#obsequious republicans

[tomorrowusa]

Republican office holders are all Trump's bitches now.

The problem for them is that after Trump is gone, their self-abasing, grovelling, and humiliating comments will still be on the public record.

An unequivocal defeat for Trump would send the GOP into a vortex of chaos. That's even more of an incentive to make sure he's beaten.

[liberalsarecool]

Republicans were groomed. They see their obsequious behavior towards Putin as loyalty to Trump.

The two enemies of America are inseparable.

[carrickbender]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CxX-Vkdus7_/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

Watch this, with the SOUND ON, then remember the words of Sinclair Lewis 80+ years ago:

"Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the—well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?. . .Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade—only of adults—right now!"

It's here. And if we don't stamp it out now, the future holds much much worse.

[qedmirage]

As most of my international followers know here in the US we're having a presidential election this year. Well, that means each major party has to select their candidate, and the process for that has been going on for a while now. See, in the US, state-level parties have a lot of say in how they select candidates, so they randomly jockey for more important slots than each other, and this is why the party elections for their candidate take months and not, like, a week. Well for the past several months, in the lead up to actual voting, we've been obligated to pretend that several people with a snowball's chance in hell were serious candidates to control the world's [EDIT: second-] largest nuclear arsenal. I want to briefly commemorate/memorialize one of those candidacies, that of Ron DeSantis of florida.

See just a few days ago we had the iowa caucuses, a silly way to select presidential candidates that is ALSO unrepresentative of who the final nominee will be, as the winner secures an objectively tiny amount of points (called 'delegates') towards gaining a party's nomination and the system is designed to make it impossible for introverts to participate. You get like a tiny sliver of a party's membership voting in caucuses and it's weighted to favor the freaks and fanatics. And yet that simple, first contest, was enough to cause all but two of the field of GOP candidates to give up and go home. Because throughout the pre-pre-election season they would give fawning, obsequious praise to Donald Trump - the best president since Washington, possibly even better - and then be asked: "Isn't he also running for president? Why should people vote for you over him, if they like Trump?" to which the answer would be some vague mumbling about his legal challenges or age or how statistically most of the country wants to murder him with knives. (The notable exception here is wannabee mafioso Chris Christie, who at least does not forgive trying to kill him). Anyways, in final results Trump got 20 points, Ron DeSantis got 9, Nikki Haley got 8, and 4chan shitposter Vivek Ramaswamy got 3. Of those, only Trump and Nikki Haley didn't immediately give up. So anyways. Ron DeSantis. Actually presently a governor of a major state, and Florida at that - one which has shifted from 'swing' to 'republican' over his tenure. You could be forgiven for thinking he's a skilled politician. And yet. He repeatedly promised that his first day in office would start with war with mexico, which he never described in those terms. Rather he'd just

blockade mexican ports

shoot mexican nationals on the southern border without a trial ('people who have backpacks', apparently)

Send US military forces into mexico to kill more mexican citizens without trial

Cool. Normal. We're allies with that country, you know? He'd say such policies were informed by his military service as a lawyer in Iraq and then (he does not mention this part) Guantanomo Bay. Yeah, I bet they are. Though, for some reason, he always leaves off the "as a lawyer" part. DeSantis's team also produced some of the most deranged and openly fascist ads of a major candidate. See, the DeSantis campaign was oriented around "the war on woke", his efforts to use state power to roll back civil rights in general, progressives existing in government, and the rights of LGBT people in particular. Already cloaked in the language of online reactionaries it was always gonna attract freaks, and as a result, the ads made by younger staffers (released, not by the official campaign, but to pro-DeSantis meme accounts secretly run by his staffers) are totally deranged. Here's one of them; I'm going to warn you, it's intensely homophobic, to the point that a republican presidential candidate had to apologize for the homophobia.:

crazy ass moments in american politics on X: "The Ron DeSantis campaign team post a Trump attack ad feat. phonk. (2023) https://t.co/cwaWnZInG7" / X (twitter.com)

For those who don't wish to watch such things, the core thesis of the ad is that the republican party under Trump was captured by and coddled LGBT people, and DeSantis will restore strong masculinity and crush LGBT americans. DeSantis is paralleled to noted straight Achilles, those sigma chad memes, and fictional murderer Patrick Bateman, all while heavy bass music plays. My personal favorite stills:

Again, these are from an ad for a guy who quit after literally the first contest. Truly a fighter.

But even that pales in comparison to the "running up that hill" ad. That one is one of the most straightforwardly fascist pieces of advertising a modern american politician has made. While perhaps less directly offensive, viewer be warned, this is nazi shit: Luke Thompson on X: "The @desantiscams account just deleted this video after at least one campaign staffer RT'd it. I wonder if this was also made in-house. https://t.co/JA1D9qqONF" / X (twitter.com) (It was, in fact, made in-house).

The esoteric nazi symbolism did not go unnoticed. Nor the fact that it ends on DeSantis's paramilitary "florida guard" (not the national guard!) marching forward into a bright dawn while he looks down approvingly. The aide who made that video was fired, but it's no wonder he felt at home; DeSantis's whole appeal is about threatening to use extralegal power against conservatism's enemies. He tried to revoke Disney's special tax statuses based purely on an extremely beige statement in support of LGBT rights they issued, and again, established a paramilitary force under his command. There are far more examples than those two. Not a 'normal' politician. Aside from setting millions of dollars of republican donor money on fire, DeSantis's campaign leaves behind a legacy of the various 'posting is life' type laws he enacted in Florida to raise his public profile. These include a raft of laws that target and victimize LGBT americans: [Thread of several such stories, reported in major outlets]

And he was also a noted figure in the conservative turn against COVID precautions, defenses, and vaccinations. While we'll never know such things to precision, Florida's COVID deaths record was considerably worse than many other states, despite its wealth and good climate. They chose not to pursue safer methods so as to buoy DeSantis's future presidential ambitions, now dead in the street. Like most failed presidential primary candidates he will probably not have a long future in national politics; DeSantis is a weirdo who eats pudding with his bare fingers, he's profoundly uncharismatic, and he's fought against his team's de facto leader. But before it's all consigned to dust of history, I'd just like to take a moment to remember all the real people who have suffered for his campaign, and for what? So he can make a 72 second ad with him shooting lightning from his eyes, get 21% of the vote in Iowa, and give up after 8 days.

A statesman for the ages, truly.

[blogdemocratesjr]

Mystery of Love by Joseph Coomans (1857)

The late 30s proved momentous years for Tiberius. Hot on the heels of his father’s death, discounting mourning obsequies, he found himself engaged. This happened before March 32 bc, when Tiberius was still only nine years old.19 His bride-to-be had recently celebrated her first birthday. She was Vipsania Agrippina, the daughter of Octavian’s closest friend, Marcus Agrippa. We do not know if Tiberius himself was consulted, though this seems unlikely. Nor is Livia’s role in the match clear. On her father’s side, Vipsania was the daughter of a novus homo , without patrician blood; her mother’s family could boast only equestrian rank. Elements of Vipsania’s family shared the Republican politics of Livia’s father and first husband - her maternal grandfather Atticus was that correspondent of Cicero who had negotiated the latter’s purchase of Marcus’s property in Rome in 50 bc; like Marcus, Cicero had fallen victim to the Triumvirs’ Proscriptions. The point was a tenuous one, however, and possibly insufficient to slake Claudian pride. If, on the surface, Agrippa gained more than Livia from the match, Livia had the consolation of Tiberius marrying within Octavian’s inner circle. Perhaps at this stage her sights were not set on Julia, Tiberius’s stepsister, as a bride for her elder son.

—Matthew Dennison, Livia, Empress of Rome

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

Henry Kissinger: Dead at 100

(Only the good die young.)

Stephen Jay Morris

11/30/23

©scientific Morality

Henry Kissinger died yesterday.  He was a German Jew who was a refugee from Nazi Germany.  He was educated at Harvard University, where he studied philosophy.  Somehow, he became Secretary of State in the Nixon Administration.  President Nixon would ingratiate himself in front of Henry, then shit-talk him behind his back. You want to talk about antisemitism?  You should have heard the anti-Jew hate speech Nixon gave to the Watergate criminals.  Nixon didn’t trust Jews.  Here is an excerpt from a published article, including quotes from one of his tapes: Washington "is full of Jews," the President asserted. "Most Jews are disloyal." He made exceptions for some of his top aides, such as National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, his White House counsel, Leonard Garment, and one of his speechwriters, William Safire. Most leftists from my generation viewed Kissinger as a war criminal. However, that would be a deep dive into history, which I won’t write about here. Maybe another time.

Henry Kissinger reminded me of the Peter Sellers’ character, “Dr. Strangelove,” from the movie of the same name.  Likewise, Strangelove reminded me of Kissinger.  Strangelove had this horse with a German accent, and he resembled a cold psychopath.  My grandmother always told me that most Jews in the community disliked German Jews because they had a superiority complex.  Some of them were obedient to the Nazi regime.  A lot of Jews were leftists ranging from Socialist Zionists to Anarchists.  They wanted to overthrow oppressive governments.  Others thought that by being obsequious to an Aryan, authoritarian government, they would be spared being jailed a concentration camp or put to death. The Jewish Community called those Jews “Capos” and, later, “Uncle Jakes.” German Jews told Zionist activists that Hitler was no threat to the Jewish people unless they were Leftists. Instead of going to Palestine, those Jews remained in Germany.

Kissinger was one of those Jews who wanted to be loved by the Goys. So much so, that he would do evil things to win their admiration.

Okay.  I now take a sharp turn and talk about Antisemitism.

Is Antisemitism left wing or right wing? The American Left was comprised mostly of Jews in the mid-Twentieth century. In the 1950’s, during the McCarthy era, some Jews left the Communist Party and joined the Democratic Party. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg got the death penalty, in 1953, for giving secret files to the Soviet Union, everybody knew they were innocent. Many Jews were freaking out over this, so some of them became Republican Conservatives. Did they become more accepted by Gentile America as a result? Not really. Many Jews weren’t permitted to golf on Christian golf courses or join private clubs until the New Left rebellion materialized in the 60’s. The Left has been anti-Zionist since 1948. Is that Antisemitism? Fuck no! Even some Orthodox Jews are anti-Zionist. They are called “Neturei Karta;” they believe there can be no Israel until the Jewish Messiah comes. Needless to say, they don’t believe Jesus is him. So, the Anti-Authoritarian Left is not anti-Semitic. The Tankies are, but they are Authoritarian Left. In their moronic minds, they think Islamo-Fascists are part of an anti-colonial, Third World rebellion.  A minority of Authoritarian Leftists romanticize any guerilla group that terrorizes American Imperialists. Groups like the Revolutionary Communist Party; Not the Communist Party USA.

So, no, the Left is not Anti-Semitic. The Right? They are. Christian Zionists use Israel for their stupid bible prophecies. According to Revelations in the King James Bible, most Jews are going to hell; that is, except for the Jews who accept Jesus as their Lord and savior. Extreme hate groups, like the Nazis and the Klan, see all Jews as evil. A normal person knows that evil exists in

If you are a Left-wing Jew, you have your list. Here is mine.

You want names, you got ‘em:

First on the list is David Berkowitz, famously branded as the “Son of Sam” by the media. He was a serial killer during the 70’s, who murdered six New Yorkers. To be fair, he suffered from Schizophrenic Paranoia and was non compos mentis.  You law students know what that means.

How about Jewish gangsters? There was Bugsy Siegel, Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, Louis “Lepke” Bacheller, to name just a few. These thugs go back to the 1920’s and 1930’s. They heavily extorted Jewish merchants for protection. See the movie, “Once Upon a Time in America.” Great flick.

Here follows a prime example of a true Uncle Jake: Nowadays, if you are anti-Israel Jewish Leftist, you are a self-hating Jew. Dog shit!

Introducing Dan Burros. He committed suicide in 1965. Why did he do it?  This dude had Traumatic Stockholm Syndrome. Nobody knew he was Jewish. Here is the kicker: he was the leader of Neo-Nazi group and, prior to that, he was a member of the K.K.K. He hated himself so much that he wanted to become an Aryan. His comrades were suspicious because of his Semitic features. Ultimately, they did some detective work and discovered he wasn’t who he said he was. Now, that’s a self-hating Jew!

Jews like Benjamin Aron Shapiro make me sick!  He is an Uncle Jake and wants to be loved by white Christians.  He has a business called “The Daily Wire.”  It’s allegedly a conservative business that makes its money attacking the Left. He employs White racists like Matt Walsh.  Then there is Benny Netanyahu, the Israel’s Prime Minister.  He is the leader of the Likud Party. His party wants to turn Israel into a Jewish Theocracy and kick all non-Jews.

In closing, I’ll state this: I love myself too much to hate self, as I do all Jews who are on the Left.

But I don’t like Right wing Kikes!

Shalom mother fucker!

[mariacallous]

The week since the midterm elections has underscored an important but often overlooked fact about Trump: it was the Republican Party that made him President and it will be only the Republican Party that can kill him off politically. General-election voters—that is, Democrats and independents—have made clear over multiple elections what they think of Trump. They don’t like him. Never have, never will. He’s lost the popular vote twice, by millions. He’s dragged down candidates in the 2018 midterms, the 2020 general election, and now in the 2022 midterms. It’s the G.O.P. that has continued to support and enable him. In primaries this year, Republican voters repeatedly chose Trump-anointed, election-denying extremists in competitive primaries as their nominees—flawed candidates such as Mehmet Oz, in Pennsylvania, and Herschel Walker, in Georgia, who came up short where their more conventional Republican opponents might not have. And Republican officials, including Trump skeptics like Mitch McConnell, then went ahead and endorsed those Trumpian nominees anyway, and spent millions of dollars promoting their candidacies. Trump led Republicans down the path of electoral folly; they didn’t have to follow.

Sure, there are some reassuring signs that self-preservation, if nothing else, might finally cause Republicans to forgo the chance at another four years of Trump. But a divided Republican Party is actually very much in Trump’s interest right now. It’s exactly how he came to power in the first place, beating out a field of seventeen other G.O.P. candidates in the 2016 primaries. They did not unite behind a single rival to defeat Trump then, nor are they likely to do so now. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—already anointed “Ron DeSanctimonious” by Trump—is being set up as Trump’s logical successor, a sort of Trump without the baggage. Polls since the midterms suggest DeSantis has gained ground with Republican primary voters beyond his home state. But Trump remains the clear leader in national surveys—including a new Politico/Morning Consult poll out on Tuesday, which had Trump leading DeSantis, forty-seven per cent to his thirty-three per cent. And there will be plenty of other Republicans who run, once again setting up a situation in which the anti-Trump vote is splintered. Pence, in book-tour mode, gave every appearance of running. Even Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State who was Pence’s rival in Trump-era obsequiousness, said on Tuesday that he would not step aside just because Trump is officially in the race.

“We’re going to bring people together. We’re going to unify people,” Trump said at one point in his speech Tuesday evening. It might have been his biggest whopper of the night. Still, there has been a surprisingly bipartisan consensus this week about the advisability of Trump running again: Democrats and an increasing number of Republicans now seem to agree they’d prefer that he not do so. Sixty-five per cent of Republicans in that Politico/Morning Consult poll, in fact, said they didn’t really want Trump to run again in 2024. But so what? He is running, and their lack of enthusiasm for Trump never stopped them from voting for him before.

Donald Trump does not care if they don’t like him. He does not care if you call him a liar, a cheat, a fraud, and a huckster. But, as the past two years have shown, he is willing to do anything, including blow up the foundations of American democracy, if you declare him a loser. ♦

The End of Trump?

[jbfletcher]

I read someone say the Trump “town hall” on CNN last night showed he’s not afraid to “take on the liberal media.”

How?

It was a panel composed entirely of Republican and Republican-leaning people and moderated by a woman who, while no Trump fan, got her start at The Daily Caller and broadcast on a middle-of-the-road milquetoast network run by craven obsequious weasels who thought it would be a good idea to give uncensored air time to a man who wants you to kill police officers and politicians in defense of overthrowing democracy to make him autocrat for life.

What’s liberal about any of that?

[mikeo56]

Where’s George Orwell Today? Texas!

If you think the GOP’s Congress of Clowns represents the fringiest, freakiest, pack of politicos that MAGA-world can hurl at us – you haven’t been to Texas.

It’s widely known, of course, that Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, and most other top Republican officials here are obsequious Trump acolytes. Thus, Texas is infamously racing against Florida to be declared the stupidest, meanest, most-repressive state government in America, constantly making demonic attacks on women’s freedom, immigrants, voting rights, public schools, poor people, and so on. But I’m confident Texas will win this race to the bottom for one big reason: GOP crazy runs extraordinarily deep here.

JIM HIGHTOWER

APR 18, 2024

[tomorrowusa]

« [M]any people who’ve served Trump, no matter how faithfully, have been ruined in various ways by the experience.

Nevertheless, as Trump runs for re-election, Republicans are climbing over one another to get as close to him as possible. »

— Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times.

One thing that will keep psychological researchers busy for decades is trying to explain the self-destructive groveling of Trump sycophants. Trump demands full loyalty and never returns it.

Wannabe Trump stooges understand this but delusionally think that things will be different for them.

Remember Trump's Attorney General Jeff Sessions?

11 times Trump has ripped Jeff Sessions

In 2017 Ezra Klein wrote...

[I]t’s become clear that to serve Trump is to risk permanently damaging your reputation — you will be asked to do things you shouldn’t do, and to say things you know you shouldn’t say, and even if you follow orders loyally, you might still end up on the wrong side of the president’s tweets.

The only rational explanation for those Republicans demeaning themselves by publicly grovelling to Trump is that they hope they get to be vice president and that he then dies in office. Such people should not be trusted at any level.

[myweddingsandevents]

Hoover served 48 years and spanned 10 presidents. During that time, he amassed, entrenched, and abused his power by gathering secrets and blackmailing opponents. According to one of his aides, “Hoover didn’t trust anyone he didn’t have something on.” Even President Richard Nixon was impacted, commenting, “he’s got files on everybody, damn it.” 

If Trump gets a second term, we can likely expect J. Edgar Hoover-style behavior from DOJ toward individuals, groups and corporations who balk about his unfettered control. Given the failures of two attempted removals through impeachment during his first term, coupled with the shameless Republican obsequiousness since the coup attempt on Jan. 6, Trump in all likelihood would re-assume office with a perceived mandate of zero accountability whatsoever, including under the Constitution itself. Let’s not forget that during this first term, he floated the idea of refusing to leave after the constitutional cap of two terms in office.

[worldofwardcraft]

Finding safety in numbers.

June 1, 2023

After years of obsequious kowtowing to every one of Donald Trump's whims, leading Republicans seem to have finally figured out how to deal with the Party's bully in chief. Which is simply to band together and ignore him. Trump's method has always been to pick out one critic to insult, attack and accuse of being a "RINO" with the aim being to terrify the others. In the past this approach has worked to suppress opposition and has allowed him to drive from the GOP ranks such antagonists as Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

But as Republicans have (ever so gradually) come to recognize that the one-term, twice-impeached loser ex-president is an impediment to the Party's future electoral success, Trump's edicts may no longer have the effect they once had. Two recent incidents appear to suggest this.

In Texas, Republicans in the state legislature finally decided to impeach corrupt attorney general and staunch Trump ally Ken Paxton. Naturally, Trump was livid at the prospect.

Hopefully Republicans in the Texas House will agree that this is a very unfair process that should not be allowed to happen or proceed — I will fight you if it does.

Despite this threat, Paxton, who for the past eight years has been under indictment for felony securities fraud, was suspended from office following a vote on no less than 20 articles of impeachment ranging from bribery to abuse of public trust.

That same day, House Republicans cut a bipartisan, yet overwhelmingly Biden-friendly deal to raise the debt limit. This was clearly over Trump's previous objections as voiced during CNN's "town hall" interview: "I say to the Republicans out there — congressmen, senators — if they don’t give you massive cuts, you’re going to have to do a default."

Just the other day, he reiterated that Republicans “should not make a deal on the debt ceiling unless they get everything they want.” But as The Hill reported, Senate Republicans dismissed Trump’s incitement to default as something far too risky to seriously consider. Observed Texas senator John Cornyn, “Nobody thinks default is a good idea. Nobody.” And, sure enough, yesterday a majority of House Republicans ignored Trump's mush-brained advice by voting to raise the debt ceiling and not default on America’s obligations.

It's entirely possible these are merely situational disagreements with the Dear Leader and that GOPers will afterwards return to their habitual subservience. On the other hand, it might be evidence of Republicans belatedly realizing that to resist their orange albatross, they must all hang together. Or else hang separately at the ballot box come November.

[nedsecondline]

‘Raw smarm’ is not a descriptor a person should aspire to — Filosofa's Word

‘Raw smarm’ is not a descriptor a person should aspire to — Filosofa’s Word

Originally posted on musingsofanoldfart: Smarm is not a good word to be described as. As a verb, it means the following: “behave in an ingratiating way in order to gain favor.” Synonyms for the term including being “obsequious, sycophantic or servile.” This term was used to define the Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy by… ‘Raw smarm’ is not a descriptor a person should aspire to —…

[anexplanationofunfortunateevents]

the darkest hour, one year later

The thing I have been thinking since January 6th, 2021 is that we have been on this path for almost exactly twenty years. Specifically, since December 12th, 2000.

Unlike 1/6, December 12th is not a date which has lived in infamy. (I had to look it up myself, I thought it might have been the 19th.) But it was the extremely consequential day when the United States Supreme Court handed down the lawless, intellectually dishonest, and unimaginably consequential decision in Bush v. Gore, which forced the state of Florida to stop its attempt to determine who had won the razor-close election for its presidential electors. This effectively handed the presidency to Bush, who received about 500,000 fewer votes than Vice President Gore – and who, a completed recount by press organizations showed a few months later, received fewer votes in the state of Florida.

Sure, it sounds bad if you describe it that way, and a lot of people said so at the time. But if you put it into the context of what led up to the decision, it actually looks a whole lot worse. It wasn’t the closeness of Florida’s election which dragged things out for over a month after the election. It was the Bush campaign doing everything it could to sabotage the recount, and the entire Republican establishment rallying behind him. “Everything” included something that’s been remembered as the “Brooks Brothers riot,” where a bunch of young Republican staffers charged into a Miami elections office and physically intimidated a bunch of local officials and volunteer poll workers into giving up on counting their constituents’ votes. And one reason Florida was even close enough to be swung by a 1/6-style mob attack was that the state’s Republican governor, who happened to be Bush’s little brother, had recently overseen a racist voter purge which secretly struck thousands of people (mostly Black Democrats) off the voter rolls.

So, to recap: Republicans tried to sabotage an election with shady bureaucratic antics in areas that most people assumed were apolitical. When that appeared not to have worked, they physically assaulted a government building where an important post-election procedure was being carried out. The violent attack bought enough time for a government institution with only tenuous democratic legitimacy to swoop in and decide “votes don’t count and we’re going to install the person who didn’t win over the public.” It does not strike me as farfetched that Trump and his henchmen thought that if they did steps one and two, then step three would work. Again.

Frustratingly, the small-d democratic failure of the 2000 election, if it’s remembered at all, tends to be decontextualized from what are broadly agreed to have been the policy failures of the Bush regime. But the clarity of 1/6 should make us reconsider. The Bush administration ignored expert warnings that the extremist Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organization al Qaeda were “determined to attack inside the United States,” and then once the warnings it had ignored proved prescient, it exploited the tragedy as an opportunity to seize a conventional strongman posture, conflating loyalty to the nation with political obsequiousness to the Dear Leader. Republican campaigns depicted opposition candidates as terrorists, simply because they were the political opposition.

The Bush regime used its control of the intelligence agencies to manipulate the press, the public, and elected officials into going along with a war of choice. It was a catastrophically bad choice on its own merits, and they went about it in a way that temporarily shielded them from constitutional checks on or democratic accountability for its bad choice. It locked people up in secret offshore prisons, publicly said it didn’t even have to show cause to arrest those people, and literally tortured them. That is a small-d democratic catastrophe.

The same Department of Justice that defended the government’s authority to kidnap and torture people also used its authority to harassand even imprisonpoliticians who it saw as potential opposition leaders. After the voters had the temerity to give Democrats a majority in the 2006 midterms, DOJ leadership demanded that US attorneys abuse their power to prosecute meritless cases of “voter fraud” and then purged the department of prosecutors who refused to frame innocent people for crimes in support of a political narrative aimed at delegitimizing the opposition’s victory.

Throughout it all, Fox News blasted a constant stream of Radio Rwanda-style propaganda demonizing the political opposition, and when that got boring, inciting violence against health care providers. This, too, was deliberately aimed at sabotaging democratic accountability – and it worked.

We have been on this path for a very long time.

So no. I am not surprised in the least that Republican officials and establishment right-wing media have found ways to rationalize defending Trump and propagating the Big Lie. I am a little surprised that many of them even hesitated and most of them even seem embarrassed about it. (Bush himself, to his credit, has denounced the 1/6 rioters in quite literally the strongest possible terms, calling them “children of the same foul spirit” as the hijackers who murdered thousands of people on 9/11. I am mildly curious what’s changed his mind.)

You might be thinking, “look, those weren’t exactly Rhodes scholars waving zipties and literally smearing poop all over the Capitol, I doubt they had much in-depth knowledge of recent American history.” But the 1/6 rioters weren’t the only insurrectionists. They had leaders like Trump’s campaign adviser and friend Roger Stone, who has taken credit for the Brooks Brothers riot, and Senator Ted Cruz, who worked on the Bush campaign’s legal team. These people knew exactly what they were doing, because they know exactly what they did before.

Moreover, even if you think political history begins with Trump, he and his supporters had every reason to believe that breaking the rules would be rewarded. Even if you accept that there is real democratic legitimacy – which isn’t the same thing as formal legality – to someone losing by millions of votes but still winning the election, elections have rules for a reason. Those rules include things like “a candidate can’t ask for or accept millions of dollars worth of opposition research and voter outreach from anyone, including foreign intelligence agencies” and “representatives of a campaign can’t pay hush money to the candidate’s ex without reporting it as a campaign expense” and “the FBI director can’t abuse his position to tell the public repeatedly about how bad and crime-y a candidate who didn’t commit any crimes seems to him.” All that stuff happened and everyone decided to let Donald Trump be the president anyway! The Trump mob wasn’t delusional to think rules are irrelevant to whether or not Trump got to be president. In this, if nothing else, they were completely correct.

There’s a lot of talk about how bad it is that some people don’t accept the president’s legitimacy, and it’s actually a reassuring development that normie centrist commentators generally acknowledge the link between the violent extremism of the 1/6 insurrection and the rhetoric of the conservative base’s favorite media outlets. But the core problem is not that people believe something radical in its implications, it is that they are justifying radical and violent action by claiming to believe something which is not true. If they were correct – even if Trump’s henchmen did not have to go to such tellingly extreme lengths to create a pretext for them to make such claims – that would be a different story. This development in Trumpist politics is not dramatics, or even hypocrisy. It is raw projection. Donald Trump sees no value in the perceived legitimacy of American elections because he never won legitimately. He knows it and his most fervent supporters know it and they are and have always been desperate to scare the rest of us away from acknowledging and grappling with it. Every “review” or “investigation” into some new theory about how zombie Hugo Chavez teamed up with the Chinese Communist Party to hire a bunch of hackers which would make random poll workers steal physical ballots should remind us of the possibility that if the Trump campaign and its Russian co-conspirators didn’t manage to sabotage the vote counting in 2016 it wasn’t for lack of trying.

January 6th was a dark day. It is almost unbearably dark to say that we are still living under its shadow; almost unfathomably dark to say that we lived under its shadow for decades until most of us saw it for what it was. All of that is true.

What is also true is that January 6th was the day the darkness gambled its most potent weapon and lost. The proto-fascist creep that started metastasizing at the turn of the millennium depended on a lot of normal people being able to rationalize denial. It never posted its selfies on Facebook, it never beat up a cop with a fire extinguisher, it never seared itself into the world’s memory with rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air. It could still make the people who were correctly alarmed wonder if they were just being alarmists – or worse, if they were the ones harming democratic stability by raising existential questions that weren’t warranted. All of that is gone. The constant, frantic lies from the terrorists’ sympathizers, as dispiriting as they are to hear, are a desperate and doomed attempt to regain something they know they have destroyed.

We did not choose to make January 6th a dark day. We can choose to make it the darkest hour before the dawn.

[eideard]

Yes, Master! Thanks, gocomics.org

[foreverlogical]

Donald Trump’s descent into madness continues.

The latest manifestation of this is a report in The New York Times that the president is weighing appointing the conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who for a time worked on his legal team, to be special counsel to investigate imaginary claims of voter fraud.

As if that were not enough, we also learned that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was pardoned by the president after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI, attended the Friday meeting. Earlier in the week, Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, floated the idea (which he had promoted before) that the president impose martial law and deploy the military to “rerun” the election in several closely contested states that voted against Trump. It appears that Flynn wants to turn them into literal battleground states.\

None of this should come as a surprise. Some of us said, even before he became president, that Donald Trump’s Rosetta Stone, the key to deciphering him, was his psychology—his disordered personality, his emotional and mental instability, and his sociopathic tendencies. It was the main reason, though hardly the only reason, I refused to vote for him in 2016 or in 2020, despite having worked in the three previous Republican administrations. Nothing that Trump has done over the past four years has caused me to rethink my assessment, and a great deal has happened to confirm it.

Given Trump’s psychological profile, it was inevitable that when he felt the walls of reality close in on him—in 2020, it was the pandemic, the cratering economy, and his election defeat—he would detach himself even further from reality. It was predictable that the president would assert even more bizarre conspiracy theories. That he would become more enraged and embittered, more desperate and despondent, more consumed by his grievances. That he would go against past supplicants, like Attorney General Bill Barr and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, and become more aggressive toward his perceived enemies. That his wits would begin to turn, in the words of King Lear. That he would begin to lose his mind.

So he has. And, as a result, President Trump has become even more destabilizing and dangerous.

“I’ve been covering Donald Trump for a while,” Jonathan Swan of Axios tweeted. “I can’t recall hearing more intense concern from senior officials who are actually Trump people. The Sidney Powell/Michael Flynn ideas are finding an enthusiastic audience at the top.”

Even amid the chaos, it’s worth taking a step back to think about where we are: An American president, unwilling to concede his defeat by 7 million popular votes and 74 Electoral College votes, is still trying to steal the election. It has become his obsession.

In the process, Trump has in too many cases turned his party into an instrument of illiberalism and nihilism. Here are just a couple of data points to underscore that claim: 18 attorneys generals and more than half the Republicans in the House supported a seditious abuse of the judicial process.

And it’s not only, or even mainly, elected officials. The Republican Party’s base has often followed Trump into the twilight zone, with a sizable majority of them affirming that Joe Biden won the election based on fraud and many of them turning against medical science in the face of a surging pandemic.

COVID-19 is now killing Americans at the rate of about one per minute, but the president is “just done with COVID,” a source identified as one of Trump’s closest advisers told The Washington Post. “I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with COVID ... It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.”

This is where Trump’s crippling psychological condition—his complete inability to face unpleasant facts, his toxic narcissism, and his utter lack of empathy—became lethal. Trump’s negligence turned what would have been a difficult winter into a dark one. If any of his predecessors—Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan, to go back just 40 years—had been president during this pandemic, tens of thousands of American lives would almost surely have been saved.

“My concern was, in the worst part of the battle, the general was missing in action,” said Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, one of the very few Republicans to speak truth in the Trump era.

In 30 days, Donald Trump will leave the presidency, with his efforts to mount a coup having failed. The encouraging news is that it never really had a chance of succeeding. Our institutions, especially the courts, will have passed a stress test, not the most difficult ever but difficult enough, and unlike any in our history. Some local officials exhibited profiles in courage, doing the right thing in the face of threats and pressure from their party. And a preponderance of the American public, having lived through the past four years, deserve credit for canceling this presidential freak show rather than renewing it. The “exhausted majority” wasn’t too exhausted to get out and vote, even in a pandemic.

But the Trump presidency will leave gaping wounds nearly everywhere, and ruination in some places. Truth as a concept has been battered from the highest office in the land on an almost hourly basis. The Republican Party has been radicalized, with countless Republican lawmakers and other prominent figures within the party having revealed themselves to be moral cowards, even, and in some ways especially, after Trump was defeated. During the Trump presidency, they were so afraid of getting crosswise with him and his supporters that they failed the Solzhenitsyn test: “The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions! His rule: Let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me.

”During the past four years, the right-wing ecosystem became more and more rabid. Many prominent evangelical supporters of the president are either obsequious, like Franklin Graham, or delusional, like Eric Metaxas, and they now peddle their delusions as being written by God. QAnon and the Proud Boys, Newsmax and One America News, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson—all have been emboldened.

These worrisome trends began before Trump ran for office, and they won’t disappear after he leaves the presidency. Those who hope for a quick snapback will be disappointed. Still, having Trump out of office has to help. He’s going to find out that there’s no comparable bully pulpit. And the media, if they are wise, will cut off his oxygen, which is attention. They had no choice but to cover Trump’s provocations when he was president; when he’s an ex-president, that will change.

For the foreseeable future, journalists will rightly focus on the pandemic. But once that is contained and defeated, it will be time to go back to focusing more attention on things like the Paris Accords and the carbon tax; the earned-income tax credit and infrastructure; entitlement reform and monetary policy; charter schools and campus speech codes; legal immigration, asylum, assimilation, and social mobility. There is also an opportunity, with Trump a former president, for the Republican Party to once again become the home of sane conservatism. Whether that happens or not is an open question. But it’s something many of us are willing to work for, and that even progressives should hope for.Beyond that, and more fundamental than that, we have to remind ourselves that we are not powerless to shape the future; that much of what has been broken can be repaired; that though we are many, we can be one; and that fatalism and cynicism are unwarranted and corrosive.

There’s a lovely line in William Wordsworth’s poem “The Prelude”: “What we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how.

”There are still things worthy of our love. Honor, decency, courage, beauty, and truth. Tenderness, human empathy, and a sense of duty. A good society. And a commitment to human dignity. We need to teach others—in our individual relationships, in our classrooms and communities, in our book clubs and Bible studies, and in innumerable other settings—why those things are worthy of their attention, their loyalty, their love. One person doing it won’t make much of a difference; a lot of people doing it will create a culture.

Maybe we understand better than we did five years ago why these things are essential to our lives, and why when we neglect them or elect leaders who ridicule and subvert them, life becomes nasty, brutish, and generally unpleasant.

Just after noon on January 20, a new and necessary chapter will begin in the American story. Joe Biden will certainly play a role in shaping how that story turns out—but so will you and I. Ours is a good and estimable republic, if we can keep it.

PETER WEHNER is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.