The short term goal is to beat Trump, but we also have to remove as many Republicans from the Senate & House as well. There is no evidence the GOP and the conservative movement will moderate. Just the opposite. They are now an extremist, weaponized minority against the majority.
— Wajahat "Wears a Mask Because of a Pandemic" Ali (@WajahatAli) September 1, 2020
Yes. #AnnihilateTheGOP
What’s to say? Wal*Mart has every right on earth to set conditions for admission to its stores, provided they are generally applicable and don’t stigmatize a specific group (e.g., “No Negroes allowed”). I know people, though, just like this. They believe Trump’s insistence that the pandemic is a “hoax,” that they are freedom-fighters for refusing to exercise common-sense care. None — at least those of my acquaintance, anyway — are able to explain how liberal-communist-BLM-anarchist-hoaxsters benefit, how this furthers their supposed aim of destroying the Good Ol’ U.S. of A.
A huge part of Trump’s base, remember, believes in talking snakes; I suspect that answering the question taxes their abilities.
A Washington Post feature takes notice of something that’s been obvious for a long time: Our Invisible Friend is an ever-more-feeble retiree.
In the United States, one of the most consequential cultural changes of our time may be the swift and seemingly accelerating decline of religious commitment.
[ … ]
When asked to express the importance of God in their lives on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “not at all important,” and 10 being “very important,” Americans rated Him at an average of 4.6 in 2017 — down from 8.2 in just over a decade, according to an excerpt of Inglehart’s book, “Religion’s Sudden Decline,” in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.
A number of reasons are offered, some more convincing than others and all of them familiar to people acquainted with the issues. None of them, in my estimation, get it quite right. Really, at least with respect to the Abrahamic religions, it’s pretty simple.
Only a moron believes that the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac (or, Ishmael, in Islam), and that its interruption in the very nick-of-time by an angel, is true. And the universe of people who worship the Invisible Friend who imposed such a cruel test is comprised exclusively of people with a grave character problem. Honestly, I have wondered from time-to-time through the years: Is it really not obvious to Jews, Christians, and Muslims that, if they actually believe that story, they worship a psychopath? Which leads to …
The Abrahamic faiths have never, ever, been able anywhere, to establish themselves without violence. Because …
They are degrading, deeply anti-life religions. There is no nice way to say it: To celebrate Abraham’s near-slaughter of a longed-for son is perverse and contrary to the most deeply-rooted impulses of life itself. On this point, as so much else, Christopher Hitchens gets it exactly right:
As I have said often through the years, most people have too much sense and decency to be good Christians; it’s the ones who don’t that you’ve got to keep an eye on. And the self-loathing True Believers who go for that death-wish theology are, and always have been, a minority. When they controlled the police powers of governance they could make it unseemly or even dangerous to disagree; with the rise of formally-secular states with the American Revolution, their decline became inevitable.
And so much for that.
As a child of God, I choose with my will to take authority over the weather. And I declare there will be no destruction in any way from Marco or from Laura. We are over the weather, not under the weather. Therefore, we command the pressure in both of the storms — we command the pressure in Marco and the pressure in Laura to begin to rise, rise, rise! We command the storms to be dissipated in Jesus’ name. We do not want you to grow. We do not want any destruction from you!
I guess we all know how that worked out.
In their [QAnon] insane mythology Trump is the god, supposedly battling against a vast “deep state” conspiracy of Satan worshippers, engaged in child sex trafficking and even baby eating. His election defeat, accompanied by his flagrant incitements, will send these already deranged people way over the edge. With a very different sort of March on Washington.
This is our coming Armageddon. Ever since the Civil War the idea of an American political settlement through violence would have seemed inconceivable. No longer. What would this do to our democratic way of life? A democratic culture is one in which issues are decided by debate, with acceptance of pluralism, respecting the legitimate role of people who are different and have divergent opinions. Even accepting political defeat. With rule of law — not guns.
That is something worth fighting for. If attacked by people with guns, it must be defended. One might expect law enforcement and the military to do so. I doubt the military would be party to any sort of coup. But the traitor-in-chief being commander-in-chief is a wild card. We’ve already had a foretaste with his deployment of goon squads in Portland. And Trump is the kind of person who, if he can’t get his way, will try to burn the place down.
Since I speculated soon after Trump assumed office that he would never leave office gracefully, and it’s easy to imagine his yahoo cultists rallying to an attempted putsch, it gladdens me to know that others are alert to the danger.
Famously, in the final days of the Nixon administration, Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger acted to undermine Nixon’s ability to mobilize troops to defend his increasing-tenuous grip on office. Are there similarly-courageous actors in contemporary D.C.? Not on the civilian side; there’s nobody there but Trump lackeys. We can probably count on the professional military yet, but it’s a national disgrace that our defenses are so thin.
