I have very bad news today, but much better Good News. We have an actual campaign of terrorism on election officials, on top of radical voter suppression laws and general demonization. What would they do if they could, and most importantly why can’t they?
Reuters: Trump-inspired death threats are terrorizing election workers
Election officials and their families are living with threats of hanging, firing squads, torture and bomb blasts, interviews and documents reveal. The campaign of fear, sparked by Trump's voter-fraud falsehoods, threatens the U.S. electoral system.
Reuters: One in three U.S. election officials feels unsafe - survey
Well.
We are going to need some new Federal anti-domestic-terrorism laws, and then we are going to have to band together and insist on serious Federal enforcement, as we did with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act back in the 1960s and from then on. Not like the Nixon Administration doing lax but well-publicized enforcement to keep the Segregationists riled up.
But, as I said, we have genuine Good News. We are on it, in a dozen different ways, for a dozen different values of We, as we have been from the beginning.
These are the times that try men’s [sic] souls. The Summer Soldier and the Sunshine Patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country. But he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of men and women.
Thomas Paine, The Crisis
First music break: Hard Times
Cluosity vs. Bogosity
Since human speech began there have evidently always been people trying to maximize bogosity, while others call out the bogus in human behavior and give clues toward behaving better. It is only recently, however, that this question has been put on a proper hyperpseudometascientific basis, in the Theory of Quantum Bogodynamics (QBD).
Bogosity, Defined at Last!
In relation to Car Talk, source of the utterance
Bo-o-o-o-ogus!
What else do the terminally bogus imagine they can pull off?
Political positions of the Republican Party
Currently, the party's fiscal conservatism includes support for lower taxes, free market capitalism, deregulation of corporations, and restrictions on labor unions. The party's social conservatism includes support for gun rights and other traditional values, often with a Christian foundation, including restrictions on abortion.[4] In foreign policy, Republicans usually favor increased military spending and unilateral action. Other Republican positions include restrictions on immigration, opposition to drug legalization, and support for school choice.
Note that there is no coherence in these positions. There are many single-issue Republican voters who don’t care about the other issues or the factions that are concerned with them. The Republican Party organization is rapidly moving rightward, far outstripping those who claim Republican affiliation. Overt White Supremacy is becoming more accepted, along with sexual offenses and crimes.
Political positions of the Democratic Party
Democratic platforms seek to promote social programs, labor unions, consumer protection, workplace safety regulation, equal opportunity, disability rights, racial equality,[8] regulations against environmental pollution,[9][10][11] and criminal justice reform.[12] Democrats tend to support abortion rights and the LGBT community, as well as a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Democrats typically agree with the scientific consensus on climate change and favor a multilateral approach in foreign policy.
Note that most Democrats are in favor of action on all of these issues, supporting each other. There are, of course, clear differences on certain points between the Democrats called Progressive and those called Moderate or Centrist. The Party is clearly shifting leftward a bit faster than its established leadership.
Most of the issues described in those articles are historically important, but have become obsolete. Many old issues have largely fallen away, or are in that process, like opposition to marijuana or marriage equality. Bogus Free Market economics still lives, but you don’t hear much about Supply-Side Economics any more.
- Steal elections comprehensively in a dozen different ways, including “Stop the Steal” efforts to overturn the 2020 election
- Demonize everyone but U.S.-born Christian White males
- Gin up a dozen bogus issues, from trans athletes or rising crime (due to ever looser gun laws in the Red states) to good old racism and misogyny
- Continuing science denial
- Prevent any action to fix their steals of three Supreme Court seats
- Get TFG off, or in the most fanciful version, reinstalled on August 13.
- Prevent any meaningful investigation of 1/6
- Get SCOTUS to ban abortions
BUT
Stealing Elections
The Brennan Center for Justice has documented hundreds of bills to suppress voting, or even to allow states to overturn election results that the party in power doesn’t like. More than 20 have passed.
Marc Elias’s Democracy Docket is on it. The ACLU, the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, the SPLC, Blue state AGs, all are in court. The DoJ has filed suit in Georgia, and is ramping up its Civil Rights Department for many more.
SCOTUS has shown that it will approve of some voter suppression measures, as last month in an Arizona case, but by no means all.
Demonization
When you get to know us, it turns out that we are just people. More and more it is impossible to avoid meeting us and seeing us in the media and more generally online. In a triumph of circular logic, this is why segregationists are so hot on their children not knowing anybody outside the traditional bubble, which is increasingly difficult to maintain. Thus the end of segregation and of systemic racism and other hatreds is inevitable.
Supreme Court Seats
Yes, it’s time to add four more Justices, and expand the Courts of Appeals, too. The whole Federal Judiciary. More courts, more judges. Expand the tax courts and the immigration courts and any others that have unconscionable backlogs.
Rs will tell you that this, and anything else worth doing, costs too much. But not the military, and not tax cuts for the rich. So we know that it is about fear and loathing, not about money.
Bogus Issues
- Trans athletes, because Marriage Equality is no longer a viable issue
- Rising crime, due to ever looser gun laws in the Red states, not to Ds being “soft on crime”, or Black Lives Matter, or Antifa, or Defund the Police.
- Good old-fashioned racism and misogyny and immigrant-bashing, but now from an ever-shrinking but ever-louder and nastier minority as those with any possibility of compassion increasingly fall away or get shoved out.
- Fear of reverse racism, when all of us do unto them as they have done unto everyone else (Not happening, not going to happen. We are still offering them the Best of Everything, whether they like it or not.)
- Getting TFG Off or Reinstalled on August 13
LOL.
Grokking Trumpists: Their Cognitive Dissonance is Even Stronger This Time
- Critical Race Theory. The full-bore attack on CRT in education is getting some of our people interested in reading it, and generating pushback against Republican censorship and cancellation.
- Attacking the military for being “woke”. They won’t like the Army’s response, ordering soldiers to read How to be an Antiracist, by a former University of Florida professor, Henry Rogers, aka Ibram X. Kendi. Ooh, Tuckums is soooo mad!
- Assorted CT, each crazier than the one before it. Did you hear that Harris is going to 25th Amendment Biden and install Pence as VP? You can’t make this stuff up, but clearly they can.
Science Denial
Global Warming denial is on the wane, but covid vaccine denial is likely at its peak. I like to compare it to 18th century lightning rod denial, when Benjamin Franklin was denounced in pulpits across the Colonies for blasphemous interference with the Will of God to strike whom or what He pleased with lightning bolts. Eventually, only churches continued to burn down, and the preaching against lightning rods stopped, either because those preachers were turned out, or because they had no churches left.
Soon Red states will have nearly all of the remaining covid cases, and we can hope for a similar gradual shift in opinion. Covid could have a significant effect on the 2030 census and reapportionment—only a few percent, but in purple states, that is plenty to tip elections.
Similarly, renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels, and electric vehicles are cheaper to own than gas guzzlers. Some analysts, including me, think we are a year or two from a comprehensive tipping point on these issues.
Prevent Investigation of 1/6
Too late!
McCarthy expected to appoint Republicans to Jan. 6 select committee
Abortion
Well, Rs, if you really want to mobilize Democratic voters to gain significant Congressional supermajorities, and dump the filibuster and the Electoral College and gerrymanders completely, and bring in DC as a state, and maybe some others, and dismantle the 1% state, go ahead and wish for SCOTUS to dump Roe v. Wade whole and entire, triggering all of the total abortion bans in ten of the Reddest states.
Down the Rabbit Hole, or in Mirror World?
“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.
Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass
Or, if you prefer,
six impossible things before breakfast
per the Red Queen.
The correct answer to the question above is
Yes.
So let us review.
We agree that the Republican Party agenda is evil. So do they, but each faction claims that it is only the extremists (the Rightist Adventurists, in an inversion of Communist jargon) or the RINOs (the Leftist Running Dogs) that are the problem, not themselves. I have identified ten major factions among the Republicans, each focused on different issues, and each expressing the utmost contempt for all of the others as well as the rest of us, in spite of the massive overlap among them.
Yup, same as ever, only more so today.
You know what they would do.
The same as ever, only more so today.
We have had years, decades, centuries of it, going back to the enslavement power, and we are busy undoing as much of it as we can now, finally, with an all-of-government/all-of-society-except-the-paskudnyaks approach, and explaining ourselves to the country and to a candid world.
But let us not speak more of that. Let us consult Sunzi on The Art of War, as I have done in brief form in various GNR comments.
On desperate ground, fight.
As I have mentioned, that is all the Rs have, while we have the rest of the book entire. They know how to fight nastily, but not effectively now that they are firmly in the minority nationally.
Our side leads with
The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerity, benevolence, courage, and strictness.
Get that man a Tesla! Well, get the Secret Service Teslas for all! The bulletproof ones. Those suckers are fast. Maximum torque at zero speed.
‘Biden is not a good bad guy’: GOP rips up midterm playbook
Biden is proving to be a less-than-ideal foil, forcing Republicans to rethink the traditional formula for 2022.
Check.
They are targeting Pelosi instead. Pelosi is having fun with that.
Hence that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.
Check.
The attacks on Biden and Pelosi don’t stick, unlike the decades of demonization of Hillary Clinton, starting when she went undercover to unmask racist Christian academies right out of law school.
We don’t even have to attack all of the Wrong-Wingers in order to get millions of the children of the Deplorables/Paskudnyaks to fall away every year. In spite of the well-known deficiencies of our media, our schools, and the Internet, far more cluons than bogons are getting into circulation and getting absorbed. What the WWNJs shriekingly call “indoctrination” and propaganda and so on. As Molly Ivins observed, in more traditional language, when you absorb one cluon you become open to them all.
Humble words and increased preparations are signs that the enemy is about to advance. Violent language and driving forward as if to the attack are signs that he will retreat.
Check, check.
Look at the total secrecy about D-Day until thousands of ships appeared over the Normandy horizon. Look at Operation Mincemeat and The Man Who Never Was, Patton’s fictional 1st U.S. Army Group (FUSAG), and its successor the Ghost Army, the Ultra Secret about cracking the German Enigma code machines, the Double Cross (XX/Twenty Committee) System of turning all Nazi agents in Britain, and all of the other ways that the Allies pulled it off.
Compare thatidiotDouglasMacArthur mouthing off at the Yalu River, after the Korean war was all but won, and prodding China to come in hard on the other side.
To begin by bluster, but afterwards to take fright at the enemy's numbers, shows a supreme lack of intelligence.
Check and burn.
If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him.
Check.
Well, they irritate themselves supremely. And it irritates them no end when we are nice to them.
How victory may be produced for them out of the enemy's own tactics—that is what the multitude cannot comprehend.
Check, check, double check, and mate
But too many “analysts” also don’t get it, and can only ask plaintively what Dems can do about supposedly unstoppable R this and that, and when we are actually going to do anything against these existential threats and make good on any of our promises. Don’t pay any attention to anyone who presumes to tell you what to think, or what the other side thinks they think. Pollsters are sort of OK in actual elections, asking about actual imminent voting. Otherwise, they mostly don’t even have any idea what kinds of question to ask.
Those who bring facts, fine.
Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.
U. S. Grant to his officers
Our hpg gets his due shoutout here for bringing both data and cats twice every day, in Good News and Evening Shade. Indeed the entire Good Gnus regular writer corps and Best Comment Section on the InternetTM get their due shoutouts here for making so many of the points that I have brought together here.
The Democratic supermajority is currently in the business of handing Republicans enough rope to hang themselves and all of their friends and relations and toadies, while nearly all of the Republicans are demanding
Moar! Rope! Moar!
on the Cognitively Dissonant hypothesis that the Road to Majority is to drive out all of the RINOs so that all of the True Believers will turn up at the polls next time.
We are also observing the Napoleonic maxim
Never interfere when your enemy is making a fatal error.
which is what Russian General Kutuzov did to Napoleon himself, as recounted in Leo Tolstoy, by Warren Piece—No, no, no! In War and Peace, by Lev Tolstoi. (H/T Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, on Car Talk)
Biden and Schumer, whether by study or just because these are good ideas, are acting in accord with what Sunzi tells us in Art of War.
They have made their calculations in advance of the battle and chosen their battlefield: the moral high ground of HR1 For the People, HR4 John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and the filibuster. The Trumpish Rs are now on “desperate ground" where there is no choice but to fight everything the Democrats propose, and show themselves as they are to all of the voters.
Biden and Manchin refuse to do away with the filibuster completely, and say that they want to go back to the "traditional” talking filibuster or some other means of bringing the pain of cloture to the Rs, making us the reasonable ones. When we get that straightened out, and brought up in the Senate, everything else becomes possible, whether now or when the next Congress is seated in Jan. 2023, with more Democratic Senators.
McConnell blusters about a "scorched earth Senate”, which means a scorched and salted earth Republican Party.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain
Shoutout to Mrmuni12 for his comment
GNR Annex: I want a “National March for Democracy”
I am puzzled why certain forms of “fighting back” aren’t being used yet. In particular, I want the fight against the Rethugs’ attack on our democratic electoral system to become a lot louder.
The other underlying good gnus on all of this, imo, is that the pro-democracy underpinnings in most of our nation are a lot stronger than they have been given given credit for being so far. This marries well with the Rethug stupidity on CRT.
The Rethugs seem to think that their “cheat to win” strategy enjoys sufficient popular support for them to get away with these bouts of ugliness. I simply do not buy it, but the “War for Democracy needs to get a lot louder.
Another aspect of the outcome, I think, is going to be the Rethugs shooting themselves in their collective feet by supporting primary opposition to incumbents who didn’t cheat hard enough. We are seeing this already in the form of primary challenges to Rethugs who aren’t loud enough in their public views that a cheat against Trump actually happened.
We could very well win some congressional seats that we were scheduled to lose, because a nearly invincible incumbent is replaced by a “Trump wuz cheated” hypocrite.
He had lots more to say that I don’t have room for here. But yes, the more fighting back by our side, the better.
In Other News
Haitian President assassinated
Haiti is worse off than you think, worse off than you can imagine.
Haiti is a country of euphemisms, of fear to say how bad it really is, of lack of words to say how bad it really is, more so than anywhere else I have encountered.
I'm sorry, I can't go on right now. Everything I thought I knew about Haiti was wrong. Everything you think you know about Haiti is wrong. The reality is much, much worse.
Proposal to move Afghan interpreter refugees to Guam temporarily, currently being blocked by DHS
Myanmar, North Korea, Ethiopia, Russia, China, same old same old. But there are way fewer such countries than there used to be.
More and Better Democracies:
Slowly I turned—step by step—inch by inch—and then I had him!
Yes, we are going to get hundreds, even thousands of paskudnyaks/deplorables up on charges or at least out of office in years to come.
Second music break: Better Times are Coming!