The following originally showed as my “Good News Roundup Annex,” with a few major additions here.
I admit, I have been having difficulty spinning what I see going on with the Rethugs to spin it into a “Good News” content. The best I can come up with is “mixed news” that has a potential Good News outcome.
My main issue: has become increasingly clear that the Rethug party has devolved into something anti-democratic, and potentially willing to steal a presidential election. This is what Thomas Friedman discussed yesterday, and it’s all over the Washington Post, The Alternet and other sources today. The good news part is that what accompanies the is the beginning of a hard-fought non-military civil war intended to NOT LET THAT HAPPEN. Alongside this is another anti-Democratic fight: McConnell’s stated fight to prevent Biden and the Democrats from actually enacting what are turning out to be highly popular initiatives. Hard-core Conservative Bill Kristol and a group of like-minded former Republicans has leapt right into the middle of this fight, on the our side of it. Obviously, this connects directly to what is happening to Liz Cheney: she has no interest in progressive viewpoints, but she strongly fears the outcome if the Rethugs get reduces to doing nothing but cheat, delay and stall. There are others, but we need a lot of others. From a week ago:
www.reuters.com/...
United States Anti-Trump group grades Republicans with 'democracy' report card
A conservative anti-Trump group handed out failing grades to 136 Republicans in Congress on Monday as part of an effort to track allegiance to former President Donald Trump and support for democracy in the Senate and House of Representatives.
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and the chamber's No. 2 Republican, Steve Scalise, were among those who received 'F' grades from the "GOP Democracy Report Card" for allegedly backing Trump's efforts to undermine President Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election and for opposing Trump's impeachment following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
The Republican Accountability Project, a group led by two former Trump administration officials and leading conservatives, including William Kristol, also handed out failing grades to prominent Trump allies such as Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.
"Our Capitol was attacked by a mob that believed that the 2020 election was being stolen. They were encouraged by the lies and actions of President Trump and many Republican members of Congress," the group said in a statement.
And from EJ Dionne at WaPo:
www.washingtonpost.com/...
Opinion: Will Democrats break the GOP’s deficit doom loop?
Republicans understand it. The rest of the country should, too. The real game-changer in President Biden’s raft of policy proposals is the revenue he would raise from the wealthy.
Biden’s plans are routinely described as big, bold and progressive. This is true but incomplete. Yes, Biden is making ambitious efforts to grapple with long-standing shortfalls in public investment.
But Biden has not cooked up some radical, untested concoction. He’s advancing programs that have been successful in U.S. states and in other well-off democratic nations. Many of his plans were proposed and vetted in Congress over the past decade. Team Biden knows that familiarity breeds comfort and long-term coalition-building.
These are indeed strange and difficult times. The Rethugs have devolved from a focus on conservative principals to a focus on maintaining The Big Lie at all costs, including the cost of giving up democracy, if they can get away with it. From the Alternet:
www.alternet.org/...
Why Mitch McConnell is about to destroy the GOP
Nobody's asking, "Why?"
Just like he did with the Covid rescue bill a few months ago, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just said that there will not be one single Republican vote in support of President Joe Biden's infrastructure plan.
Why would McConnell do this?
Why would he give away any bargaining leverage the GOP might have?
Why would he essentially encourage Democrats to make the legislation as expansive, effective and popular as possible? And then let them get all the credit for it? After all, now that the Democrats know there's no possibility of any Republican votes, there's no need for them to negotiate with any GOP senators. There's no need for Democrats to worry about their Republican colleagues' feelings, thoughts, concerns or even ask their opinions….
It's pretty far out, but maybe he's letting folks trash Romney and Cheney and the rational few left in the party so it'll fall so low in the 2022 election that Trump will be discredited and purged from the party himself.
That possibility, though, is a stretch. It still appears that the only reasonable explanation for Mitch McConnell refusing in advance to go along with anything Biden is proposing that might help America is that he truly believes that, at the end of the day, Biden's plans will be a disaster and he wants to have no part of them.
He's wrong, but — in either case — he's certainly not lacking in conviction.
And next:
www.washingtonpost.com/...
Opinion: Liz Cheney told the truth. Republicans must decide whether they value Trump over it.
A strong conservative on policy, Ms. Cheney faces punishment for refusing to embrace, or at least to accept with silence, the falsehood that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. Ms. Cheney is among the few Republican patriots for whom former president Donald Trump’s toxic lies about voter fraud, and the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol they sparked, were a red line. After the former president insisted on Monday that his failure in last year’s election is “THE BIG LIE,” Ms. Cheney shot back: “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”
In a Post op-ed posted Wednesday, Ms. Cheney spelled out the stakes for her party: “The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution,” she wrote. “While embracing or ignoring Trump’s statements may seem attractive to some for fundraising and political purposes, that approach will do profound long-term damage to our party and our country.”
The bottom line, in my view is that the 2022 election has become and inflection point in the fight to preserve democracy—very possibly a more important election than the Biden election was. The best news I can find from this mess is this:
1) The Democratic-based polices, up to most of “Infrastructure-plus,” moves to fix the legacy racism involved in infrastructure decisions, moves to reduce child poverty and move to increase the care economy, are extraordinarily popular, in the face of the Rethug’s doctrinaire opposition.
2) This popularity includes the policy position of sharply raising taxes collected from corporations and the wealthy.
3) Even many corporations are willing to live with this shift, if the alternative is a devolution of Democratic Modified Capitalism into Incompetent, Dishonest Authoritarianism—which is what the choice has become. Major corporations know that climate change is coming, and that their capacity to thrive is based in signing up to aggressively attack our carbon footprint—which the Rethugs will NEVER do. This puts corporations like GM closer to our side, working toward electric cars, better batteries and zero-carbon electric generation, while extraction companies stick with the liars and cheaters, because they do not see a back side in a much lower carbon footprint that helps their bottom line.
4) The successes we have, from Covid relief to a really strong economy to vast support for what we want to do next, could well be sufficient to keep The Big Cheat from working.
5) Meanwhile, as I note in linking the Ross Douthat “editorial” below, the nation has moved in an increasingly progressive direction, and that fact in and of itself will ultimately help at the ballot box.
The Rethugs are cheating so aggressively that they may very well win the House—even while losing a few Senate seats which involves state-level voting where the cheating will likely be less successful. But, the fear of that outcome is growing increasingly strong. WE NEED TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THAT FEAR, JUST AS WE DID ABOUT HEALTHCARE IN 2018.
I admit: I thought that the ugliness would decline with the removal of Trump. But, ironically with the assistance of the ex-president, the ugliness has gotten even worse. This has a lot of people and institutions very scared, and some of those who are scared are lining up on our side.
Now, on that Douthat editorial from yesterday: Douthat is one of the Times’ limited corps of very conservative opinion writers. The times gave him the entire editorial section yesterday to present a difficult, complex piece about how the nation is becoming strongly and almost inexorably more progressive, in the face of the Rethug bullcrap:
www.nytimes.com/...
Did Trump Make Everything Progressive?
The latest transfixing document for our time is a public-relations video for the Central Intelligence Agency. It features an unidentified 36-year-old Latina officer who speaks of her ascent through the ranks of the Company in a hybrid language, partly the traditional American narrative of immigrant success, partly something more contemporary and ideological: “I’m a woman of color. … I’m a cisgender millennial who’s been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise. … I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be.”
Thus is a career in service to the American imperium, at an institution dedicated to spycraft, drone strikes and the occasional coup d’état, now packaged as the fulfillment of a certain kind of cultural leftism and sold with buzzwords that almost nobody outside the academy would have recognized in the first term of Barack Obama. Whatever this change ultimately means for left-wing politics — the death of the antiwar left? the completion of progressivism’s march through the institutions? just the usual C.I.A. tricks? — it’s pretty remarkable to watch. In my weekend column I wrote about the political challenges that the rise of so-called wokeness poses for the Democratic Party: the surmountable challenge created by its academic style of rhetoric, and the more substantial challenge should the new progressivism preside over policy disasters in the cities where it rules.
But it would take more than just an electoral setback to reverse the ideological shifts that have given us the intersectional, anti-patriarchal, cisgender-and-all-genders Central Intelligence Agency video. Indeed, the striking thing about the new progressivism’s advance is that it was seemingly accelerated by electoral defeat — the shocking defeat of 2016, specifically, which by making Donald Trump president made a progressive revolution possible.
This is complex but heady stuff, and I encourage you all to read the whole thing. And I finally harken back to the Thomas Friedman piece from yesterday about the threat posed by the Rethugs. I won’t quote the threat in any detail, which has already been done, but rather Friedman’s strong belief that the nation won’t stand for it:
Trump’s Big Lie Devoured the G.O.P. and Now Eyes Our Democracy
Think about that for a second. To be a leader in today’s G.O.P. you either have to play dumb or be dumb on the central issue facing our Republic: the integrity of our election. You have to accept everything that Trump has said about the election — without a shred of evidence — and ignore everything his own attorney general, F.B.I. director and election security director said — based on the evidence — that there was no substantive fraud.
What kind of deformed party will such a dynamic produce? A party so willing to be marinated in such a baldfaced lie will lie about anything, including who wins the next election and every one after that...
Imagine if all or many of these measures are passed — and in 2022 and 2024 Republicans manage to retake the House, Senate and White House with, say, only 42 percent of the popular vote, effectively establishing minority rule. Do you know what will happen? Let me tell you what will happen. Disenfranchised Democratic voters will not sit idly by. They may refuse to pay their taxes. Many will take to the streets. Some might become violent, and our whole political system could become paralyzed and start to unravel.
It is this risk of unraveling that is drawing many conservatives and even many corporations to our side—and that is the very best news: we now know for sure that the Rethugs favor a cheating win over any possible fight on policy issues, where a strong majority of Americans are on our side. The arch-conservative Bill Kristol, now mainly on our side, has suggested that, as a reminder, the Democrats should keep bringing pieces of their policy program up in the Senate, and let the electorate sees that they are getting zero Rethug support. Still, we need to offset Trump’s entirely new set of donors, and that won’t be easy, either. In the Alternet from Pro Publica:
www.alternet.org/...
Trump spawned a new group of mega-donors who now hold sway over the GOP's future
Wesley Barnett was just as surprised as anyone to learn from news reports that the Jan. 6 Trump rally that turned into a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol was funded by Julia Jenkins Fancelli, an heiress to the fortune of the popular Publix supermarket chain. But Barnett had extra cause for being startled: Fancelli is his aunt.
Barnett said he was at a loss to explain how his aunt — who isn't on social media, lives part time in Italy and keeps a low profile in their central Florida town — got mixed up with the likes of Alex Jones and Ali Alexander, the right-wing provocateurs who were VIPs at the Jan. 6 rally in front of the White House.
Over the last five years, it has become clear that former President Donald Trump has activated a new set of mega-donors who were not previously big spenders in national politics. Some of the donors appear to share the more extreme views of many Trump supporters, based on social media posts promoting falsehoods about election fraud or masks and vaccines. Whether they will deepen their involvement or step back, and whether their giving will extend to candidates beyond Trump, will have an outsized role in steering the future of the Republican Party and even American democracy.
The offset to that, as Douthat observes, is that the nation’s move toward progressivism includes strong counters to racism that are just coming into view, that the Rethugs cannot easily offset as part of their cheat. WE NOW HAVE TO MAKE IT WORK. The alternative, of a move directly into racist authoritarianism, is too ugly to live with, and as Friedman notes will likely lead to a pretty aggressive civil war triggered by the progressive side, which can no longer live with corporate dominance, Jim Crow and the Big Cheat.
On that note, here is an interesting view from The Alternet as to how it might all come togather on our side:
www.alternet.org/...
Trump's election lies may cost Republicans the House in 2022: former GOP pollster
If the presidencies of Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton are any indication, President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee need to think long and hard about the 2022 midterms. Obama, Reagan and Clinton are three examples of U.S. presidents who — despite being popular enough to win a second term — saw their parties suffer a major pounding when the midterms arrived. Former President Donald Trump, in contrast to Obama, Reagan and Clinton, was pounded during the 2018 midterms and voted out of office two years later when Biden defeated him by more than 7 million in the popular vote. And according to former GOP pollster Frank Luntz, Trump's unending obsession with the 2020 election "could cost the Republicans the majority in the House in 2022."
Luntz issued that warning to Republicans during an interview with journalist Kara Swisher for the New York Times' podcast, "Sway," noting, "More than two-thirds of Republicans believe that the election was stolen." And Swisher responded, "So, it's working. This 'Big Lie' thing is working."
According to Luntz, Trump's bogus and totally debunked claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020 are terrible for the Republican Party because they may discourage GOP voter turnout in 2022.
Luntz told Swisher, "It is working.... What Donald Trump is saying is actually telling people it's not worth it to vote. Donald Trump single-handedly may cause people not to vote. And he may be the greatest tool in the Democrats' arsenal to keep control of the House and Senate in 2022."
I liken this set of beliefs to Rethug unwillingness to get vaccinated or wear masks. The mythology is self-defeating. Here is hoping that Dems use all of this sufficiently to save 2022, because 2022 is a clear inflection point for all of our futures, and even our children’s futures.