With their gerrymanders now all but complete in the red states, which they expect to give them 15-20 Republican winners just in the new districts, the Republicans feel emboldened and now act like wolves are circling the hen house.
I don't see Democrats acting like they understand the gravity of the situation and what's required to stop it. I don't think we're prepared for what comes next.
We have to face that the Gosars and the rest of the radicals are ready and prepared to spill blood. Their base is primed to believe that is acceptable, asking at GOP rallies “When do we get to use the guns?” That is what they want. And that's what needs to be stopped. This isn't just about killing AOC or Biden.
Today in Congress, the way they reacted to the censure of Gosar, the Republicans showed they are ready to kill us.
This is not hyperbole. They must be stopped.
This past weekend, General Michael Flynn (who a good friend who was in a position to know hm says he really is crazy) said: “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.”
And the crowd erupted in cheers.
The Republican Party, a collection of cranks, crooks, clowns, bigots, and deranged conspiracy theorists, and its entire leadership from the county committees to Congress is in thrall to a disgraced, defeated, one-term president, who is reduced to issuing increasingly crazed screeds from his exile in Mar-a-Lago.
Every day we learn more about Republican complicity in the events of Jan. 6 and their attempts to whitewash an attempted coup.
The GOP *is* the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz and Louie Gohmert. And the guys at meeting asking “when do we get to use the guns?”
And despite all of that….
The GOP has opened a massive lead in the polls and appears poised to win landslide victories in next year’s mid-terms.
So now, this morning, Democrats need to ask themselves an urgent question: Why can’t we beat these fucking scumbag traitors?
There are obvious answers, including inflation, Afghanistan, supply chain problems, rising crime, problems at the border, the ongoing pandemic, wokeness, and a certain tone deafness towards the public’s concerns. All of them magnified by the otherwise-unemployables of the D.C. Press Corpse. The result is Biden’s “fall from grace.”
Joe Biden was elected to restore a sense of “normalcy.” But these are not normal times, and perhaps the reality is that a normal approach to politics in profoundly abnormal times is a formula for political disaster.
Look at all the actual good news: they announced the economy actually generated 625,000 jobs over the summer that were undercounted; add those to the numbers that were reported, and the employment picture is amazing: the unemployment rate is now around 4.3 percent and expected to be under four percent by New Year’s. That’s almost as good as it was on New Year’s Eve 2019, in The Time Before.
The bipartisan infrastructure bill is law, and localities are already announcing that the first action will be taken on projects that can now proceed because of this as soon as next spring.
Today they announced that - in one week!!! - 2.5 million children between 5-12 have been given their first shots of the COVID vaccines. That’s TEN PERCENT of children who are eligible, vaccinated in less than a week!
The supply chain backlog has seen a 30 percent reduction in containers sitting more than nine days at the Port of Los Angeles in the past three weeks. That may not be a solution, but it does qualify as a damn good start.
President Biden has demonstrated that at least he knows how to go around the country and tell people all the good news.
And the Republicans look at their successful gerrymanders and Kevin McCarthy predicts they will take 60 seats a year from now.
The result is a dramatic disconnect in our politics.
Consider this week’s split screen: President Biden signs the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, hoping that the legislation will help jump-start his political recovery while Trump master-mind Steve Bannon promises “the misdemeanor from hell for Biden, Pelosi and Schumer.” He’s not kidding.
The Democrats would like to imagine the first scene will drive the political narrative. But Bannon knows the reality. "The Democrats don't matter,” he once explained. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit." Which has been done and continues right this moment.
The Press Corpse and their media cycle are easily commandeered by misinformation, innuendo, and outrageous content - they like it, because it drives clicks!. The norms that used to govern journalism no longer hold force and the political economy of the media makes it very hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories.
This manufactured nihilism is the central problem for the loose coalition of pro-democracy forces, who all imagined the post-Trump era would involve a return to the normal rules of politics.
The zone has been flooded with shit, and there is no easy way out.
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I don't think this country can recover from this disaster from the Republiscum party. We are watching democracy's agonal breathing, with the (as you so accurately describe it) the Press Corpse sitting on its chest.
The truth of today’s newsletter make me want to throw up.