A key indicator of how long Trump will continue to resist the reality of losing the election will be the size of the crowd and its "nature" in the streets of Washington DC today. If it is "enormous" in his and the media's (CNN would no longer be "fake" news if they so reported huge crowd numbers and highly beligerent intentions) reporting on it, he will continue to resist. If it flops tomorrow, is small and made up uniquely of violent "Proud Boys" etc, then his slide into depression will accelerate. He will probably at that point not concede personally as it is beyond him. He will nolonger stop the process going forward as people will "suffer the bully less kindly" and just get on with it while he wails and shakes his fist ...but does nothing but sulk.
The monotonal delivery of his “speech” yesterday sure made him sound depressed. But I seriously wonder if he is capable of any moods except greed, rage and lust.
It's his "reading a teleprompter" voice: he really can't read. I feel for all people with dyslexia who are struggling to deal with a dyslexic POTUS who would sooner denigrate them than admit that he can't read. Biden's stutter is a minor, minor issue compared to Cheeto's myriad cognitive issues.
Yeah, when all 500 of the morons show up this morning, we'll know what's what. So far, the "Stop the Steal" demonstrations have drawn crowds in the (less than) tens.
He's losing the support of the legal "Warriors" who are becoming afraid that they will be sanctioned for filing "frivilous" claims by the authorities in their profession and he's reduced to putting Guiliani in charge of the fiasco. If he doesn't have the "threat" of massive popular protest and violence then he has no more levers to pull. Fox has abandonned him as they will any "loser" . At a guess his new fake appeal for funds isn't generating expected returns either or he would be boasting about it...despair!
I think he's stuck at anger right now Stuart! There is a great WaPo cartoon from the other day referring to this. I think the bargaining part is going to be under the table with Biden representatives that will propose some kind of Gerald Ford-esque carte blanche pardon in order to pry him out of the WH.
The process is not governed by clockwork...and pardon before charges are proferred requires admission of guilt! Doesn't sound like him. More likely he will follow his usual method of "testing" precedent and declare that a President, ex or existing is above the law (his shooting someone on 5th Ave , NYC argument) and is pardoned automatically by the nature of his role; thus having his cake and eating it...pardoned but not guilty! Total legal rubbish but fodder for the orcs. He will think that Biden will hesitate before he brings the role of POTUS into disrepute by going after him. He will also figure that Biden would not wish to establish such a precedent. Biden will probably effectively let NY and the IRS go after him. Financial ruin and social stigmatization will probably have to suffice. Hoping that's enough to neuter the beast
I hope it's a flop too, but I'm not holding my breath. He's got his base riled up and I think you'll see a lot of 2nd amendment people in the crowd. That's their 1st amendment too.
"O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!" Walter Scott
Except that this is not his first, nor second, nor third! However, all that he has done for the past 4 years comprise his "first" as the leader of our country! He has lied, cheated, embezzled, and bamboozled his way through our rights, liberties, and our dignity. Basta! No more, Mr. 🍊 Demon! Your game is up! You have destroyed us and now it's time for our courts to destroy you!
Do I sound vengeful and angry? You betcha! But my heart aches for the gentle souls we have lost during this pandemic, and all we will continue to lose, because you do not care, have never cared, and will be never do so!
I have been dismayed at the numbers of people who have been targeted by this virus these past several months due to the Federal Government's failure to mitigate. But highlighting the toll it has taken on the Secret Service as well as the essential workers at the WH directly due to this administration really highlighted for me their depraved negligence that borders on the criminal. Lester Holt's Nightly News recounted the story of a man's life-threatening medical emergency unrelated to COVID-19 where he couldn't get into a hospital in his home state. After several attempts of contacting other hospitals around the country he was finally medi-vac'd to another state (Iowa, I think it was) to get the surgery he needed.
Thank you Heather. We all appreciate your daily summation.
Trump seems be to shedding his loyalists like a Labrador Retriever these days. It always surprises me how long they took, but being complicit to a wannabe dictator may be hard to shake...for some. I do find a certain level of delight everytime I hear a State turn Blue or another one of his frivolous lawsuit thrown out. This is a long time coming. The pressure is rising dramatically for him to concede and turn over the Transition to its rightful owner.
As a lifelong resident of New York State, his petty stand on keeping the COVID-19 vaccine from us because he has been royally showed up by Governor Cuomo is being laughed at. New Yorkers are a tough crowd.
I bow my head daily to the lives lost to the Pandemic. It appears we are our own worst enemy. Please wear a mask, socially distance and be careful.
Earlier this evening, I was watching Bill Maher's show on HBO, where the 'Trump in denial' extravaganza was nearly the singular topic of the evening. Maher's first on camera guest was a young woman who described herself as the Chief Lawyer for the Trump Reelection Campaign, who, upon being introduced, held forth with a three-to four-minute monologue about how the election results are in doubt because the Republican Party's observers at Pennsylvania County ballot-processing offices were 'prevented' from standing closer than 10 linear feet from county employees who were then engaged in the ongoing ballot processing and vote counting operations. On, and on, and on she went, arguing that these alleged infractions of the ballot counting rules required the disqualification of several hundred thousand ballots originating, as you well might have guessed, from the City of Philadelphia. I suppose that Bill Maher had to do this, at least for the sake of appearing to have made a gesture of evenhandedness to the President's party. Any sensible person would have thanked this apparently newly-minted lawyer, and pointed to the door. She also told her audience that she was an evangelical; and that might've explained the fervency of her beliefs, and her obvious lack of boundary control in the manner in which she delivered her speech. Maher, trying to get a word in edgewise, made numerous references to the fact that every judge who had heard the President's pleas had turned him down. To paraphrase the late writer Christopher Hitchens, 'That which is asserted without facts without giving reason therefore.' The problem here is, as was well-discussed on the show, that the hoopla and the sideshow antics that accompanied these lawsuits demean and diminish democracy itself. Donald Trump has amply demonstrated, if further proof be needed, that the American electorate is too polite for its own good.
On the other hand, there are Democrats sitting in sackcloth and ashes over the fact that their party did not do as well as its presidential and vice presidential candidates, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Some of the bad actors from the bad old days when Republicans control both houses of Congress will be showing up for another reprise of their obstruction area skills in the next Congress.
I've written extensively about this elsewhere on Facebook about what ails the Democrats. On a day in the recent past, I traced the moment to the inflection point when the Democratic Party began to lose interest in the cares and concerns of working people. I place the point to a speech that John F. Kennedy gave at Rice University on September 12, 1963, when he announced that the United States would place a man on the moon within the decade. Of course, this was an exercise of geopolitics, and we had been playing catch-up in the Space Race for the previous five years.
Now, Democratic administrations had relied heavily on academic support and validation since the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, even before he acceded to the presidency in 1933, Roosevelt had assembled a large corps of academics to help him pull the country out of the Depression. That reliance on academic knowledge, learning, and practical expertise had become embedded into the ethos of the Democratic Party. After World War II, and unlike any previous war, the American government underwrote the college educations of millions of former servicemen and women. But the government's generosity served a much larger purpose. World War II had been won because we had better weapons and better technology; and now our adversaries in the form of the Soviet Union were catching up in a very big way. It also meant that Congress would be funding the college educations of an enormous number of people. Obviously, the impetus was to accelerate the training of scientists and engineers, but there was no way to do that selectively, and still get the results the government wanted. The selective service system, charged with maintaining a large reservoir of men eligible for military service, provided a secondary, but no less important pressure point to incentivize young people to go to college and earn their degrees. The military requires a far greater range of talents than physicists the rocket engineers, many of whom needed to have a four-year college education in order to qualify for the jobs they would fill.
Then there was Vietnam. Some of us still remember David Halberstam's magisterial book, the best and the brightest. My copy dates from the 1970s. Here again, in 1963, the year that President Kennedy was assassinated, he gave prospective draft inductees a special bonus, if they were were college students, and they got married, they had nothing to fear from their local draft boards.
But what about those left behind. Those whose educations ended in high school; got drafted; or who lack the will or capacity to endure four years of classroom education, or who did not do well enough in college to qualify for graduate school. As long as there were jobs that paid well enough to pay for the luxuries and status symbols that their income levels could afford, things went well enough. But the world was changing, and not to their advantage. And it did not take long. By 1973 the United States was in a precarious position with the oil shocks; and by the end of the decade we had 'stagflation', with home mortgage rates approaching 18 percent. In Jimmy Carter, we had a President who is qualified, even hyper-qualified, in all the wrong ways. The Democratic Party learned the wrong lesson from the Civil Rights movement by looking for a Southerner that Northern Liberals could live with. Franklin Roosevelt brought prosperity to the South, which they wanted and badly needed. That is why the New Deal worked. His successors, in the form of Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and especially Lyndon Baines Johnson, with the American government into fostering and supporting the cause of civil rights. The civil rights movement was a logical extension of the defeat of totalitarian dictators in Germany, Italy, and Japan; but the rhetoric used to win that war echoed here decades, even generations after battlefield success had won the war.
In the South, more than anywhere else in the United States, racial division was a fact of life; and poor whites, whose material successes in life are often marginally better than those of blacks, found themselves on the outside, looking in. From their perspective, the government was now helping the very people they hated and feared. For them there was no 'why'; regardless of the fact that Southern elites had a conscious policy to pit white against black, to the denigration of both.
Globalization knocked the bottom out of 'the poor man's economy'. Beginning in the 1950s, much of America's manufacturing industries were shifted overseas to take advantage of drastically lower labor costs. Republican administrations supported the off-shoring of American industry because it weakened American labor unions; Democratic administrations did nothing to reverse the trend, because world trade represented economic betterment with foreign goods equal or superior to domestically manufactured products, and everybody seemed happy, or at least not in active opposition. Economic theories and the mathematical jargon that seem to justify them held sway; but long about the mid-1970s, the bottom began to drop out of the rural states' economies in the Midwest and South. Those who could move out, did so. Those who could not, or would not relocate, saw their cities and towns slowly drift into decline. This is why 70 million Americans voted for Trump! Since the 1930s, the Democratic Party has always proclaimed itself the protector and advocate for working families. Much of their accomplishments date back to the New Deal, or other Democratic domestic programs that fostered social betterment; but except for the Affordable Care Act, not much of it has been seen in this generation. Foreign wars and international affairs have absorbed much of the American government's attention. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 led to a wave of triumphalism within the Republican Party that brought us only frustration and grief. Donald Trump's supporters don't know that; and even if they did they wouldn't care. All they see is that immigrants seem to do better, and they blame the Democratic Party for their loss of influence and prestige.
As for the Democrats, their elites tend not to be among the truly wealthy, who support Republicans who reward that support by protecting their wealth in exchange for power and position. No, Democratic elites tend toward refinement, art collections and charitable foundations, instead of overseas investment accounts. Hillary Rodham Clinton may have fancied herself as some form of well turned-out aristocrat who outshone everyone else in handling the affairs of state, but I would have to think that the Queen of England, herself, exhibits more self-discipline than Ms. Clinton has shown. President Barack Obama proved himself to be an absolutely exemplary Chief Executive; the problem is that Obama's undeniable excellence does little more than excite the fears and hatreds of Trump's dispossessed millions of supporters, even though Trump cheats and robs them at every turn, for them, Trump is Everyman, the one every supporter wants to emulate, and no matter what the cost.
We can only hope and pray that Joe Biden can bridge the gap.
Interesting comments. I believe a sincere focus on improving the economic life for all working class Americans needs to happen. Why have we not funded massive infrastructure rebuilding at a time of historic low interest rates? I suspect tax cuts for the well off “trump” real investment in socially and economically useful projects. Private capital vs social good.
You say "that the American electorate is too polite for its own good" and I think the same about the mainstream media. Yesterday, the BBC's Laura Trevalyan gave too much time to the man who headed up trump's transition team. He gave a monologue, very hard to break into, and shouted of the "Russia hoax." He was open in basically saying that Biden deserves a difficult transition and presidency also. At one point, the sound of a gong went off, perhaps to indicate lies? I believe that interviewers should break in and, if the person refuses to allow a conversation rather than a monologue, they should cut to a new segment of the program. These trumpers had a turn to speak and abused it. I've seen it happen with Judy Woodruff too on the PBS Newshour and others. Abject lies should not air without interruption, they are also too polite!
As an interveiwer Woodruff lacks toughness and tenacity, as a news reader, she's just fine. I tend to prefer reporters like Amiche Alsindor who are aggressive and can stand up to intimidation tactics. The other thing that colors my opinion is this: there are dozens of really good, solid young journalists who deserve a seat at the table. In the last 10-15 years journalists of all ages have lost work as newsrooms downsize. The young ones frequently suffer since their face or byline doesn't carry a lot of recognition. I'm not being ageist but the unwillingness of those of us who have good, long careers in any field, to step aside and make way for young, fresh talent, is a mistake. It's critical we mentor those coming up with the goal of them filling our shoes in mind. That's not happening at PBS and several of the networks. It's not happening, to a large extent, in politics. The less we do to rejuvenate and invigorate our workforce the more stale we become.
Doesnt always(!) happen in politics, either, does it? I'm retired, older and for Petes sake - there are far too many 80 & up members of Congress - most "old white men". They have been there for far too long! Havent we all been "represented" by them long enough?
It is far too common in politics. And we have indeed been represented by old white, mostly men, for far too long. I think the reason so many people are alarmed by some of the younger progressives with "radical" ideas is because we have had the same stodgy nonsense thrown at us for decades. Ideas that are considered extreme in the US are quite the norm in other developed countries. It's pretty frightening how resistant our culture is to change.
Too polite and rarely follow it up with a statement of what IS true /reality.. do the lie gets the last word, repeated over snd over until the masses believe it.
A very long and interesting read, Artsilen. Are you a studied historian, or a folk historian like myself? On the surface I didn’t see any problem with this dissertation, and the part about President Obama’s undeniable excellence exciting “the fears and hatreds of Trump's dispossessed millions of supporters,” was seen by me firsthand in my ignorant, redneck brother in Mississippi.
It’s interesting that you mention this, Rob. I am almost finished with Michelle Obama’s excellent autobiography “Becoming” (and I just pre-ordered Barack’s new one which comes out Tuesday) and it has further opened my eyes to the racism and bigotry that met the Obamas and his administration. From McConnell’s obstructionism against ANYTHING that Obama tried to do, to the nastiness that met this wonderful family at every turn it was awful. Then along comes tRump and his minions who have been the polar opposite of Obama and have now undone nearly everything. But the saddest thing of all IMHO, is that even when faced with the clear choice between good and evil, the Republicans in office and so many people have clearly chosen evil.
I havent read Michelle Obama's book, but watched the documentary - which was eye-opening. The garbage-throwing started even before the election! Angry black woman??? I cannot imagine what that kind of constant barrage of - frankly crap - with no way to really correct it, could do to your daily life. Apparently all because they were born with a darker skin color. If anyone was in doubt as to the blind racism in this country - wake up! Actually - as someone else said at some point - racism is actually fear of "others". What a wonderful country!
Rob Boyte: I would be the first to concede that this essay went on a bit longer than I had planned. But, as Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once observed, to the effect that when the Muse hits you in the middle of the night, you seize the moment and not wait until morning to complete the thought.
To answer your question, no, I am not a professional historian, nor even an avocational amateur; but I do have a lifetime's worth of abiding interest and professional experience as a student of American government. Professionally, I am a lawyer, now retired, with extensive experience in local, state, and national government. My principal areas of interest centered around the myriad of ways in which governments at all levels interact with one another both within their jurisdictional boundaries, and the communities of interest that they share with their affiliated non-profit surrogates that are now with increasing frequency the way in which government interacts with the general population and with voters. As a lawyer in government, I had numerous professional responsibilities that involved interaction with state governments, local governments, and numerous public bodies. As a private lawyer, I was often on the other side of the table, where my primary concern was representing clients, but at the same time letting the lawyer on the governmental side know that I was fully cognizant of his employer's interests that needed to be acknowledged and advanced. Whatever deal we struck had to work for both sides. I'm also a certified arbitrator and mediator, getting adversarial parties who are often adamantly opposed to settling a dispute on anything short of their own terms, to come to some form of agreement because the cost of battling it out to the bitter end is just too great for either of them. On top of everything else is the public interest, which in the past used to be the foremost priority. Today, not so much. In our ideological battles, the public interest is become collateral damage; and that needs to change.
Of late, I study Complexity Science, because what works well at the individual level become something different as scale increases; and with increasing scale, predictability of outcomes drops off drastically, and emergent behaviors within the overall system appear that usually have drastic consequences. At a certain point systems become ungovernable and suffer internal collapse, usually followed by extinction. Chaos reigns; and then things start all over again with something new. What we are finding is that there is a science to it, and a mathematical basis that are in polar contrast to the ideological dogmas that we hear bandied about as received wisdom by people who should know better, but who have decided that it is not in their respective interests to deviate from the paths they have chosen for themselves.
artsilen, your comments and observations of history are interesting. Heather's book, "How the South Won the Civil War" adds a great deal to the discussion and her knowledge of Westward Movement and its impact is a must read. Hope you order her book. I just got started on my copy yesterday.
This is an interesting personal interpretation of history with some things I agree with. But I would stick with the original observation and point out that a large part of the electorate is far from polite. Unfortunately, for the most part they number a substantial percentage of the 70 or so million that voted for their standard bearer. However you want to review and interpret the history, we cannot escape the fact that we are now in a political and personal contest of will that results from years of growing discord, with no end in sight. Some dream of civil war, but unless and until Biden becomes Commander in Chief, the right wing, now likely a permanent presence in our politics, has virtually all the weapons on its side. My bottom line in this regard is that Biden has the opportunity to become a great president and I think some of the qualities that may take him there. Fingers crossed.
Interesting analysis to read and I agree with what yoyu write...but, by definition, inevitably somewhat lobsided when one only looks for the economic raison d'être. Where I beg to differ is with your analysis of Obama's performance as it looked a lot less useful on the international stage to us living elsewhere in the world than he could appear for domestic issues. To my mind his lack of previous political experience left him blinded to the Koch financed GOP opposition and inevitably reduced his ability to impose all of his agenda of social, climatic and business-related, regulatory change. This naivety laid the groundwork for the strength of the Trump take-over in 2016
Well written, but this "economic determination of history" is far too long to be posted here. Too many will have skipped reading it, a mistake. Pour a cup of tea, sit down and read it.
I started reading not knowing how long it was. It didn't matter as the more I read, the more I wanted to read. Excellent "summary" of where we are now!
Same here. I looked at it on the page and said that's longer than "the Letter." However, I started reading and couldn't stop. A lot of that history I have lived thru (born a day after FDR won his 4th term). So, it gave me another perspective of my life.
You say the Trump Campaign lawyer is an evangelical Christian. Here's an article I ran across earlier today, about white evangelical support for Trump.
The author of this article quotes a Democratic strategist as saying “People who want to live in a white supremacist society vote Republican. Those who don’t vote Democrat.”
The author says he was startled. The author also calls that Democratic operative's quote “hyperbolic“ as in exaggerated, overblown.
This author, like many Americans, is allergic to the term “white supremacy.” Being allergic to it means you are challenged in hearing it, receiving it, appreciating it, and understanding it.
The author appears to have a misconception, popular among progressives and liberals, that “White supremacy“ is some sort of taboo and invisible force. It is like Hitler and Nazi Germany. It’s dangerous, it’s threatening and intimidating, it’s super scary, so we can’t look at it and talk about it.
“White supremacy“ is when people want the whites to be the dominant force in society, the superior power.
Obviously people are going to be cagey when approached for an interview for a poll. Obviously these people are not going to wear a T-shirt printed with the words “MAGA supporter for a white America“ or “I am a white person, how about you?“ Racist is a dirty word.
The percentage of Americans, however, who want to stay in a whites-first, whites-dominated, whites-ahead-of-everyone-else, society is HUGE.
This naïve author’s take on white supremacy nevertheless goes to the heart of why Donald Trump received more votes than any other president in history. [before January 20 I can still use that expression]
The 2020 US Presidential Election is absolutely about race, and also gender (men come first) and orientation (straights come first).
Believe it.
.
"Opinions | Trump’s racist appeals powered a White evangelical tsunami:
White evangelicals turned out in mind-boggling numbers to support the president at the polls."
The Senate runoff in Georgia, and thus control of the Senate, is up for grabs. Since Biden won Georgia, there is the very real possibility the Democrats could take both seats. (Gerrymandered congressional districts don't matter in a state-wide Senate election.) If the Koch brothers think Trump's hopeless quest remain in office will be a drag on Republican efforts in Georgia, they certainly have the gravitas within the Republican hierarchy to speak directly to the likes of Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, et al and tell them what they think. At this point newly re-elected McConnell and Graham have little to fear from the Trump mob, and the Koch brothers' deep pockets will be more than just helpful toward winning in Georgia.
There is a pleasing irony in thinking, hoping, that Trump may be in the process of politicly neutering himself to the point where Senate Republicans think they have to abandon him to keep control.
I admit that I don't understand the reasoning of the GOP enablers of He-Who-Refuses-to-Accept-Reality (for our current troll, I am refraining from calling him the Deranged Cheeto--whoops! I did it again!:-D) with respect to the Covid infection rates, as their own supporters are now getting sick and dying by the thousands, even the tens of thousands. It made (a kind of sociopathic) sense to me in April that the amoralists would work to prevent appropriate measures because in their minds only BIPOC and Dems were dying, because the pandemic was at its worst in congested urban areas. I know I am presenting the strategies of McConnell and Co as criminally cynical but that is what I believe was happening. Now, instead, the people dying are those who attended MAGA rallies, live in rural states and districts, and are in significant numbers supporters of the soon-to- be-former POTUS. For instance, in KC, hospitals are overwhelmed by rural patients who have been transferred to KC hospitals because of a breakdown of rural healthcare that has been promoted and fomented by the Republicans in power. As a result, urban patients could find themselves unable to get a hospital bed. And yet the idiot governor refuses to mandate mask wearing, continues to claim that the pandemic is a matter of "personal responsibility," and won't financially support KC and St. Louis, which are Dem strongholds and which are bearing the brunt of caring for the covidiots in the countryside.
It seems to me counterintuitive to welcome the morbidity and mortality of one's own followers, but I suppose the thing is that the election is over, so the jokers don't have to pretend to care about their constituents any more.
"I have brought you the most beautiful virus ever!" - just paraphrasing Trump's balcony speech about how he feels stronger now than ever as the result of his virus experience. The works of the Devil. And his minions.
The problem to me, with the term "covidiots", is that people who have been doing everything they can to prevent becoming ill have caught the virus regardless. Many of us in the over-60, health-impaired categories are striving to stay safe, but the advent of these huge numbers becomes overwhelming, no matter what you do. Let's pray for reasonableness (I know, in some places that is not going to happen) and a speedy, but careful, FDA approval of a vaccine. And let's pray that happens before another 150,000 of us are dead, or permanently damaged by this scourge.
I too am in the super high risk group because I'm old and have a severely compromised immune system and I have been more or less a prisoner of my house for the last 8 months. I call the people who knowingly and deliberately endanger others by refusing to follow reasonable and sensible precautions--wearing masks, etc--as well as (if in government) refusing to require reasonable and sensible precautions covidiots because they are absolutely abrogating their community responsibilities in favor of some extreme notion of "personal liberty" that has nothing to do with liberty and everything to do with the brand of toxic masculinity Drumpf promotes and the female enablers of it. When Hilary Rodham Clinton talked about it taking a village to raise a child, she was also talking about these people: it takes a community to accept responsibility for both individual AND collective action or anarchy reigns. And really what Drumpf and his minions want is chaos in order to make it as difficult as possible for a new administration to ameliorate the situation. They WANT 200,000 deaths by January. They are relying on this.
I don't use the term "covidiot" because it assumes that people who don't mask and follow various safety protocol don't have the capacity to understand the reasons behind making, etc. Unless one lives in a bell jar inside of a dark cave, they know that the precautions work quite successfully. Anti-maskers are being insolent. At this stage of the game, I'd actually call them borderline criminal, not covidiotic.
They are definitely committing a “criminal” act in my opinion. It’s like dealing with 70 million 10 year children! They know not what they do...until they are are personally afflicted and affected.
More and more with Covid everyday, and everyday the orange moron sits and does nothing. But, today he'll be out there encouraging his gathering followers to take off masks and get the virus! And, he'll hope that there will be enough secret service to "protect" him at the gold course. I'm done with this man, and hope that the country will get it figured out how much damage he has done to the American psyche. It will take generations to heal from his abuse.
But do we really want him to be "doing his job"? Aren't we all so much safer if he and all his minions just play golf for the next couple of months???? I know: that means that Pence and Barr are in charge but still . . . :-P
"Mr. Trump should order the transition process begin immediately. It is the right and moral thing to do.” Well, we're well and truly screwed, then, because Mr. Trump wouldn't recognize the moral thing to do if it bit him in his nether regions.
At what point, if ever, will people like the lackey who refuses to go against Trump and provide Mr. Biden with the pandemic information he needs to hit the ground running - at what point will people like THAT do the right thing? It's obvious Trump never will.
If I were someone in the bureaucracy that actually runs the government, and I thought it important to brief my counterpart in an incoming administration against orders, I think I would be taking care to do so in an extremely cautious and surreptitious manner.
So former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly suggests that allowing the transition process to proceed would be the right and moral thing to do. That's naive at best. By now, he should know that Trump does only what is good for himself and has no interest in what is right or moral. Most Republicans know that and don't give a darn, especially those who need Trump's blind and loyal base to get elected. An American tragedy.
Just curious, Heather... Alot of media talk about 51-49% political party division in our country now. What was it during WW2 when there seemed to be a united citizen effort to help the war effort? What this country may need is similar propaganda to unite and defeat COVID.
As I recall, it took years before the country "united." There was endless debate over whether the US should get involved in the war "over there." It wasn't until people united against a threatening, visible, common enemy and, significantly, FDR embraced a "moral duty" to engage against an enemy that US joined the effort. FDR was not eager for the United States to enter a global military conflict. But unlike the ardent isolationists, he also figured it was inevitable, especially with German subs being sighted off our shores. Even then American troops didn’t officially join World War II until December 1941 well after the invasion of Poland (1939) and after London, England (1941) began suffering devastating German bombing raids.
Jan, you are quite correct that the country was far from unified support of any efforts to get involved in any of Europe's troubles. "We helped them out in the World War and look what that got us. A pox on them." was the common sentiment of both political parties. And of course, efforts to stem the Depression dominated government actions as well as people's lives. FDR tried to use the idea of selling military equipment to England and France as a potential stimulus to U.S. manufacturing, but Congress passed three Neutrality Acts 1935-37 forbidding any such involvement. After 9/1/30 evidence of fascist aggressions in Spain, Libya and Central Europe were unmistakeable and Congress agreed to the "cash and carry" Neutrality Act of 1939. There was tremendous resistance to FDR's support for increasing our own military preparedness
[hit the wrong button] ...and it wasn't until September 1940--by which time the Nazis dominated the continent--that Congress agreed to the first peacetime draft, and only for troops who could not be sent overseas. (And BTW, several historians suggest that it got extended a year later only because Sam Rayburn gaveled the vote when a one-vote margin was achieved in the roll call.) Three months later Pearl Harbor changed everything, but FDR had continuing struggles to persuade people of the need to fight Hitler first.
"It is the right and moral thing to do." Drumpty has never done anything in his life that could be labeled "right" or "moral." He wouldn't know those words if they bit that enormous fat ass of his.
As far as the governors of Iowa and North Dakota finally being dragged kicking and screaming to reality - tough luck. for $500, "what is "Depopulating Iowa and North Dakota?" "I know Alex! I know! A good start." Followed by huge depopulation due to the pandemic in every other red state. We have to kick start Darwinian "survival of the fittest" somehow. And fewer morons is the best possible way to Make America Great Again.
The Dakota's population as with Montana's, has been declining since the beginning of the 19th C as a result of the mistaken idea that you could intensively farm such areas in smallholdings with so little rain. They would have been better listening to and observing the Native Americans rather than the land speculators, miners and railroad propaganda.
A key indicator of how long Trump will continue to resist the reality of losing the election will be the size of the crowd and its "nature" in the streets of Washington DC today. If it is "enormous" in his and the media's (CNN would no longer be "fake" news if they so reported huge crowd numbers and highly beligerent intentions) reporting on it, he will continue to resist. If it flops tomorrow, is small and made up uniquely of violent "Proud Boys" etc, then his slide into depression will accelerate. He will probably at that point not concede personally as it is beyond him. He will nolonger stop the process going forward as people will "suffer the bully less kindly" and just get on with it while he wails and shakes his fist ...but does nothing but sulk.
The monotonal delivery of his “speech” yesterday sure made him sound depressed. But I seriously wonder if he is capable of any moods except greed, rage and lust.
It's his "reading a teleprompter" voice: he really can't read. I feel for all people with dyslexia who are struggling to deal with a dyslexic POTUS who would sooner denigrate them than admit that he can't read. Biden's stutter is a minor, minor issue compared to Cheeto's myriad cognitive issues.
I didn't know he was dyslexic! Or are you joshing?
Not joshing. He is. And has ADD which is why he snorts adderall.
His failure to color his hair for a public performance is a "tell" on that.
Yeah, when all 500 of the morons show up this morning, we'll know what's what. So far, the "Stop the Steal" demonstrations have drawn crowds in the (less than) tens.
Dropping like a "Stone" if you'll excuse the expression. I'm not sure that Trump will pardon him again for such a failure to produce the goods!
One hopes. From your lips to goddess' ear.
😂
I hope you’re right, Stuart!
He's losing the support of the legal "Warriors" who are becoming afraid that they will be sanctioned for filing "frivilous" claims by the authorities in their profession and he's reduced to putting Guiliani in charge of the fiasco. If he doesn't have the "threat" of massive popular protest and violence then he has no more levers to pull. Fox has abandonned him as they will any "loser" . At a guess his new fake appeal for funds isn't generating expected returns either or he would be boasting about it...despair!
And when does Guiliani finally cross the line fully and get disbarred? His ranting is as destructive and misguided as Trump's.
He's already far beyond "red" in the spectrum of light. If he isn't disbarred i would doubt he'll ever have another client!
Praying all you say is so, Stuart!
He's following Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's "coping with grief" cycle; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
I think he's stuck at anger right now Stuart! There is a great WaPo cartoon from the other day referring to this. I think the bargaining part is going to be under the table with Biden representatives that will propose some kind of Gerald Ford-esque carte blanche pardon in order to pry him out of the WH.
The process is not governed by clockwork...and pardon before charges are proferred requires admission of guilt! Doesn't sound like him. More likely he will follow his usual method of "testing" precedent and declare that a President, ex or existing is above the law (his shooting someone on 5th Ave , NYC argument) and is pardoned automatically by the nature of his role; thus having his cake and eating it...pardoned but not guilty! Total legal rubbish but fodder for the orcs. He will think that Biden will hesitate before he brings the role of POTUS into disrepute by going after him. He will also figure that Biden would not wish to establish such a precedent. Biden will probably effectively let NY and the IRS go after him. Financial ruin and social stigmatization will probably have to suffice. Hoping that's enough to neuter the beast
I would add vindictiveness to that list.
It's part of the "anger"
In that case, Stuart, I hope it's a flop.
I hope it's a flop too, but I'm not holding my breath. He's got his base riled up and I think you'll see a lot of 2nd amendment people in the crowd. That's their 1st amendment too.
And it'll show the rest of us what we're up against.
"O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!" Walter Scott
Except that this is not his first, nor second, nor third! However, all that he has done for the past 4 years comprise his "first" as the leader of our country! He has lied, cheated, embezzled, and bamboozled his way through our rights, liberties, and our dignity. Basta! No more, Mr. 🍊 Demon! Your game is up! You have destroyed us and now it's time for our courts to destroy you!
Do I sound vengeful and angry? You betcha! But my heart aches for the gentle souls we have lost during this pandemic, and all we will continue to lose, because you do not care, have never cared, and will be never do so!
I have been dismayed at the numbers of people who have been targeted by this virus these past several months due to the Federal Government's failure to mitigate. But highlighting the toll it has taken on the Secret Service as well as the essential workers at the WH directly due to this administration really highlighted for me their depraved negligence that borders on the criminal. Lester Holt's Nightly News recounted the story of a man's life-threatening medical emergency unrelated to COVID-19 where he couldn't get into a hospital in his home state. After several attempts of contacting other hospitals around the country he was finally medi-vac'd to another state (Iowa, I think it was) to get the surgery he needed.
"Stop the Steal" and Mr. Koch wanting to stuff the genie back in the bottle make me want to hurl.
I knew it was highly unlikely (read: impossible) for him to have had a "road to Damascus" moment............After all, Ebenezer Scrooge was a fiction.
I couldn't put it any better than that!
Thank you Heather. We all appreciate your daily summation.
Trump seems be to shedding his loyalists like a Labrador Retriever these days. It always surprises me how long they took, but being complicit to a wannabe dictator may be hard to shake...for some. I do find a certain level of delight everytime I hear a State turn Blue or another one of his frivolous lawsuit thrown out. This is a long time coming. The pressure is rising dramatically for him to concede and turn over the Transition to its rightful owner.
As a lifelong resident of New York State, his petty stand on keeping the COVID-19 vaccine from us because he has been royally showed up by Governor Cuomo is being laughed at. New Yorkers are a tough crowd.
I bow my head daily to the lives lost to the Pandemic. It appears we are our own worst enemy. Please wear a mask, socially distance and be careful.
Yikes, Linda. I wasn't aware that the entire State of New York voted for Biden! Tough crowd, indeed!
Well Trump thinks so. Any State he didn't win equates to all Democrats to him. Evidently, thats the " New Math". 😆
Earlier this evening, I was watching Bill Maher's show on HBO, where the 'Trump in denial' extravaganza was nearly the singular topic of the evening. Maher's first on camera guest was a young woman who described herself as the Chief Lawyer for the Trump Reelection Campaign, who, upon being introduced, held forth with a three-to four-minute monologue about how the election results are in doubt because the Republican Party's observers at Pennsylvania County ballot-processing offices were 'prevented' from standing closer than 10 linear feet from county employees who were then engaged in the ongoing ballot processing and vote counting operations. On, and on, and on she went, arguing that these alleged infractions of the ballot counting rules required the disqualification of several hundred thousand ballots originating, as you well might have guessed, from the City of Philadelphia. I suppose that Bill Maher had to do this, at least for the sake of appearing to have made a gesture of evenhandedness to the President's party. Any sensible person would have thanked this apparently newly-minted lawyer, and pointed to the door. She also told her audience that she was an evangelical; and that might've explained the fervency of her beliefs, and her obvious lack of boundary control in the manner in which she delivered her speech. Maher, trying to get a word in edgewise, made numerous references to the fact that every judge who had heard the President's pleas had turned him down. To paraphrase the late writer Christopher Hitchens, 'That which is asserted without facts without giving reason therefore.' The problem here is, as was well-discussed on the show, that the hoopla and the sideshow antics that accompanied these lawsuits demean and diminish democracy itself. Donald Trump has amply demonstrated, if further proof be needed, that the American electorate is too polite for its own good.
On the other hand, there are Democrats sitting in sackcloth and ashes over the fact that their party did not do as well as its presidential and vice presidential candidates, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Some of the bad actors from the bad old days when Republicans control both houses of Congress will be showing up for another reprise of their obstruction area skills in the next Congress.
I've written extensively about this elsewhere on Facebook about what ails the Democrats. On a day in the recent past, I traced the moment to the inflection point when the Democratic Party began to lose interest in the cares and concerns of working people. I place the point to a speech that John F. Kennedy gave at Rice University on September 12, 1963, when he announced that the United States would place a man on the moon within the decade. Of course, this was an exercise of geopolitics, and we had been playing catch-up in the Space Race for the previous five years.
Now, Democratic administrations had relied heavily on academic support and validation since the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, even before he acceded to the presidency in 1933, Roosevelt had assembled a large corps of academics to help him pull the country out of the Depression. That reliance on academic knowledge, learning, and practical expertise had become embedded into the ethos of the Democratic Party. After World War II, and unlike any previous war, the American government underwrote the college educations of millions of former servicemen and women. But the government's generosity served a much larger purpose. World War II had been won because we had better weapons and better technology; and now our adversaries in the form of the Soviet Union were catching up in a very big way. It also meant that Congress would be funding the college educations of an enormous number of people. Obviously, the impetus was to accelerate the training of scientists and engineers, but there was no way to do that selectively, and still get the results the government wanted. The selective service system, charged with maintaining a large reservoir of men eligible for military service, provided a secondary, but no less important pressure point to incentivize young people to go to college and earn their degrees. The military requires a far greater range of talents than physicists the rocket engineers, many of whom needed to have a four-year college education in order to qualify for the jobs they would fill.
Then there was Vietnam. Some of us still remember David Halberstam's magisterial book, the best and the brightest. My copy dates from the 1970s. Here again, in 1963, the year that President Kennedy was assassinated, he gave prospective draft inductees a special bonus, if they were were college students, and they got married, they had nothing to fear from their local draft boards.
But what about those left behind. Those whose educations ended in high school; got drafted; or who lack the will or capacity to endure four years of classroom education, or who did not do well enough in college to qualify for graduate school. As long as there were jobs that paid well enough to pay for the luxuries and status symbols that their income levels could afford, things went well enough. But the world was changing, and not to their advantage. And it did not take long. By 1973 the United States was in a precarious position with the oil shocks; and by the end of the decade we had 'stagflation', with home mortgage rates approaching 18 percent. In Jimmy Carter, we had a President who is qualified, even hyper-qualified, in all the wrong ways. The Democratic Party learned the wrong lesson from the Civil Rights movement by looking for a Southerner that Northern Liberals could live with. Franklin Roosevelt brought prosperity to the South, which they wanted and badly needed. That is why the New Deal worked. His successors, in the form of Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and especially Lyndon Baines Johnson, with the American government into fostering and supporting the cause of civil rights. The civil rights movement was a logical extension of the defeat of totalitarian dictators in Germany, Italy, and Japan; but the rhetoric used to win that war echoed here decades, even generations after battlefield success had won the war.
In the South, more than anywhere else in the United States, racial division was a fact of life; and poor whites, whose material successes in life are often marginally better than those of blacks, found themselves on the outside, looking in. From their perspective, the government was now helping the very people they hated and feared. For them there was no 'why'; regardless of the fact that Southern elites had a conscious policy to pit white against black, to the denigration of both.
Globalization knocked the bottom out of 'the poor man's economy'. Beginning in the 1950s, much of America's manufacturing industries were shifted overseas to take advantage of drastically lower labor costs. Republican administrations supported the off-shoring of American industry because it weakened American labor unions; Democratic administrations did nothing to reverse the trend, because world trade represented economic betterment with foreign goods equal or superior to domestically manufactured products, and everybody seemed happy, or at least not in active opposition. Economic theories and the mathematical jargon that seem to justify them held sway; but long about the mid-1970s, the bottom began to drop out of the rural states' economies in the Midwest and South. Those who could move out, did so. Those who could not, or would not relocate, saw their cities and towns slowly drift into decline. This is why 70 million Americans voted for Trump! Since the 1930s, the Democratic Party has always proclaimed itself the protector and advocate for working families. Much of their accomplishments date back to the New Deal, or other Democratic domestic programs that fostered social betterment; but except for the Affordable Care Act, not much of it has been seen in this generation. Foreign wars and international affairs have absorbed much of the American government's attention. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 led to a wave of triumphalism within the Republican Party that brought us only frustration and grief. Donald Trump's supporters don't know that; and even if they did they wouldn't care. All they see is that immigrants seem to do better, and they blame the Democratic Party for their loss of influence and prestige.
As for the Democrats, their elites tend not to be among the truly wealthy, who support Republicans who reward that support by protecting their wealth in exchange for power and position. No, Democratic elites tend toward refinement, art collections and charitable foundations, instead of overseas investment accounts. Hillary Rodham Clinton may have fancied herself as some form of well turned-out aristocrat who outshone everyone else in handling the affairs of state, but I would have to think that the Queen of England, herself, exhibits more self-discipline than Ms. Clinton has shown. President Barack Obama proved himself to be an absolutely exemplary Chief Executive; the problem is that Obama's undeniable excellence does little more than excite the fears and hatreds of Trump's dispossessed millions of supporters, even though Trump cheats and robs them at every turn, for them, Trump is Everyman, the one every supporter wants to emulate, and no matter what the cost.
We can only hope and pray that Joe Biden can bridge the gap.
Interesting comments. I believe a sincere focus on improving the economic life for all working class Americans needs to happen. Why have we not funded massive infrastructure rebuilding at a time of historic low interest rates? I suspect tax cuts for the well off “trump” real investment in socially and economically useful projects. Private capital vs social good.
You say "that the American electorate is too polite for its own good" and I think the same about the mainstream media. Yesterday, the BBC's Laura Trevalyan gave too much time to the man who headed up trump's transition team. He gave a monologue, very hard to break into, and shouted of the "Russia hoax." He was open in basically saying that Biden deserves a difficult transition and presidency also. At one point, the sound of a gong went off, perhaps to indicate lies? I believe that interviewers should break in and, if the person refuses to allow a conversation rather than a monologue, they should cut to a new segment of the program. These trumpers had a turn to speak and abused it. I've seen it happen with Judy Woodruff too on the PBS Newshour and others. Abject lies should not air without interruption, they are also too polite!
Judy Woodruff needs to go. She has taken the solidity of Newshour and trashed it. Oh for McNeil, Lehrer, and Ifill.
I think she's good, but seems too frail to stand up to these bullies.
Huh? How do you see that?
As an interveiwer Woodruff lacks toughness and tenacity, as a news reader, she's just fine. I tend to prefer reporters like Amiche Alsindor who are aggressive and can stand up to intimidation tactics. The other thing that colors my opinion is this: there are dozens of really good, solid young journalists who deserve a seat at the table. In the last 10-15 years journalists of all ages have lost work as newsrooms downsize. The young ones frequently suffer since their face or byline doesn't carry a lot of recognition. I'm not being ageist but the unwillingness of those of us who have good, long careers in any field, to step aside and make way for young, fresh talent, is a mistake. It's critical we mentor those coming up with the goal of them filling our shoes in mind. That's not happening at PBS and several of the networks. It's not happening, to a large extent, in politics. The less we do to rejuvenate and invigorate our workforce the more stale we become.
Doesnt always(!) happen in politics, either, does it? I'm retired, older and for Petes sake - there are far too many 80 & up members of Congress - most "old white men". They have been there for far too long! Havent we all been "represented" by them long enough?
It is far too common in politics. And we have indeed been represented by old white, mostly men, for far too long. I think the reason so many people are alarmed by some of the younger progressives with "radical" ideas is because we have had the same stodgy nonsense thrown at us for decades. Ideas that are considered extreme in the US are quite the norm in other developed countries. It's pretty frightening how resistant our culture is to change.
Agree! Especially in politics!
Too polite and rarely follow it up with a statement of what IS true /reality.. do the lie gets the last word, repeated over snd over until the masses believe it.
A very long and interesting read, Artsilen. Are you a studied historian, or a folk historian like myself? On the surface I didn’t see any problem with this dissertation, and the part about President Obama’s undeniable excellence exciting “the fears and hatreds of Trump's dispossessed millions of supporters,” was seen by me firsthand in my ignorant, redneck brother in Mississippi.
It’s interesting that you mention this, Rob. I am almost finished with Michelle Obama’s excellent autobiography “Becoming” (and I just pre-ordered Barack’s new one which comes out Tuesday) and it has further opened my eyes to the racism and bigotry that met the Obamas and his administration. From McConnell’s obstructionism against ANYTHING that Obama tried to do, to the nastiness that met this wonderful family at every turn it was awful. Then along comes tRump and his minions who have been the polar opposite of Obama and have now undone nearly everything. But the saddest thing of all IMHO, is that even when faced with the clear choice between good and evil, the Republicans in office and so many people have clearly chosen evil.
I havent read Michelle Obama's book, but watched the documentary - which was eye-opening. The garbage-throwing started even before the election! Angry black woman??? I cannot imagine what that kind of constant barrage of - frankly crap - with no way to really correct it, could do to your daily life. Apparently all because they were born with a darker skin color. If anyone was in doubt as to the blind racism in this country - wake up! Actually - as someone else said at some point - racism is actually fear of "others". What a wonderful country!
Rob Boyte: I would be the first to concede that this essay went on a bit longer than I had planned. But, as Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once observed, to the effect that when the Muse hits you in the middle of the night, you seize the moment and not wait until morning to complete the thought.
To answer your question, no, I am not a professional historian, nor even an avocational amateur; but I do have a lifetime's worth of abiding interest and professional experience as a student of American government. Professionally, I am a lawyer, now retired, with extensive experience in local, state, and national government. My principal areas of interest centered around the myriad of ways in which governments at all levels interact with one another both within their jurisdictional boundaries, and the communities of interest that they share with their affiliated non-profit surrogates that are now with increasing frequency the way in which government interacts with the general population and with voters. As a lawyer in government, I had numerous professional responsibilities that involved interaction with state governments, local governments, and numerous public bodies. As a private lawyer, I was often on the other side of the table, where my primary concern was representing clients, but at the same time letting the lawyer on the governmental side know that I was fully cognizant of his employer's interests that needed to be acknowledged and advanced. Whatever deal we struck had to work for both sides. I'm also a certified arbitrator and mediator, getting adversarial parties who are often adamantly opposed to settling a dispute on anything short of their own terms, to come to some form of agreement because the cost of battling it out to the bitter end is just too great for either of them. On top of everything else is the public interest, which in the past used to be the foremost priority. Today, not so much. In our ideological battles, the public interest is become collateral damage; and that needs to change.
Of late, I study Complexity Science, because what works well at the individual level become something different as scale increases; and with increasing scale, predictability of outcomes drops off drastically, and emergent behaviors within the overall system appear that usually have drastic consequences. At a certain point systems become ungovernable and suffer internal collapse, usually followed by extinction. Chaos reigns; and then things start all over again with something new. What we are finding is that there is a science to it, and a mathematical basis that are in polar contrast to the ideological dogmas that we hear bandied about as received wisdom by people who should know better, but who have decided that it is not in their respective interests to deviate from the paths they have chosen for themselves.
artsilen, your comments and observations of history are interesting. Heather's book, "How the South Won the Civil War" adds a great deal to the discussion and her knowledge of Westward Movement and its impact is a must read. Hope you order her book. I just got started on my copy yesterday.
This is an interesting personal interpretation of history with some things I agree with. But I would stick with the original observation and point out that a large part of the electorate is far from polite. Unfortunately, for the most part they number a substantial percentage of the 70 or so million that voted for their standard bearer. However you want to review and interpret the history, we cannot escape the fact that we are now in a political and personal contest of will that results from years of growing discord, with no end in sight. Some dream of civil war, but unless and until Biden becomes Commander in Chief, the right wing, now likely a permanent presence in our politics, has virtually all the weapons on its side. My bottom line in this regard is that Biden has the opportunity to become a great president and I think some of the qualities that may take him there. Fingers crossed.
Interesting analysis to read and I agree with what yoyu write...but, by definition, inevitably somewhat lobsided when one only looks for the economic raison d'être. Where I beg to differ is with your analysis of Obama's performance as it looked a lot less useful on the international stage to us living elsewhere in the world than he could appear for domestic issues. To my mind his lack of previous political experience left him blinded to the Koch financed GOP opposition and inevitably reduced his ability to impose all of his agenda of social, climatic and business-related, regulatory change. This naivety laid the groundwork for the strength of the Trump take-over in 2016
I read it end to end, but then, it is Saturday morning, and I am ignoring my "chores". I appreciate your perspective, Artsilen!
Well written, but this "economic determination of history" is far too long to be posted here. Too many will have skipped reading it, a mistake. Pour a cup of tea, sit down and read it.
I'm one who said, tldr. Maybe after I've had a couple cups of coffee I'll give it a go.
I started reading not knowing how long it was. It didn't matter as the more I read, the more I wanted to read. Excellent "summary" of where we are now!
Same here. I looked at it on the page and said that's longer than "the Letter." However, I started reading and couldn't stop. A lot of that history I have lived thru (born a day after FDR won his 4th term). So, it gave me another perspective of my life.
You say the Trump Campaign lawyer is an evangelical Christian. Here's an article I ran across earlier today, about white evangelical support for Trump.
The author of this article quotes a Democratic strategist as saying “People who want to live in a white supremacist society vote Republican. Those who don’t vote Democrat.”
The author says he was startled. The author also calls that Democratic operative's quote “hyperbolic“ as in exaggerated, overblown.
This author, like many Americans, is allergic to the term “white supremacy.” Being allergic to it means you are challenged in hearing it, receiving it, appreciating it, and understanding it.
The author appears to have a misconception, popular among progressives and liberals, that “White supremacy“ is some sort of taboo and invisible force. It is like Hitler and Nazi Germany. It’s dangerous, it’s threatening and intimidating, it’s super scary, so we can’t look at it and talk about it.
“White supremacy“ is when people want the whites to be the dominant force in society, the superior power.
Obviously people are going to be cagey when approached for an interview for a poll. Obviously these people are not going to wear a T-shirt printed with the words “MAGA supporter for a white America“ or “I am a white person, how about you?“ Racist is a dirty word.
The percentage of Americans, however, who want to stay in a whites-first, whites-dominated, whites-ahead-of-everyone-else, society is HUGE.
This naïve author’s take on white supremacy nevertheless goes to the heart of why Donald Trump received more votes than any other president in history. [before January 20 I can still use that expression]
The 2020 US Presidential Election is absolutely about race, and also gender (men come first) and orientation (straights come first).
Believe it.
.
"Opinions | Trump’s racist appeals powered a White evangelical tsunami:
White evangelicals turned out in mind-boggling numbers to support the president at the polls."
Opinion by Dana Milbank
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/13/trumps-racist-appeals-powered-white-evangelical-tsunami/
Thank you, HCR. Inauguration day cannot get here soon enough to suit me. I'll be happy when responsible adults are in charge again.
Andrew McCabe was fired because he was in the know and honorable.
Curious to know more details about his mysterious statement.
That’s an understatement! I wonder if it will ever come out, or at least come out in my lifetime.
The Senate runoff in Georgia, and thus control of the Senate, is up for grabs. Since Biden won Georgia, there is the very real possibility the Democrats could take both seats. (Gerrymandered congressional districts don't matter in a state-wide Senate election.) If the Koch brothers think Trump's hopeless quest remain in office will be a drag on Republican efforts in Georgia, they certainly have the gravitas within the Republican hierarchy to speak directly to the likes of Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, et al and tell them what they think. At this point newly re-elected McConnell and Graham have little to fear from the Trump mob, and the Koch brothers' deep pockets will be more than just helpful toward winning in Georgia.
There is a pleasing irony in thinking, hoping, that Trump may be in the process of politicly neutering himself to the point where Senate Republicans think they have to abandon him to keep control.
I have donated what I am able to both Georgia candidates and I will be writing postcards.
I'm starting to write today to GA voters to encourage vote by mail.
Thank you Pam! Are you writing with Postcards to Voters or another organization?
I write for Postcards to Voters. Great organization!
Me too! I wasn't sure if the Georgia campaign was up and running yet. This is great news. Thanks!
Thank you Paula! Are you writing with Postcards to Voters or another organization?
Later today I’ll begin texting into GA on behalf of Fair Fight.
Koch brother
Thank you, I stand corrected. I’m so used to seeing it in the plural, I suppose.
The one remaining has alot of sins to atone for imho.
Let’s hope his departed brother is reminding him of this, a la Jacob Marley.
That is a delicious thought...”neutering”!
I admit that I don't understand the reasoning of the GOP enablers of He-Who-Refuses-to-Accept-Reality (for our current troll, I am refraining from calling him the Deranged Cheeto--whoops! I did it again!:-D) with respect to the Covid infection rates, as their own supporters are now getting sick and dying by the thousands, even the tens of thousands. It made (a kind of sociopathic) sense to me in April that the amoralists would work to prevent appropriate measures because in their minds only BIPOC and Dems were dying, because the pandemic was at its worst in congested urban areas. I know I am presenting the strategies of McConnell and Co as criminally cynical but that is what I believe was happening. Now, instead, the people dying are those who attended MAGA rallies, live in rural states and districts, and are in significant numbers supporters of the soon-to- be-former POTUS. For instance, in KC, hospitals are overwhelmed by rural patients who have been transferred to KC hospitals because of a breakdown of rural healthcare that has been promoted and fomented by the Republicans in power. As a result, urban patients could find themselves unable to get a hospital bed. And yet the idiot governor refuses to mandate mask wearing, continues to claim that the pandemic is a matter of "personal responsibility," and won't financially support KC and St. Louis, which are Dem strongholds and which are bearing the brunt of caring for the covidiots in the countryside.
It seems to me counterintuitive to welcome the morbidity and mortality of one's own followers, but I suppose the thing is that the election is over, so the jokers don't have to pretend to care about their constituents any more.
This is BEYOND REASON. It is a doubling down.
"I have brought you the most beautiful virus ever!" - just paraphrasing Trump's balcony speech about how he feels stronger now than ever as the result of his virus experience. The works of the Devil. And his minions.
The problem to me, with the term "covidiots", is that people who have been doing everything they can to prevent becoming ill have caught the virus regardless. Many of us in the over-60, health-impaired categories are striving to stay safe, but the advent of these huge numbers becomes overwhelming, no matter what you do. Let's pray for reasonableness (I know, in some places that is not going to happen) and a speedy, but careful, FDA approval of a vaccine. And let's pray that happens before another 150,000 of us are dead, or permanently damaged by this scourge.
I too am in the super high risk group because I'm old and have a severely compromised immune system and I have been more or less a prisoner of my house for the last 8 months. I call the people who knowingly and deliberately endanger others by refusing to follow reasonable and sensible precautions--wearing masks, etc--as well as (if in government) refusing to require reasonable and sensible precautions covidiots because they are absolutely abrogating their community responsibilities in favor of some extreme notion of "personal liberty" that has nothing to do with liberty and everything to do with the brand of toxic masculinity Drumpf promotes and the female enablers of it. When Hilary Rodham Clinton talked about it taking a village to raise a child, she was also talking about these people: it takes a community to accept responsibility for both individual AND collective action or anarchy reigns. And really what Drumpf and his minions want is chaos in order to make it as difficult as possible for a new administration to ameliorate the situation. They WANT 200,000 deaths by January. They are relying on this.
I don't use the term "covidiot" because it assumes that people who don't mask and follow various safety protocol don't have the capacity to understand the reasons behind making, etc. Unless one lives in a bell jar inside of a dark cave, they know that the precautions work quite successfully. Anti-maskers are being insolent. At this stage of the game, I'd actually call them borderline criminal, not covidiotic.
They are definitely committing a “criminal” act in my opinion. It’s like dealing with 70 million 10 year children! They know not what they do...until they are are personally afflicted and affected.
HWoRtAR?
* for simplicity, use the pronunciation "wart."
Wart works - maybe new nickname???
More and more with Covid everyday, and everyday the orange moron sits and does nothing. But, today he'll be out there encouraging his gathering followers to take off masks and get the virus! And, he'll hope that there will be enough secret service to "protect" him at the gold course. I'm done with this man, and hope that the country will get it figured out how much damage he has done to the American psyche. It will take generations to heal from his abuse.
But do we really want him to be "doing his job"? Aren't we all so much safer if he and all his minions just play golf for the next couple of months???? I know: that means that Pence and Barr are in charge but still . . . :-P
The Praetorian Guard may bring an end to this all.
"Mr. Trump should order the transition process begin immediately. It is the right and moral thing to do.” Well, we're well and truly screwed, then, because Mr. Trump wouldn't recognize the moral thing to do if it bit him in his nether regions.
At what point, if ever, will people like the lackey who refuses to go against Trump and provide Mr. Biden with the pandemic information he needs to hit the ground running - at what point will people like THAT do the right thing? It's obvious Trump never will.
They're Just Following Orders.
Yeah, Rob, that's what worries me. We know how that ends............😥
If I were someone in the bureaucracy that actually runs the government, and I thought it important to brief my counterpart in an incoming administration against orders, I think I would be taking care to do so in an extremely cautious and surreptitious manner.
So former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly suggests that allowing the transition process to proceed would be the right and moral thing to do. That's naive at best. By now, he should know that Trump does only what is good for himself and has no interest in what is right or moral. Most Republicans know that and don't give a darn, especially those who need Trump's blind and loyal base to get elected. An American tragedy.
Just curious, Heather... Alot of media talk about 51-49% political party division in our country now. What was it during WW2 when there seemed to be a united citizen effort to help the war effort? What this country may need is similar propaganda to unite and defeat COVID.
As I recall, it took years before the country "united." There was endless debate over whether the US should get involved in the war "over there." It wasn't until people united against a threatening, visible, common enemy and, significantly, FDR embraced a "moral duty" to engage against an enemy that US joined the effort. FDR was not eager for the United States to enter a global military conflict. But unlike the ardent isolationists, he also figured it was inevitable, especially with German subs being sighted off our shores. Even then American troops didn’t officially join World War II until December 1941 well after the invasion of Poland (1939) and after London, England (1941) began suffering devastating German bombing raids.
Jan, you are quite correct that the country was far from unified support of any efforts to get involved in any of Europe's troubles. "We helped them out in the World War and look what that got us. A pox on them." was the common sentiment of both political parties. And of course, efforts to stem the Depression dominated government actions as well as people's lives. FDR tried to use the idea of selling military equipment to England and France as a potential stimulus to U.S. manufacturing, but Congress passed three Neutrality Acts 1935-37 forbidding any such involvement. After 9/1/30 evidence of fascist aggressions in Spain, Libya and Central Europe were unmistakeable and Congress agreed to the "cash and carry" Neutrality Act of 1939. There was tremendous resistance to FDR's support for increasing our own military preparedness
[hit the wrong button] ...and it wasn't until September 1940--by which time the Nazis dominated the continent--that Congress agreed to the first peacetime draft, and only for troops who could not be sent overseas. (And BTW, several historians suggest that it got extended a year later only because Sam Rayburn gaveled the vote when a one-vote margin was achieved in the roll call.) Three months later Pearl Harbor changed everything, but FDR had continuing struggles to persuade people of the need to fight Hitler first.
Wasn't it the infamous date of December 7...Pearl Harbor?
That is a very interesting point.
"It is the right and moral thing to do." Drumpty has never done anything in his life that could be labeled "right" or "moral." He wouldn't know those words if they bit that enormous fat ass of his.
As far as the governors of Iowa and North Dakota finally being dragged kicking and screaming to reality - tough luck. for $500, "what is "Depopulating Iowa and North Dakota?" "I know Alex! I know! A good start." Followed by huge depopulation due to the pandemic in every other red state. We have to kick start Darwinian "survival of the fittest" somehow. And fewer morons is the best possible way to Make America Great Again.
The Dakota's population as with Montana's, has been declining since the beginning of the 19th C as a result of the mistaken idea that you could intensively farm such areas in smallholdings with so little rain. They would have been better listening to and observing the Native Americans rather than the land speculators, miners and railroad propaganda.
"Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day" .
20th century?
Yes of course, I meant 1900s..but if you campared it to the 16th C, i 'm not sure if the decline didn't start there,
Natural Selection: Thinning the Herd of its Weakest Minds.
Except even depopulated those states will have 3 members in Congress. Way too much power to the few.
Too bad the census happened already.
Sort of.
Heather, have you seen this update yet on Col. Alexander Vindman's latest plans? I believe this was announced just a day or two ago.https://www.pritzkermilitaryfoundation.org/press-release/pritzker-military-foundation-awards-lt-col-alexander-vindman-the-first-pritzker-military-fellowship-at-the-lawfare-institute/
Certainly well deserved! Kind of a slap in the face at the Orange man, wouldnt you say?? And THATS well deserved too.
My hope is that both he and his brother are reinstated by Biden. That would be a great FU to The Donald.
Wonderful!! For US!
"Squattertgate." Noun. Trump's refusal to concede the election.