Remember all those endless jokes about how millennials are all spoiled and whiny because instead of being told “You lose!” they get participation trophies (several people have said this is not a thing that happens much, despite the stereotype). Republicans seem to have embraced it. They can’t conceive that millions of them voted and didn’t get the presidency back in their (frequently) racist and misogynist hands. That can’t be right.
Unfortunately, as this detailed piece on the Arizona recount points out, millions of whiny right-wing babies is not a funny thing. Officials who stand by the facts — Joe Biden won the White House — are being threatened. All over the country, Trump worshippers are demanding that officials fix things so Trump wins. Sure, they say they just want a serious look, but no facts are going to convince them. It’s like the Obama birther racists; the two main birther groups were on the record during his administration saying that producing the original birth certificate wouldn’t prove anything. One wanted more documentation, the other demanded witnesses; if Obama had delivered, they’d still have refused to believe it.
Refusing to accept Obama was legally qualified to be president was bad; refusing to believe Biden was even really elected was worse. The conviction America has been stolen from its rightful white, male Christian rulers isn’t a new thing but it’s metastized into something more extreme. Trump’s worshipper will never accept a Democratic president is legitimate and as Sedition Day showed, they feel justified in returning him to office by any means necessary. It’s possible they’ll do the same for Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis or whoever eventually replaces Ex-President Man Baby; the Republican groundwork in Georgia and other states allowing them to overrule the electors mean they can be elected even if they don’t win the electoral college.
I have no idea how we get out of this mess. I don’t know if anyone does. Or when we have congressional reps lying and saying there have been no Trump virus cases in Texas since they ended the mask mandate. Of course, it helps we have lying homophobe Matt Staver spreading lies of a nonexistent vaccine conspiracy — and telling suckers to pay him to fight it.
“If Trump has a political philosophy, one of its main tenets is toxic masculinity — the use of menace and swagger to cover his mental and moral impotence.” — Michael Gerson, writing about Trump’s enthusiasm for calling down violence on his supporters. This will not end well either, especially given the Republicans are now rageaholics. Fred Clark suggests part of the problem is the temptation to demonize your enemies so you can feel virtuous and heroic, something everyone from C.S. Lewis to Nietzsche has warned against.
As Paul Campos says, “Our modern reactionaries are the heirs to the royalists, the priests, the lords of the countryside and of capital, and everybody else who has always at bottom despised the notion of egalitarianism, and worships at the altar of hierarchy, whether ruled over by God or Darwin or whatever other metaphysical justification may be at hand to maintain the most evil aspects of the status quo.”
In other news, the war in Israel shows Jared Kushner no more brought peace to the Middle East than he’s succeeded at anything else. In fairness, Trump’s administration was neither the first nor the last to fail to slice through that Gordian knot; however, given some Trump cultists told me bringing peace proved how awesome Trump was, let it be noted … he wasn’t.
Spying on journalists or American citizens in general isn’t new either. Trump’s Justice Department spying on a reporter the administration didn’t like still isn’t a good thing.
And the grift continues: despite all the money Trump gets as an ex-president, he’s still charging rent to the Secret Service (Biden did that with a cottage in Delaware but Trump’s sucking down several times more). Of course he’s not the only grifter. Self-proclaimed prophet Hank Kunneman has books and prophesy swag to sell so even though his prophecies of Trump’s victory have failed, he says nobody can say he’s a false prophet. And if you disrespect him, God might curse you with leprosy! Well, Mr. Kunneman, I’m disrespecting you now …
Republicans love to talk about how they support the troops. But then we get Ted Cruz favorably comparing Russia’s soldiers to an American female soldier raised by two mothers.
Fraser Sherman's Blog 