Another potential fallout of the big lie I haven't seen mentioned (though I'm sure this isn't an original thought) is that it sets up a situation where if there is widespread fraud by Republicans in a future election, who would ever believe it? "Oh sure... Now that the Dems lost they're saying there's fraud. What about 2020?." It would be the standard playbook. Blame the Dems for something they didn't do, then do it themselves and say -what about? And create a massive mess of disinformation and straw man arguments. Name a dozen Republicans who would come to the defense of democracy.
Re polls on how many believe the Big Lie, I figure most Republicans *say* they do, but I figure some portion of those don't really believe it but know it triggers liberals. That is, they say so to be nasty.
Maybe it's not the crime, nor the cover-up, nor the acceptance. It's the opportunity to return to grade school playground taunting. IOW, the problem may be the inexorable immaturity of too many Americans old enough to have been legal adults for decades.
Those one quarter who may feel it will soon be necessary to take up arms, that's a cover for wanting to have an excuse to shoot at someone. As for Pelosi and Pritzker - Oh my gawd!
But you are doing damage to the definition of decadence. You are using several terms very differently from how they are normally understood. I would like to know the source of these ideas.
Charlie's observation on the politically intractable mess in Wisconsin is a perfect example of why people of good conscience on both sides of the aisle must come to see the Federalist Society, and every other politically ideological legal society, for what they are: dangerous threats to a healthy democracy.
I don't know enough about legal history to say this for sure, but I imagine our current Supreme Court is the first which can be legitimately said to have been engineered by an outside interest group. We were told time and again that this group was committed to *judicial* conservatism, not *social* or *political* conservatism. Even if that were technically true, this turned out to be a distinction without a difference. The overwhelming intersection between the judicial vs. social/political camps lent itself to an obvious right-wing culture among jurists and lawyers who willingly segregated themselves from their legal peers.
The result has been more than just a nominal judicial philosophy in service to a political agenda. It was a loss of something important that we could once reasonably rely upon from our courts: wisdom. I was gob-smacked when John Roberts claimed it was not a job for the courts to adjudicate the fairness of gerrymandered districts. *Of course* it was a job for the courts - not because it was ever plainly stated in a document, but because they were the only ones who possibly could. Because democracy is helpless to correct a political system that has been specifically re-engineered to thwart democracy itself.
Was it not this implicit understanding of the courts *practical* duties which led to the concept of judicial review itself, despite not being mentioned in the Constitution? Even if we credulously accept the lack of political motive, should the Court's seeming humility, when faced with the knowledge of the sclerotic and dysfunctional political institutions to which they sanctimoniously defer, not be seen as, in fact, a dereliction of duty?
Our courts have long been viewed as a bulwark against the evils of partisanship. They have been revered precisely because they have been seen as apolitical - and consequently our polity looks to them to be the referees in the game of politics, regardless of how grounded this role may or may not be in historical texts. The collective wisdom of the courts, when informed by an apolitical culture, acknowledged this expectation. That they accepted the role was evident in their informal reasoning: "The Constitution is not a suicide pact", being perhaps its most emblematic example. If you don't want your drunk friends to die, and to possibly take others with them, you grab the keys even when you aren't the designated driver.
My name is not Cassandra but the hatred and disinformation appears to have fomented such animus that Im wondering how far an aggressive 3 column Republican government would go to wipe clean any perceived liberal culture from "our" country. Am I off base thinking that there is a whiff of Aryan theocracy in the air...potentially? Or, could anyone imagine internment camps for non-compliant libs?
The word I kept hearing back in 2016-2018 was: dummycrat. I’m a dem. We have second rate strategists. Our leadership is out of touch with the middle 70% of Americans. It’s the “feel” of it stupid!
Ever since I heard Laura Ingram say about the Jan 6th hearings <<<<We all know who the real terrorists are, the Democrats.>>>>
I knew something was seriously wrong. How a well known Commentator can say to an audience of millions that at least 60% of the country are terrorists, it is more than just an election. When my friend went to see her Oklahoma relatives and heard them saying they want Trump to take over the US government and his spawn to be rulers afterwards, I realized these people hate democracy. The are doped up with their religion (her brother in law is a Pastor!!!) and dictator worship. This is how 7 million people get put in concentration camps and murdered while their neighbors laugh. I don't think there is any hope.
This is from a piece in Orion magazine which I read earlier today and I think it applies here:
"Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros written in 1959 tells the story of a village in which all except one of the citizens succumb to “rhinoceritis,” turning into belligerent beasts that rush about recklessly, following the herd. I took it to be a satire on fascism, communism, and other mass delusions that only afflicted other nations. Three years later, when Merton’s essay reminded me of the play, I knew better. I knew that Americans could succumb to mass aggression as readily as people anywhere. In “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” Merton invoked Ionesco’s play as a caution not merely against totalitarianism but against all forms of “collective thinking,” especially those that derive their power from channeling contempt toward people defined as Other. “Collectivity needs not only to absorb everyone it can,” he wrote, “but also implicitly to hate and destroy whoever cannot be absorbed. Paradoxically, one of the needs of collectivity is to reject certain classes, or races, or groups, in order to strengthen its own self-awareness by hating them instead of absorbing them.”
My wholly off topic little rant for the Fourth, which everyone in my (small) circle is so sick of hearing me talk about that I have nowhere else to go with it: As we celebrate this holiday, and perhaps call to mind some of our favorite Americans, I want to recommend a thought towards Mary Todd Lincoln, a great American.
Prior to taking my son to Springfield,IL to visit all the Lincoln stuff (my son is named after Lincoln), I had only the vaguest notions about MTL, which were mostly that she was nutty and a millstone and nuisance to her husband. In the Lincoln Museum there was a hologram of the Lincoln family, and I became instantly curious about the woman standing there. (There is also an actual stovepipe hat that Abe wore, and you can see the spots of wear left on it by his fingertips - I cried.)
In the gift shop I bought a biography of Mary, and have since read more. She and Abe had 4 sons, 3 of whom died - one before the WH, one while in the WH and during the war, one after the WH. The fourth son had her committed to a mental hospital, from which she was sprung by a rare-at-the-time woman lawyer.
When her husband was mortally shot at Ford's theater and moved to a nearby house, the men in the room where his dying body lay and where she was wailing, shouted "get that woman out of here," and they did get that woman out of there.
Mary and Abe were maybe the original American celebrity couple, as they took the train journey from Springfield to Washington to begin his presidency there were throngs of people lining the way, at stations climbing lampposts to get a view of the couple.
She was maybe an original believer in American consumer culture once at the WH, buying what she hoped would be a sense of security and belonging, but was in fact just deep and damaging debt.
She was derided by the Washington establishment - too Southern, too emotional, too hick.
Their marriage began as a real love-match, maybe even passionate in the you-know-what dept, but the horrors of the war, the loss of their first 2 children, put a strain on them both individually and as a couple.
Her grief lead her to conduct seances and alienated her from the people around her...she should just get over it. I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that if the many personal catastrophes, not to mention the national one of civil war, were to befall me, I'd be holding seances too, and tend to nuttiness. I think she sacrificed as much as any American ever has, and should hold a place of honor, especially on July 4.
Lived in SE PA a good part of my life and visit often. Mastriano has a strong chance of winning. Outer suburban and rural PA were festooned with his posters, everywhere. PA will be the test of urban vs rural once again. Very religious state from wacko extreme evangelic to Mennonite. 'Country folk' look at Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as holes that their tax dollars go to support with no improvements. Mastriano's warped messaging is working - God, guns, bible, more guns, church, kill the libs, military good, American flags everywhere, and no fed government interfering with our God-given way of life. Hard to counter that with the extreme parochialism in such states.
So, who else isn't ready to watch Democrats and D-leaning voters hand over their rights because screaming on Twitter is enough for them?
Register to vote -- 40+ states let you do that online. If you have to go do it in person, go and get that done.
Vote in the primaries, vote in the caucuses. A big part of why extremists end up on the ballot is because only the nutbars show up on primary night.
Vote in the general. Vote on everything. Not just the top of the ballot, the whole fuckin' thing. You can't eat half the meal and take the rest home, here. Go to the polls hungry, and vote hard.
Nullification started as a small government, conservative idea. From Jefferson to Calhoun to the CSA to states refusing to integrate schools, small government conservative have been nullifiers
Has anyone followed the money? My nightmare when I woke up (and I'm not making this up) was a modernist take on the movie Seven Days in May (a demagogic general decided to seize power using the military). Only in my dream it was Putin-financed pols raking in billions to take over. My semi-conscious brain added a happy ending with FBI/military, etc. arresting all of them as paid seditionists (like the movie ending). My wide-awake brain thinks I'm beginning to believe that's what really behind the takeover of the R party - the financing of anti-democracy pols by our enemies. We keep thinking/talking about the people behind them as ignorant, non-monied rural folks. They might be the ones doing stunts like the truck convoy, but it takes money, lots and lots of money, to run all these people in so many different states. And we already know that a number of the big players have links to Russia. (Google it - there are quite a few.)
We know Putin's operatives have long been working to undermine and destabilize democracy, freedom and the West. Remember Maria Butina? And altho Robert Muller didn't find evidence "sufficient to charge any member of the campaign with taking part in a criminal conspiracy", he sure did find lots of Russians and lots of collusion. And then there's Putin's involvement with far right organizations:
Business Insider: "Russia could strike back at the West by calling on its network of white-supremacist groups to commit terror attacks there, analysts warn"
I'd love to see a full accounting of the nesting dolls of ties between Putin and the Alt-Conservatives in the Trump team, MAGA, America First, the GOP, CPAC, and the far right groups!
Another potential fallout of the big lie I haven't seen mentioned (though I'm sure this isn't an original thought) is that it sets up a situation where if there is widespread fraud by Republicans in a future election, who would ever believe it? "Oh sure... Now that the Dems lost they're saying there's fraud. What about 2020?." It would be the standard playbook. Blame the Dems for something they didn't do, then do it themselves and say -what about? And create a massive mess of disinformation and straw man arguments. Name a dozen Republicans who would come to the defense of democracy.
Re polls on how many believe the Big Lie, I figure most Republicans *say* they do, but I figure some portion of those don't really believe it but know it triggers liberals. That is, they say so to be nasty.
Maybe it's not the crime, nor the cover-up, nor the acceptance. It's the opportunity to return to grade school playground taunting. IOW, the problem may be the inexorable immaturity of too many Americans old enough to have been legal adults for decades.
Those one quarter who may feel it will soon be necessary to take up arms, that's a cover for wanting to have an excuse to shoot at someone. As for Pelosi and Pritzker - Oh my gawd!
No reason for me to contribute to DNC appeals if it stupidly supports wack job Republicans
Better use of your money to pick local elections like SOS in certain states and contribute directly. Michigan. Colorado. a few others no doubt.
But you are doing damage to the definition of decadence. You are using several terms very differently from how they are normally understood. I would like to know the source of these ideas.
Charlie's observation on the politically intractable mess in Wisconsin is a perfect example of why people of good conscience on both sides of the aisle must come to see the Federalist Society, and every other politically ideological legal society, for what they are: dangerous threats to a healthy democracy.
I don't know enough about legal history to say this for sure, but I imagine our current Supreme Court is the first which can be legitimately said to have been engineered by an outside interest group. We were told time and again that this group was committed to *judicial* conservatism, not *social* or *political* conservatism. Even if that were technically true, this turned out to be a distinction without a difference. The overwhelming intersection between the judicial vs. social/political camps lent itself to an obvious right-wing culture among jurists and lawyers who willingly segregated themselves from their legal peers.
The result has been more than just a nominal judicial philosophy in service to a political agenda. It was a loss of something important that we could once reasonably rely upon from our courts: wisdom. I was gob-smacked when John Roberts claimed it was not a job for the courts to adjudicate the fairness of gerrymandered districts. *Of course* it was a job for the courts - not because it was ever plainly stated in a document, but because they were the only ones who possibly could. Because democracy is helpless to correct a political system that has been specifically re-engineered to thwart democracy itself.
Was it not this implicit understanding of the courts *practical* duties which led to the concept of judicial review itself, despite not being mentioned in the Constitution? Even if we credulously accept the lack of political motive, should the Court's seeming humility, when faced with the knowledge of the sclerotic and dysfunctional political institutions to which they sanctimoniously defer, not be seen as, in fact, a dereliction of duty?
Our courts have long been viewed as a bulwark against the evils of partisanship. They have been revered precisely because they have been seen as apolitical - and consequently our polity looks to them to be the referees in the game of politics, regardless of how grounded this role may or may not be in historical texts. The collective wisdom of the courts, when informed by an apolitical culture, acknowledged this expectation. That they accepted the role was evident in their informal reasoning: "The Constitution is not a suicide pact", being perhaps its most emblematic example. If you don't want your drunk friends to die, and to possibly take others with them, you grab the keys even when you aren't the designated driver.
My name is not Cassandra but the hatred and disinformation appears to have fomented such animus that Im wondering how far an aggressive 3 column Republican government would go to wipe clean any perceived liberal culture from "our" country. Am I off base thinking that there is a whiff of Aryan theocracy in the air...potentially? Or, could anyone imagine internment camps for non-compliant libs?
You're not off base.
My only superpower is seeing patterns. I'm not off base and that scares the hell out of me.
The word I kept hearing back in 2016-2018 was: dummycrat. I’m a dem. We have second rate strategists. Our leadership is out of touch with the middle 70% of Americans. It’s the “feel” of it stupid!
Ever since I heard Laura Ingram say about the Jan 6th hearings <<<<We all know who the real terrorists are, the Democrats.>>>>
I knew something was seriously wrong. How a well known Commentator can say to an audience of millions that at least 60% of the country are terrorists, it is more than just an election. When my friend went to see her Oklahoma relatives and heard them saying they want Trump to take over the US government and his spawn to be rulers afterwards, I realized these people hate democracy. The are doped up with their religion (her brother in law is a Pastor!!!) and dictator worship. This is how 7 million people get put in concentration camps and murdered while their neighbors laugh. I don't think there is any hope.
This is from a piece in Orion magazine which I read earlier today and I think it applies here:
"Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros written in 1959 tells the story of a village in which all except one of the citizens succumb to “rhinoceritis,” turning into belligerent beasts that rush about recklessly, following the herd. I took it to be a satire on fascism, communism, and other mass delusions that only afflicted other nations. Three years later, when Merton’s essay reminded me of the play, I knew better. I knew that Americans could succumb to mass aggression as readily as people anywhere. In “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” Merton invoked Ionesco’s play as a caution not merely against totalitarianism but against all forms of “collective thinking,” especially those that derive their power from channeling contempt toward people defined as Other. “Collectivity needs not only to absorb everyone it can,” he wrote, “but also implicitly to hate and destroy whoever cannot be absorbed. Paradoxically, one of the needs of collectivity is to reject certain classes, or races, or groups, in order to strengthen its own self-awareness by hating them instead of absorbing them.”
That's excellent. I'll for that story. I agree that the current right wing seems fanatical.
Conscience and Resistance (current issue Orion)
My wholly off topic little rant for the Fourth, which everyone in my (small) circle is so sick of hearing me talk about that I have nowhere else to go with it: As we celebrate this holiday, and perhaps call to mind some of our favorite Americans, I want to recommend a thought towards Mary Todd Lincoln, a great American.
Prior to taking my son to Springfield,IL to visit all the Lincoln stuff (my son is named after Lincoln), I had only the vaguest notions about MTL, which were mostly that she was nutty and a millstone and nuisance to her husband. In the Lincoln Museum there was a hologram of the Lincoln family, and I became instantly curious about the woman standing there. (There is also an actual stovepipe hat that Abe wore, and you can see the spots of wear left on it by his fingertips - I cried.)
In the gift shop I bought a biography of Mary, and have since read more. She and Abe had 4 sons, 3 of whom died - one before the WH, one while in the WH and during the war, one after the WH. The fourth son had her committed to a mental hospital, from which she was sprung by a rare-at-the-time woman lawyer.
When her husband was mortally shot at Ford's theater and moved to a nearby house, the men in the room where his dying body lay and where she was wailing, shouted "get that woman out of here," and they did get that woman out of there.
Mary and Abe were maybe the original American celebrity couple, as they took the train journey from Springfield to Washington to begin his presidency there were throngs of people lining the way, at stations climbing lampposts to get a view of the couple.
She was maybe an original believer in American consumer culture once at the WH, buying what she hoped would be a sense of security and belonging, but was in fact just deep and damaging debt.
She was derided by the Washington establishment - too Southern, too emotional, too hick.
Their marriage began as a real love-match, maybe even passionate in the you-know-what dept, but the horrors of the war, the loss of their first 2 children, put a strain on them both individually and as a couple.
Her grief lead her to conduct seances and alienated her from the people around her...she should just get over it. I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that if the many personal catastrophes, not to mention the national one of civil war, were to befall me, I'd be holding seances too, and tend to nuttiness. I think she sacrificed as much as any American ever has, and should hold a place of honor, especially on July 4.
Lived in SE PA a good part of my life and visit often. Mastriano has a strong chance of winning. Outer suburban and rural PA were festooned with his posters, everywhere. PA will be the test of urban vs rural once again. Very religious state from wacko extreme evangelic to Mennonite. 'Country folk' look at Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as holes that their tax dollars go to support with no improvements. Mastriano's warped messaging is working - God, guns, bible, more guns, church, kill the libs, military good, American flags everywhere, and no fed government interfering with our God-given way of life. Hard to counter that with the extreme parochialism in such states.
Thank god for bulwark. You have stood up to the lies and bullshit from trump and his supporters. Trump is a disgusting human being.
Tell me this is a lie! WTF!!!!!! I will never make another donation to democrats. So fucking infuriating! Whoever made this call must resign.
So, who else isn't ready to watch Democrats and D-leaning voters hand over their rights because screaming on Twitter is enough for them?
Register to vote -- 40+ states let you do that online. If you have to go do it in person, go and get that done.
Vote in the primaries, vote in the caucuses. A big part of why extremists end up on the ballot is because only the nutbars show up on primary night.
Vote in the general. Vote on everything. Not just the top of the ballot, the whole fuckin' thing. You can't eat half the meal and take the rest home, here. Go to the polls hungry, and vote hard.
Nullification started as a small government, conservative idea. From Jefferson to Calhoun to the CSA to states refusing to integrate schools, small government conservative have been nullifiers
Has anyone followed the money? My nightmare when I woke up (and I'm not making this up) was a modernist take on the movie Seven Days in May (a demagogic general decided to seize power using the military). Only in my dream it was Putin-financed pols raking in billions to take over. My semi-conscious brain added a happy ending with FBI/military, etc. arresting all of them as paid seditionists (like the movie ending). My wide-awake brain thinks I'm beginning to believe that's what really behind the takeover of the R party - the financing of anti-democracy pols by our enemies. We keep thinking/talking about the people behind them as ignorant, non-monied rural folks. They might be the ones doing stunts like the truck convoy, but it takes money, lots and lots of money, to run all these people in so many different states. And we already know that a number of the big players have links to Russia. (Google it - there are quite a few.)
We know Putin's operatives have long been working to undermine and destabilize democracy, freedom and the West. Remember Maria Butina? And altho Robert Muller didn't find evidence "sufficient to charge any member of the campaign with taking part in a criminal conspiracy", he sure did find lots of Russians and lots of collusion. And then there's Putin's involvement with far right organizations:
Business Insider: "Russia could strike back at the West by calling on its network of white-supremacist groups to commit terror attacks there, analysts warn"
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-could-retaliate-west-leverage-white-supremacist-group-attacks-analysts-2022-4
I'd love to see a full accounting of the nesting dolls of ties between Putin and the Alt-Conservatives in the Trump team, MAGA, America First, the GOP, CPAC, and the far right groups!