Tuesday, September 14, 2021

Stars In Alignment

In the Venn Diagram of people who think voting is useless (as Trump keeps telling them) and those who think the vaccine is useless/unnecessary/dangerous/"you can't tell me what to do!" (but I'm for law 'n' order!), the two circles are so coterminous as to be contiguous and one. And this is a problem for democracy because....? Yes, that looks bad. But the courts are not going to uphold insane claims about vote fraud based solely on "The wrong guy won!" And the more the GOP diminishes their ability to win public office, and diminishes their voting base by simply encouraging them to kill themselves off, the less viable the GOP becomes as a political party.

I mean, we've had more than two political parties at a time in America, and the GOP hasn't been around since the ratification of the Constitution.  The Democratic party has, actually.  Which is an interesting history lesson in itself.  The GOP came into existence about the time Lincoln ran on their ticket (that's not entirely and precisely historically accurate, but good enough for highway work).  Yes, the two parties have flipped places since then, but which party is avidly encouraging its most rabid adherents to die in the name of political ideology, and which party is also encouraging its members not to even bother to vote because they can't win?

Is their plan, then, violent overthrow of the government?  Even Jan. 6th never got that far.  Not finding any Congresspersons to harass or terrify or put on their cameras, the invaders all got bored and left.  And now they're whining about ankle bracelets and prison food.  This is the "existential" threat to democracy?

I sort of feel like the nurses at the Houston hospital this weekend, listening to the attendees at Dan Crenshaw's "youth summit" complaining about wearing masks. 

"It's pathetic," one nurse from Boston told the newspaper. "They are complaining about having their freedoms taken away. But the people in that room clearly don't know real suffering."

To those clowns wearing a mask is the end of this land of liberty.  Do they represent a threat to American democracy?  Hell, the KKK was more dangerous; the John Birch Society more of a threat (they got Goldwater nominated, didn't they?)  I think most of the pundits on the intertoobs don't know what real threats to governance are.

I don't really want them to find out.  I just wish they'd stop trying to out-Cassandra each other.  It's getting tedious.

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1 comment:

  1. rustypickup7:01 PM

    From now on? The hard core right has been convinced the Democrats are cheating with elections for long time. This goes at least back to Newt and the message he pushed that no Democratic government is ever legitimate, it probably goes farther but I wasn't politically aware enough before that time to know. A dozen years ago, an extremely conservative coworker explained to me how the Democrats had stolen every presidential election, he was obsessed with JFK's election. He was very active on conservative politics and it just wasn't possible that people could have voted in enough numbers to elect Democrats (He even knew my politics while telling me this). Voter suppression was entirely justified to counter the ongoing cheating of Democrats, unions and other groups he opposed. These elements of anti-democracy ideology have been circulating in the open on the right for a long time, it's just now the press bothered to notice.

    On retirement he and his wife moved to outside Waco. They had absolutely no connections there (the closest family is their daughter in Los Alamos NM), but having grown up and lived in California, and then upstate NY, they wanted a place that was a better "cultural fit". I hope it has worked out for them (I actually liked him, as long as we stayed away from politics).

    All that said, I am not worried about a take over of the country. Other than the one to be imposed by the six conservative members of the Supreme Court.

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