which obliterates the "it's a choice" belief).
I always default to Nasty, Brutish & Short, but that's only because I've had 'em on retainer for years.
"As I said on Twitter"
Ya lost me already, pops...
Who has the energy for all that hate? I bet it's those energy drinks.
The New York Times Morning brief thing I get just to give my blood pressure a jolt is a warm inspiring story about how The Plucky Marjorie Taylor Green has made a Comeback. Not once does it say anything about her being a racist piece of shit. There are glamor shots.
(To be fair, maybe they did mention it. I just opened it, saw what it was about and said " Ha Ha oh fuck no!" And deleted it.)
This came up in conversation with my daughter last week. Truer words and all that.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51294/waiting-for-the-barbarians
Saw that too -- and it's months behind relevancy. More recent revelations strike me as floundering & desperate. The Barnes/Greene debate showed her testy, interrupting, & ready to go off the rails into incoherence as ever.
On other things, it's always great to see how US white supremacists can retrofit one of their own insults to be victimized by. "Race traitor" was a KKK word for white people who dated interracially.
Also the Warnock/Walker debate had a great moment when Warnock stated that Walker was given to impersonate a police officer, and Walker's reply was to flash his badge & say, "But the badge is real."
When I first saw that, I didn't know what it was he had in his hand, and assumed it was a small bible. And I thought, "Oh, shit, I guess he's won now" because "Walker scolded by Secular Liberal Media for bringing a Bible to debate" would put him over the top for sure. Now I wonder why no other Republican has thought of this: Agree to a "no props" rule and then bring a bible as your prop. "Just as they crucified Our Lord Jesus Christ..."
Well, to be fair, Herschel don't have to show you any steenkin' badges!
"showed her testy, interrupting, & ready to go off the rails into incoherence as ever." Well, that's her brand!
I didn't find the Times article all that terrible; it's in their "here are the facts as we see them" anemic version of objectivity. But in this case, the focus is less Greene's insane awfulness and more her success at making herself a national figure and what got her there. In some ways, it's another example of the problem with access journalism (at one point she's quoted as calling the reporter "Robert") where most of the quotes in the article are from Greene herself, about herself and her beliefs, or from GOP politicos praising her pugnacious perspicacity or performative combativeness or such-like. In other words, you come away from reading it not so much horrified at what and who this monster represents as wondering what she needs to do to rise even higher in the party.
To be fair, there's this end note:
This article is adapted from “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind,” published this month by Penguin Press.
When the GOP lost its mind? Probably in the early 80s but definitely by 1994.
There's a Never-Trump Republican who appears frequently on MSNBC who claims it started with Palin. That's about 30 years off, by my reckoning, but I do think it's interesting that an OctoBox full of liberals and Never-Trump Republicans can chew this question over for an hour and nobody asks, "Gee, why is it that the Democratic party never took the Hyperloop to Crazytown?" Like in the Andromeda strain, you could understand the virus better by looking at the people who didn't fall victim to it, but I guess not.
When? Hmmmm . . .
Goldwater ("In your guts, you know he's nuts!")? Nope.
Ike (Yeah, sure the HUAC hearings are completely off the rails. But I AM NOT going to say anything . . .)? Nope.
Hoover? ("Look, this so-called Great Depression is really just some kind of fad. Like goldfish swallowing or flagpole sitting! It will 23-skidoo right outta here if America just keeps on starving!") Note that Hoover was instantly followed by Father Coughlin, the rise of the American Nazi movement, and Republicans throwing in with Hitler and Mussolini until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
So I'd date the GOP losing its mind to sometime in the 1920s.
Rachel Maddow's podcast is all about Coughlin and the Christian Front. So far, it's terrific, IMO. Have you heard it?
The 20's is such an interesting time, because the popular conception of it (flappers, speakeasys, etc.) is so at odds with what it really was: Massive resurgence of the Klan and lynchings, religious fundamentalists at the peak of their power, attaining their fondest wish in national prohibition, eugenics as respected science leading to the most restrictive immigration laws in history, plus the Palmer Raids, strike-breaking with the National Guard, etc. Easily one of the worst periods in our history, but how 'bout them FLAPPERS!
Dunno about "losing its mind," but the GOP was always top-heavy with grifters -- Lincoln was a transcendent figure but the con men arrived early and by the 1876 election they had a plurality at least.
Reminder that Greene ran unopposed in 2020. Her Democratic opponent had to leave the state or lose custody of his children, and Georgia state law prohibits a replacement on the ballot after primaries.
Dem candidate's children love him for dropping out; Rep candidate's children (haven't looked – has she spawned?) hate her because she didn't...
There are always people willing to join the group they see as winning, even if those winners clearly hate their kind. I think that explains Sen. Scott. As for the Republican base, the presence of a black, Hispanic, gay or woman joining their group feeds their confirmation bias, evidence they aren’t as racist, homophonic or sexist as we know they are.
*sigh*
Again, because I am now, as we approach the election in cynical, lo-hope, dotard mode:
The most unhinged POS GOP candidate can be trusted to vote the party line. So we libs getting upset over a RoJo or Walker or whoever is a waste of time. Focus and energies should be on that party line.
So there's Black Republicans condoning if not supporting racism. BFD. The party's racist (among other pathological positions), been that way since the 50s, and who's or what's on the party line is irrelevant.
And while we obsess one way or another on the provable traitor Trump, Walker, or whoever ad nauseam, the GOP will be entrenched in power -- that is, cannot be voted out of office -- within the next two cycles.
I should qualify that shit ton of hopelessness there and again note that all that is at the federal level, the top-down stuff. As Rebecca Solnit for one noted (it's just that she noting it is my favorite) there's the potential, possibility of pressure from the bottom up.
But the feds? Didn't SCOTUS say that they don't have the power to do anything progressive?
Bottom up's the way.
I'll play Little Miss Sunshine here and say that the fact that the Dems are still competitive in ANY of these races, given a President with an approval rating in the low 40's and nearly nine percent inflation is a goddamned miracle.
K.
Of course, the problem with a diet of crumbs is one can die from it.
Note that my despair and crabbiness is limited to the federal level. States/localities are something else and much more complex.
The Republicans could still win all of these, "competitive" means just that, we've got a chance to win, nothing more.
We also have a chance to have victories stolen by post-election shit pulling by having results tossed by state legislatures and courts.
My favorite example is Trump calling Tish James, the New York Attorney General now prosecuting him for fraud, "racist." Nothing further is said (or needs be said) about what makes James "racist", she's black and he's white, and she's bein' mean to him, ain't that enough?
I suppose, if there's any long-term plan to this, it's to drain the word "racist" of all its meaning and moral force, simply through over-use.
They already claim that it has been drained of all meaning, but still makes folx upset. Ergo, it can be mobilized as a weapon when needed.
It's not uncommon, in a resignedly ironic tone, for my queer friends & I to recount personal irritations to each other like so: "My pencil eraser leaves smudges all over my homework. That's a homophobia."
All I can say about Ye and others of his ilk is that every barrel has rotten apples in it.
A perfect title for a thoughtful piece. I love how the bigot brigades claim it's people supporting civil rights and racial justice who are the natural cause of their own racism. It's as if the students who tried to patronize the Pickrick Restaurant were just "playing the race card," forcing real victim Lester Maddox to whip out his pistol and chase them out at gunpoint.
"We were all gettin' along fine until those outside agitators showed up!"
I think you've hit on something – don't like outside agitators? Stay inside! Sometimes the answer is so easy nobody sees it.
I keep wanting to point out that this country elected Obama twice, but I'm wary of the response of "yeah, and that's what triggered this latest racist-going-on-fascist wave" like I'm supposed to kinda wish we hadn't elected him. No. Will not wish that.
I know what you mean. I think of the election of Obama -- and even more so his re-election -- whenever I need a tiny dose of optimism, sort of like a political popper that lasts about as long. And then I try to remind myself that the Trump monster was not reelected so maybe the American electorate isn't.... oops that just wore off, too.
I’m willing to take Tim Scott’s “conservatism” at face value, i.e., that he holds the threadbare tenets of that blinkered, cartoon-like and illogical ideology as sincerely as any white person of that ilk. I don’t think it’s necessary or useful to posit that Scott (and others, like Maya Flores) may be just along for the ride because it beats walking with the Dems and progressives. Who knows what he “really” thinks? Who cares? I guess if the political winds shift our way enough we’ll find out.
But sometimes the cynicism displayed by them is so breathtaking you can’t help but think they don’t really believe this crap.
Reminder that Herschel, like Tim Scott (and Clarence Thomas), is The Black Person White People Picked. There was and is no support for either of them in their respective Black communities (especially in Herschel's case; he was literally brought in from Texas). Those people have always existed; they used to call them "straw bosses" and "overseers". They provide a brown veneer to White supremacy.
There's a car at the Tops Supermarket gas station near me which I assume belongs to the cashier in the tiny booth, as it's often there. There's a "Hispanics For Trump" bumper sticker on it and it always makes me sad someone could be so willingly blind.
We can choose a political party for all sorts of loopy reasons, including that one hot girl in college that we wanted to get close to who was a member of the College Republicans. But once we're in, we're in, we buy the full package and there's no getting out.
Flores is 36, she claims she voted for Obama in 2008 when she was 22, but shortly after leaving college she was already working for the county Republican party on Hispanic outreach. I mention all this because Trump wasn't in view when she joined, but she made a decision to stay after he became the Republican party, root and branch, so not deciding to leave is on her.
I don't think there's really any difference between Democratic voters and Republican voters on this question of what to do when your party nominates a monster. Republicans were tested in 2016 and 95% failed the test, but I don't want to flatter myself by thinking I'd do any better in similar circumstances.
If there's a difference between the parties, it's not in the force of party loyalty, which is baked into our tribal human nature, but in the ideologies of the two parties, which makes the Democratic party less likely to produce a monster ("less likely" because lookin' at you, Woodrow Wilson).
"I don't want to flatter myself by thinking I'd do any better in similar circumstances" but I'm willing to be tested! Reanimated Reanimated Robespierre in '28!
When you believe that an issue were fundamenrally bullshit—Republicans seem to believe variously that racism weren't real, is real but were just, or is real but were only addressable by a Freed Market—you can do anything you like with it with a clean conscience.
You don't have to treat tissues like 30-lb cream bond.
"You don't have to treat tissues like 30-lb cream bond."
I pondered this awhile before I realized you wrote 'tissues' not 'issues'. I kinda like my version tho. Profound in a "whut?" sort of way.