“And so the first returns are in, and the Silly Party has taken Leicester! What do you think of that- Norman?”
“Well, yes, the election went much as I predicted, except that the Silly Party won.”
-“Election Night”, Monty Python’s Flying Circus
So now, finally, the 2022 midterms are over. In the Georgia runoff, incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock won – barely – against college football star and Trump friend Herschel Walker, who got a huge amount of Republican turnout despite or likely because being as dumb as an entire store full of left shoes and picked only because Trump wanted him and the rest of the Republicans thought this was the ideal Black candidate. If nothing else, we now know why it’s better to be a werewolf than a vampire: Warnock is an ordained minister, and Clerics can’t turn werewolves.
Now, given that even before this, Democrats had managed to keep 50 seats in the Senate and held the House Republicans to a five-seat majority (who probably aren’t in consensus about their leadership) the conventional wisdom from everyone was that Donald Trump was to blame for pushing a whole bunch of election-liar candidates who wanted to skew state governments to make sure no one could elect Democrats again. That and, the Alito Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade attracted a surprising amount of anger. Well, it surprised Republicans, anyway. Hey, Mr. Alito, it turns out that women had the right to choose after all. Maybe while you were obviating the 14th Amendment and completely ignoring the Ninth, you could have used your magical legal bullshit to eliminate the 19th Amendment and take away women’s right to vote. It would have made things so much easier for your Party.
Usually in a midterm election, voters kick out the party in power. Except, people perceived, not just because of the Dobbs decision, that the party in power isn’t so much the Biden Democrats as the Trump Republicans. Supposedly even before the election, Trump told insiders that creating a pro-life supermajority on the Supreme Court wasn’t going to help him politically, and it’s another one of the factors that pin the blame on him for Republican performance.
That’s one of the reasons why Republicans supposedly begged the former Russian Viceroy to hold off on announcing a re-election campaign until after the election, but just one week afterward, November 15, he made this big presentation at Mar-a-Lago and announced he was running to stay out of prison for President of the United States. Those who actually bothered to watch said it was a great example of what Trump used to call “low energy.” Such that the press caught some people trying to leave the room.
Anyway, somewhere inside a speech that was so wandering and tedious that even Laura Ingraham cut away from it, Trump said he was going to “make America great and glorious again.”
MAGAGA!
Isn’t that Lady Gaga’s final form?
But the problem with paying any attention to this at all is that I simply don’t have time to. In the time between the general election, the Trump announcement and the Georgia runoff, Trump actually managed to get himself involved in multiple fuckups. On the way to Make America Gross And Ghetto Again, Trump decided to host Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago. Kanye West, who now legally goes by “Ye.” (I assume this is supposed to be ‘yay’ as in the last syllable, but I pronounce it ‘yee’ as in Ye Gads.) He has recently been accompanied everywhere by “traditional Catholic” and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, acting as Ye’s wannabe Salacious Crumb. If you don’t know who Fuentes is, congratulations, you have a life. If you actually want to know, just do a Google search on the phrase WHERE THE FUCK IS YOUR CHIN? Anyway, Kanye has been erratic for quite some time, as anybody who follows hip-hop could tell you, but he really started acting crazy – by Kanye standards – when he twitted that he was going to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”. Except DEFCON is an abbreviation and he actually spelled it ‘death’. You would think a black man would know how to spell DEF. Whatever. It got to where Ye and Fuentes appeared on Alex Jones’ show (with Ye wearing full-body clothing and a full mask with zip holes for the eyes, apparently to keep TheJews from injecting him with nanotech) and everyone thought, “Wow, I hope Alex Jones can talk some sense into this guy.”
Ye, like Trump, was also supported by Elon Musk at Twitter at least until Ye said he would allow the banned Alex Jones to post from his account, posted a swastika inside a Star of David, and when threatened by Musk, posted his “final tweet” as a picture of Musk getting hosed down at the beach. (‘I love free speech so much, I’m letting Q people and racists back!’ ‘Hey boss, Kanye posted a pic of you looking whiter than a night light.’ ‘Ban his ass.’) Not that Elon gave up on trying to help Trump: This last week he made an arrangement with Gonzo journalist Matt Taibbi to release “The Twitter Files” – on Twitter – being a set of internal communications where Twitter staff debated whether to release emails from Hunter Biden’s pilfered laptop three weeks before the 2020 election. They eventually decided against doing so, but without consulting then-head and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who now calls their decision a mistake. The staff had also consulted left-wing free speech advocate Congressman Ro Khanna (D.-California) who recommended against killing the story.
And you know where this is going. In order to Make America Goonish And Garish Again, Trump committed his compound fuckup. Posting on his Truf Censhal platform, he said, “So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
But here is the crux of the issue that lit the fuse on Trump’s tampon: “The Biden campaign asked Twitter to review five tweets, which were later deleted. Taibbi did not disclose the content of the Biden campaign requests, presenting only their URLs; …four tweets contained nude photos and videos of Hunter Biden, which violate Twitter policy and California law as revenge porn.” Again, the joke to me is that Twitter HAS a policy. Based on history, especially now, I thought anybody could post snuff films and prolapse porn and it’s all good.
But apparently Hunter Biden’s penis doesn’t impress most Americans as much as it impresses Republicans. Especially when the main story of this became not an alleged collusion to keep the Biden family from being smeared, but the owner of the Republican Party demanding to terminate the Constitution, in so doing violating his previous oath and creating incriminating evidence in any case against him for the January 6 riot.
Now, the fact that a lot of this mishegoss involved James Baker, a Twitter legal counsel who was also part of James Comey’s FBI investigation into Trump caused a lot of the Right to think, “Oh, praise Jesus, we’ve finally got something on these Demonrats.” But Tuesday the Trump Organization tax fraud trial in New York returned 17 charges as 17 guilty verdicts. And while Trump himself was not personally indicted, suddenly Hunter Biden and his Dad didn’t seem so crooked and evil anymore.
All of which – and it’s a lot, even for this guy – have caused the political-media complex to think that Trump is at his weakest moment, and that if there was ever a time for the Republican Party to get rid of him, it’s now.
HaHaHa.
No.
Sure the smart Republicans are saying they should get rid of Trump. The smart people have known that Trump is bad news for years. The smart people aren’t the ones running the Republican Party. The Party isn’t run by heartless manipulators like Mitch McConnell and Rupert Murdoch. It isn’t run by functionaries like Paul Ryan or Kevin McCarthy. It’s run by people like Lauren “Bubblehead” Boebert and Matt “Morrissey Called, He Wants His Hairstyle Back” Gaetz. People who either are as dumb and venal as they seem or are putting on an act to appeal to voters who are even worse.
They dismiss the critiques of liberals, “liberal” apparently being anybody who thinks that a mob coup is illegal. They say it all comes down to “Orange Man Bad.” Well, YES. Orange Man Bad. Also: White slavery bad. Leprosy bad. Cancer bad. Why are we debating the given? The problem is not Orange Man Bad, the problem is that the modern Republican Party could defend and support cancer as long as cancer helped them ban abortion.
Trump’s sorta like Hitler. Except Hitler liked dogs. And he served in the military. And he didn’t cheat on his girlfriend.
Now you may be going, “No, No. Stop. Why are you acting like Trump is worse than Hitler? Hitler was Hitler.” Exactly. I’m saying, if the Trumpniks want to sell my country to some idiot clownboy who’s not even AS good as Hitler, maybe we should cut the Germans some slack.
Maybe we should quit thinking America is “exceptional” and admit we were just lucky.
Maybe, just as people of Russian and Chinese and German ethnicity can move to this country and adopt that can-do, optimistic, individualist American spirit, so it is possible for Americans to adopt the sullen, collectivist, Sklavmoral mindset of Russians or Nazi-era Germans, if the local culture changes enough.
Trump might be a loathsome mass of all potential human vices, congealed into something resembling a humanoid form, but if one were to judge from his positions prior to getting into politics, you could see why some made the case that he could be a good leader. He didn’t always agree with Republican orthodoxy and he clearly didn’t care about following the party’s internal political correctness. Unfortunately what seemed like pragmatism was simply not having a moral core beyond “anything that gets me what I want is good”.
Even more unfortunately, that description also fits most of the people who worship Trump, including all the Good Christians (TM) who were amazingly eager to discard their decorum and moralism as long as government trampled over all that procedural stuff that conservatives used to favor. Like, the Constitution.
For all the huffing and handwringing in the media and the Republican Party about Trump palling around with terrorists and wanting to get rid of the Constitution, they really shouldn’t be acting so surprised. And both the Republican establishment and the liberal media should quit acting like this is gonna make a difference. You notice that for the last six years, Trump has always been pushing it. The “good” Republicans and establishment people (including people in his own inner circle) have always tried to pull him back towards respectability. That never works. He always pulls them further and further into the slime. Because he’s been betting that they need him more than he needs them, and so far, that bluff has not been called.
Because if it is, Trump can always take his ball and go home, that “ball” being his voter base. And for both moral and long-term practical reasons, the Republican Party really should cut him off and make it clear that they don’t want to have the kind of people that Trump encourages in the Party. But the implication there is that without those people, they won’t even be as competitive in national elections as they are now, cause this is the base they’ve been cultivating for years before him. He simply said the sort of stuff they were saying to themselves and wouldn’t admit cause that would make them unpopular with the rest of the country. Trump showed them they didn’t have to care about that. He gave the base the freedom to be their worst selves. He gave the base the freedom to be … base.
As I say, it’s horrible enough that these guys emulate the Nazis, but the problem is they’re so BAD at it.
Not even the original Nazis. I mean, back in the ’70s, the ACLU took flak because they defended the right of Illinois Nazis to protest in a Jewish neighborhood in Skokie. Hey, remember when that sort of thing WASN’T tolerated by an establishment political party? But this is them:
Look at these guys. Clean-cut, uniformed, capable of marching in formation, and I can’t see from here, but the slogans they’re carrying are probably grammatically correct.
Now think of the guys who stormed the Capitol. Fat, slovenly, unshaven and just bringing whatever odd gear they had to the riot like it was a BYOB (Bring Your Own Bombs).
I’m just saying, our standards for fascism have really gone downhill.
I mean, if Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and their tanks had the little metal testicles dangling off the back, that would be the Republican Party right now.
Again, Trump IS the base and the base IS Trump. Who in the Republican political class is more like the Republican Party than Trump? Even if they trained to walk with their knuckles at waist level and learned how to talk English gooder, they wouldn’t mean it. And the more civilized Republicans are no longer able to cover for them, because the agenda has been laid bare. And Democrats have been stewing over all those Supreme Court appointees mouthing “settled law” so many times, even they might have figured out they should quit trusting conservatives.
So why NOT keep supporting Trump? The alternative would be to… actually come up with common-sense, centrist and right-wing ideas that would appeal to the general public. But then they’d have to admit the general public into the movement, and then they would no longer have the freedom to be their worst selves. If they could appeal to the wider public, they wouldn’t be who they are.
So for the next two years (at least) they’re going to keep goosestepping behind Trump so he can Make America Gallant And Goofus Again. Reagan would not have recognized this party, but Barry Goldwater would have. He was the one who said “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.” But in a lesser-known quote on similar lines, he said: “Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism. Fellow Republicans, it is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public, which enforce such conformity and inflict such despotism. It is the cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people.”
But this party seems to think that’s commie wokeness or whatever their influencers have told them to hate this week.
It continues to marginalize conservatives and libertarians like myself, who stupidly believed that the Right was about creating a limited constitutional republic and free-market economy, as opposed to trolling the libs and giving more power to the already privileged because one identifies with them as opposed to your fellow working stiffs. Cause apparently the toadies and trolls are more numerous than the liberty caucus, or at least more motivated.
Unfortunately for them, the last election, which should have been the best opportunity for Republicans to make gains against a flawed and unpopular Biden Administration, demonstrated that this approach isn’t going to work with the voting public, even with all the state and federal rules in their favor. The only route left is another coup. In which case, they have to hope that their militia are not as incompetent as their lawyers and legislators have proven to be. But you know what they say: “A failed coup that isn’t punished isn’t a failure, it’s just a rehearsal.”
So step up, Republicans, it’s time to Make America Greedy And Gullible Again!
Or is that Make America Gluttonous And Grabby Again?
We’re still working this out.