That is to say, can we wake up and smack down pols aligned with coup-doers?
Take Donald Trump’s would-be sidekick, Vivek Ramaswamy. (Please.) As if fact-free dreck were food from the gods, the lean, mean pharma bum honks “GO WOKE, GO BROKE!”
While frenetic Vivek effectively hawks plutocracy to the underpaid, regressively taxed (by his party) masses, former US Rep Joe Walsh (R-IL) effectively counters with “WAKE THE HELL UP, AMERICA!” (See “Wake the hell up…,” Raw Story, 12/31/23.) Bully for him. ‘Needless to say,’ let’s make bold to take to heart Walsh’s strong, full-throated message. Namely, damn the anti-woke goons and ever-Trumpers, full speed ahead; WE SNOOZE, WE LOSE.
* * * * *
Sad to say, we’ve dozed through our alarms for years. During the heyday of the Trumpish trailblazer George ‘WMD’ Bush, neuroscientist/strategist/pundit/author Drew Westen marshaled tons of science and history to decry the vote-repellant fecklessness of Dems’ wonky, pliant, conflict-averse, brainier-than-thou political politesse. (Better late than never, let’s face it. The subtitle of his 2007 masterwork The Political Brain has turned out to be even more on-target than he could have imagined. Namely: The Role of Emotion in DECIDING THE FATE OF THE NATION [emphasis added].)
As he suggests, we’ve been countering beanballs with sponge balls for WAY too long. As they say in many sports (and perhaps especially in tennis, whose scoring system strives to facilitate comebacks), ALWAYS CHANGE A LOSING GAME.
As it happens, with our country under the gun from domestic terror writ large, the pro tennis season gears up to commence down under (in Adelaide, Australia). On (what else?) J6.
Don’t look now, but the eruption of early 2021’s near-debacle should serve to make plain the fact that decent, utilitarian progressives have been losing. Big. For a long, long time. Now facing GOP war cries about “trial by combat,” “bullets” not “ballots,” “civil war started,” and “the final battle,” we have no real choice but to up our game.
Question. With such anti-coup righties as Walsh, Rick “Everything Trump Touches Dies” Wilson, and Adam ‘You Can Detect Trump’s Diaper From Denver’ Kinzinger waking up and smelling the, uh, coffee, why do most donkeys (who need to be leading the Trump-bumping) STILL look as if they’re trying to score brownie points (for comity, or what have you) at some courtly old social cotillion?
So. Another year of slapping the J6 foot soldiers’ wrists (while cowering before the Big Orange Cheese) rolls by. Through time, memory fades, dilutes. J6’s blood red tide feels as if it’s drifting back out to sea (if not further).
So wait. Revisit the video (from the Ellipse and the Capitol). Those America-maimers are not spewing New Year’s bubbly. Better late than never, can we wake up and smell the bear spray? With Walsh in heart-and-mind, can we fully and fearfully resolve the coup/siege/search-and-destroy foray (NOT “riot”) that looks to have been planned to “get rid of the ballots” (quoting Trump)?
Look. In one season (ironically christened the “Red Summer” of 1919), our land saw at least 26 (some say 40) major riots. Each, of course, was horrific. But not one of them- or even ALL of them combined- threatened the USA’s survival. Plainly enough, to soft-pedal J6 as a “riot” (which even “progressive” outlets now do) is to hawk what deserves to be called ‘Big Lie Lite.’
Dems now are stuck with the unenviable task of awakening the media and the public to the plain, bald truth that we’re down to one non-despotic major party- and to the fact that the other one (which has dominated for decades) has long since swamped our ship of state.
Drifting back to sleep won’t help. The brain-fogged, ever-fomenting fogey who smears the foe who replaced him as “sleepy” deploys constant deceit. Big Media has served to legitimize Trumpian whoppers by the tens of thousands. So now- as these words are scrawled- President Biden at last seems to have woken up to the sheer, long-telegraphed ‘shocker’ that the cult-helming kook (who now channels not ‘merely’ Il Duce, but also Der Fuhrer) poses danger that must be faced. Fought. And- by all means- stopped.
An 80-ton Godzilla in the Rotunda is that Hitler’s motto was “God With Us.” Ours now might well be ‘God Help Us.’ Once an oxymoron, American Nazism now looks favored (some say heavily) to hold sway starting just 380 days after J6, ‘24. In any event, in no way, shape, or form is Trump’s faux Biblical cult a flash in the pan. Truth to tell, it’s pure, distilled tyranny.
Not to say evil incarnate. Let’s have a great year as if our lives depend on it. And choose to refuse to snooze-and-lose.