Civil Commotion

Opinion: The GOP is a refuge for bigots and wackos https://t.co/3OloWRArNy

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 20, 2020

“… refuge for bigots and wackos” Ain’t that the truth.

Try to imagine Dwight Eisenhower (Interstate Highway System), Richard Nixon (China opening), Ronald Reagan (“Tear down this wall!”), George H.W. Bush (Americans With Disabilities Act), or George W. Bush (compassionate conservatism) sitting down to lunch with The Donald (“Hoax!”}. It couldn’t happen. I can recall dinner with a much-younger friend (also raised in a conservative household) 10-years ago, and wondering if the reason that I was uncomfortable with the direction I saw the party going was that I was getting older; maybe I just wasn’t keeping up? I decided that I hadn’t left the GOP, but that the GOP had left me — even as I wondered if vanity had the upper hand in that judgment.

No. I was right. The GOP I grew-up with ceased to exist a long time ago.

“Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t.”

Barack Obama

And that, by a bunch, is the best one-sentence assessment and dismissal of the man that will ever be written.

Early polling indicates that Loomer is on track for a stomping in November, so it appears unlikely that this loony will be going to Congress. But how has the GOP gotten so deranged that a plain nutjob like this can be a credible candidate in the first place? Granted, “movement conservatism” has been decadent and reactionary from the get-go, and the evangelicals are nuts, but … still; are there no countervailing sane people in the base?

It’s the same thing that has happened to the Southern Baptists, I guess: The whackjobs concentrated as the sane people left.

You cannot reason with, or even have a sane conversation with, people this ridiculous. There is nothing to do but put them as far away from your life as possible so that they can’t busybody their ignorance into the middle of it.

Trump Floats Invalidating Election Over
Mail-In Voting, Says Election May Have
to Be Held Again

For 3-years I’ve been telling anybody who would listen that Trump isn’t going to leave office gracefully if he loses the election in November, and it becomes clearer by the day that, indeed, he intends to stay win-or-lose.

Only — Only. — an epochal, ruinous, annihilating defeat will put Trump out of office; less, and his enabling Republican whores can be counted upon to hem-and-haw and pussyfoot around and let him get away with it.

“This is the most important election of our lifetime” … it’s such a tedious cliché. But this time it’s true. The presidency is in the hands of an incompetent, unintelligent, thoroughly amoral authoritarian who is deeply hostile to American ideals — so far as he is even aware of them, I mean. There is no more important business before the country than putting Trump out of office.