Month: December 2020

Whatever else one might say about David Frum’s political history, he called it in The Atlantic in January 2018. Never Trumper Bill Kristol tipped his fedora to Frum’s prescience a week after last month’s election:

"If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”—David Frum

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) November 10, 2020

Republicans in November lined up behind Donald Trump, the hair-sprayed loser of the presidential race, and behind the stolen election narrative he had constructed months earlier in case what happened happened. Whatever flag-waving patriotic pretensions the Republican base put on while singing with misty eyes Lee Greenwood’s anthem, it always felt synthetic. Frum knew it. Kristol too. So long as it secured Republicans in power and them their slots on “Meet The Press,” that was fine. Let the rabble dance. So what?

But for decades what bloggers once called the Mighty Wurlitzer of conservative media had addicted the base to daily hits of Two Minutes Hate. With Rush Limbaugh’s ascendance, the two minutes stretched to three hours. With the rise of imitators and Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid TV empire, stoking grievance became a 24-hour, profit-making enterprise. No longer the Republican Party’s media arm, conservative media made the Republican Party its legislative arm. So long as Republicans won, oligarchs got their legislation, and right-wing pundits and media barons got rich, so what?

Then in 2008 a charismatic Black Democrat won the presidency for eight years. The T-party revolution made it abundantly clear the flag-wavers’ allegiance was not to America as an ideal, but to a particular formulation that kept their tribe firmly in control, as God intended. Republicans in 2010 conspired to (and did) gain control of federal and state redistricting in enough states to keep Democrats at an electoral disadvantage for the next ten years.

Backlash to Barack Obama paved the way for Donald Trump and his disastrous non-management of the COVID-19 pandemic. The backlash to a quarter million Americans dead (and perhaps hundreds of thousands more to come) led to Trump’s reelection loss last month. But Trump ginned up a conspiracy theory that he could only lose if Democrats stole the election. His cultish followers and well over half the Republican Party still believe the liar. This, despite his lawyers’ allegations of massive fraud being laughed out of court over 50 times since Nov. 3.

Now the American republic has all gone sideways, as Frum warned. Conservatives played with fire. Now that fire like COVID-19 rages out of control. They have rejected democracy.

House Republicans — 106 of them — signed on to a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of a Texas initiative to overturn election results in swing states Trump lost: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Michigan. Eighteen states forming a kind of New Confederacy have joined the overturn effort spearheaded by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, indicted in 2015 on securities charges. Paxton pleaded guilty and awaits trial. No doubt he expects a presidential pardon for his troubles.

No doubt many Republican officials believe there is no political downside to backing a case they think destined to fail anyway. David Graham writes in The Atlantic this morning, “The case seems to face very, very long odds, though it takes only five members of the Court to turn the preposterous into precedent. Even if the case fails, though, these Republicans have set a course of being willing to oppose the results of elections simply because they don’t like them. That is by definition antidemocratic.” That is the preposterous precedent being set. The courts are extras in this tragedy.

NBC News reports on the response from other states:

More than two dozen states filed motions with the Supreme Court on Thursday opposing Texas’ bid to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden’s wins in four battleground states, a long-shot legal move that Pennsylvania blasted as a “seditious abuse of the judicial process.”

Throughout Trump’s effort to thwart popular sovereignty, legal pundits have pooh-poohed the Trump team’s clownish legal efforts as doomed to fail. “Dangerous garbage, but garbage,” as Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen put it.

Anti-maskers dismiss COVID-19 in similar fashion. If they caught the virus, it would be mild, like the flu (superior genes?), but hardly life-threatening as skittish Democrats claim. The dead must have had underlying medical conditions.

And what of the country’s underlying conditions? With our people and economic foundations weakened by a deadly pandemic, and with the republic’s supporting norms knocked out from under it one by one over the last decade-plus, dismissing Trump’s public coup feels like whistling past the graveyard.

Winning the election or his legal cases is not Trump’s goal. Replacing the republic with autocracy is. Half the Republican House caucus just enlisted.

It is a fascist version of the camel’s nose and the tent. With each failed court case, they push it just an inch more, just another inch more, then another. Wise men snicker at the comedy of it and think there’s no way that camel is really getting inside the tent. Then, voila!

And so your German Shepherd sneaks onto the couch when you are watching TV.

What is left of the United States of America beside the 2nd Amend to which faux Real Americans™ of the New Confederacy “bear true faith and allegiance”?

Everything else these autocrats have repudiated.

Philip Bump of the Washington Post says that the marketplace for fantasy is reshaping conservative media, just like it reshaped conservative politics:

With the clarity of retrospect, one can see how Fox News got into its current predicament. For the duration of President Trump’s time in office — and, of course, well before that — the network tried to find a middle ground between establishment Republican reality and the virulent right-wing rhetoric bubbling on social media and in conservative blogs. It’s a somewhat tricky dance, but it’s generally feasible. There’s usually enough gray area around reality to both cover what happened with one eyebrow raised and to allow the audience-generating “opinion” folks in the evenings to run without leashes. There’s usually a way to provide something palatable to both those who want actual news presented through a conservative lens and those who simply want politics-based soap operas offered with a veneer of authenticity.

He goes on to show how Trump made it into a loyalty test as he does with everything,

Over the past few years, Fox News has had two challengers nipping at its heels: One America News and Newsmax. The former is a pro-Trump video channel offered with a cable-news-like aesthetic. The latter is an outgrowth of a right-wing website that similarly couches fervently pro-Trump coverage within a newsy package. Each made a deliberate calculation last month: It was more useful to deny Trump’s loss than to accept it. So viewers of either channel are repeatedly told that the settled issue is not settled and that Trump’s baseless and debunked claims about fraud are substantial and awaiting a court’s verdict.

Trump noticed this and began hyping the Fox alternatives to his millions of Twitter followers. His followers listened, with Newsmax and OAN gaining viewers at Fox News’s expense, according to a recent poll. On Monday, something once unthinkable happened: Newsmax’s 7 p.m. program with anchor Greg Kelly got more viewers in the key marketing demographic than Fox News’s show in the same time slot.

Cable news ratings have been an obsession of Trump’s for years, including while he’s been president. He’s tweeted about ratings more than 140 times as president, often to hail how well Fox News was doing against CNN or MSNBC, its hated rivals. He used ratings variations as a cudgel, demanding that Fox News show more fealty to his worldview or pay the consequences.

“Don’t know why [Fox News] wants to be more like” its competitors, he tweeted last December. “They’ll all die together as other outlets take their place. Only pro Trump Fox shows do well. Rest are nothing. How’s Shep doing?” — a reference to Shepard Smith, one of Fox News’s few obviously objective anchors who eventually left the network.

At the time, this seemed like little more than an effort to cow Fox News into being even more obsequious. But there’s an obvious kernel of truth to what Trump was arguing: Fealty to Trump at the expense of objectivity and truth is, in fact, one strategy for success. It made Trump himself successful, after all, along with Fox opinion hosts who, for months on end, were dominating their rivals.

But Republicans are moving over to the rivals and suddenly CNN is winning in the ratings war. Maybe that’s how it’s going to be with Fox trying lameley to pretend it still has some credibility while the other networks just careen off into Lala land.

That’s not a certainty, of course. One can vacuum up viewers by telling them what they want to hear, clearly, but that doesn’t make a business successful. Are advertisers going to want to invest in a network that spreads conspiracy theories and debunked claims with the wantonness of OAN? Will OAN and Newsmax try to moderate their choir-preaching to expand their audiences and appeal to people beyond die-hards like My Pillow?

Trump doesn’t really care about any of this, of course. He cares about promoting his worldview and rhetoric without a filter and leveraging misinformation to his benefit. He doesn’t care if there’s a bizarre cult of people who believe that prominent people are involved in child-sex trafficking, as long as they support him personally. What matters is Trump, followed by what Trump wants, followed, as needed, by reality.

But this is a problem. It is a problem that Fox News viewers are abandoning the network for a ship unmoored to reality. It is a problem that, as a result, Fox News seems to be moving more in that direction, including by expanding the footprint of its opinion hosts like Tucker Carlson. Carlson last month told his audience that his “reporting and analysis” would soon more fully permeate the network, a prediction that seems to be coming to fruition.

It is a problem that surreality is being presented as a valid contrast to reality, including by the president of the United States. On Wednesday morning, Trump complained about news coverage of the Supreme Court declining to throw out the results of the vote in Pennsylvania.

“How can you have a presidency when a vast majority think the election was RIGGED?” Trump asked on Twitter.

It’s a good question and one that doesn’t depend on the fact that there is no credible evidence at all that the election was rigged in any substantive way. How can you have a presidency — a country — when a large part of the population (though hardly the “vast majority”) declines to accept obvious realities? When media outlets leverage the desire for nonsense by elevating more nonsense? When there are robust market forces pushing money and votes and attention away from what’s objectively happening?

I guess we’ll see.

I guess we will. And I guess we’ll also see how long Fox can hold out from going completely QAnon 24/7.

My question is just how many of these people really believe what they are saying and doing or whether it’s all an elaborate game to make money or own the libs. Or maybe just have fun. I honestly don’t know. And maybe it doesn’t matter. What’s happening is dangerous regardless of whether or not they really believe what they are doing.

President Trump is a corrupt imbecile. And Democrats should not allow Republicans to project his slime on to them, which is what they are attempting to do.

Here is some of the detail from CREW:

As a candidate for president, Donald Trump used to promise cheering crowds at stop after stop on the campaign trail that if he won the election he would be too busy to play golf or visit his properties. “I love golf,” Trump told supporters in Portsmouth, N.H., in February 2016, “But if I were in the White House, I don’t think I’d ever see Turnberry again. I don’t think I’d ever see Doral again — I own Doral in Miami. I don’t think I’d ever see any of the places that I have… I just want to stay in the White House and work my ass off, make great deals.” 

To the contrary, President Trump has found time to visit his properties hundreds of times while in office, with time left over to lavish them with praise in official remarks, and to reward his paying customers with privileged access to and positions in his administration. For nearly four years now, President Trump has made it abundantly clear that any claim of separation from his business was a lie, and coupled with his unprecedented decision not to divest his business empire before entering office, this empty promise has led to some of the most egregious examples of presidential corruption and conflicts of interest ever raised by a modern president.

Since day one, CREW has been tracking President Trump’s conflicts of interest, showing how the line between the Trump Organization and the Trump administration has blurred so much that it is unclear where President Trump’s public responsibilities end and his private financial interests begin. Unlike any other modern president, Trump has forced the American people to ask if the decisions and policies his administration is implementing are because they’re the best policies for the nation, or because they personally benefit him — either by helping his businesses directly or the special interests spending money there.

It goes on. And on….

He is the most corrupt president in history. And we cannot let this go. The GOP is going to attempt to project all this on to the Democrats as they have done before. It’s how they build “they all do it” cynicism in the system that gives their real crooks a pass.

I’m bookmarking this piece and I suggest you do it too. You’re going to need it for when Republicans and the media try to tell you that Biden and his family are criminals who should be locked up.

Four years ago yesterday, the Washington Post published an article with the following headline:

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”How the Russian hackers got into the DNC’s network

The Obama administration has been debating for months how to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions, with White House officials concerned about escalating tensions with Moscow and being accused of trying to boost Clinton’s campaign.

In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present.

The Trump transition team dismissed the findings in a short statement issued Friday evening. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again,’ ” the statement read.

“Time to move on and make America great again …” Sigh.

There has been a lot of water under the bridge since then. And the right and many anti-anti Trump types have said all that was overblown and the Deep State was wrong to pursue it etc. etc. The government should not have investigated their suspicions that Trump had worked with a foreign country to cheat in his election. They went too far.

But let’s not forget that it was just two years later that Trump was leveraging military equipment with an ally to get them to investigate his Joe Biden, an obvious abuse of power for which he was impeached. Again, a bridge too far to think that Trump was doing something so nefarious to cheat in his election.

And here we are four years later with Trump trying desperately to get his fellow Republicans to use whatever power they have to once again help him cheat in the election. This latest gambit with the 17 state Attorneys General and the aiding and abetting of the Republicans in congress has taken it up a notch.

No he hasn’t declared martial law and had the military force a new election as Michael Flynn and others are pushing. Yet. But what he’s already done is demonstrate over and over and over again that he is more than willing to take the office by any means necessary.

It would appear in retrospect that the Deep States suspicions were well founded. After all, he’s been repeatedly proving that he is a cheater ever since then.

Disgusting:

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday that U.S. sanctions are making it difficult for Iran to purchase medicine and health supplies from abroad, including COVID-19 vaccines needed to contain the worst outbreak in the Middle East.

President Donald Trump’s administration has imposed crippling sanctions on Iran’s banking sector and its vital oil and gas industry since unilaterally withdrawing the U.S. from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers in 2018.

While the United States insists that medicines and humanitarian goods are exempt from sanctions, restrictions on trade have made many banks and companies across the world hesitant to do business with Iran, fearing punitive measures from Washington. The country is also cut off from the international banking system, making it difficult to transfer payments.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. This administration is killing massive numbers of Americans. Of course it doesn’t care about the mass death of Iranian civilians.

Ed Kilgore catches Lindsey Graham talking about his Dear Leader’s plans for the future:

Mulling Trump’s prospective status in an interview with Peter Nicholas, South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham (who once said of Trump, “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office”) uttered words that may have been prophetic while carefully stipulating that Trump hasn’t lost just yet:

He has a lot of sway over the Republican Party. If he objects to anything Biden [does], it would be hard to get Republicans on board. If he blessed some kind of deal, it would be easier to get something done. In many ways, he’ll be a shadow president.

The notion of a “shadow” opposition leader, common in parliamentary systems, has never had any place in the United States, where defeated presidents (or presidential candidates) have no office to fall back upon and no formal status. On January 21, Trump will be a private citizen, albeit one with a Secret Service detail. If the idea spreads in Republican circles that Trump deserves quasi-official status as the victim of a “stolen election,” it could make him the most powerful ex-president since Theodore Roosevelt (or maybe more powerful, since Teddy had to cede party leadership to a designated successor).

Those Republicans who have privately hoped to rid themselves of Trump by jollying him along in his postelection misconduct really need to rethink their strategy. The only thing worse for them than a 2024 Trump comeback effort is a scenario in which he never goes away at all. A moment’s thought should convince everyone that becoming a “shadow president” is exactly what Trump wants if he cannot just continue to hold the White House by adverse possession.

I’ve been saying he planned to sell himself as the “president in exile”, as if he’s a deposed dictator of a third world banana republic, for months now. These Republicans, with their acquiescence to his nonsensical election fight, are making it easy for him. It’s worked out well for them up until now. But I wonder if they’ve rally thought it through.

Oy, what a thought. But it’s important to at least consider what Never Trumper J.V. Last is saying here:

Over the past year I’ve been insisting that Trump is Forever.

TL;DR is Trump won’t leave politics and the Republican party won’t be able to move on from him because its voters are bound to him.

The counterargument to this—often expressed by Republican friends who hated Trump, but went along with things—went something like this:

Voters hate losers. After Biden crushes Trump, the GOP will turn its back on him and move on. This is the cycle of defeat and renewal which is constant in American politics. Five years from now, you won’t be able to find a single Republican who admits to having voted for him.

This wasn’t a crazy argument, but I think we can now say with rough certainty that it was incorrect.

And yet I think it’s an interesting lens through which to view the last five weeks.

Everyone laughs at how stupid the Trump lawsuits are. Can you believe these morons? They lose everywhere! Even Republican judges keep slapping them down! How embarrassing for Trump!

But that’s the wrong way to think about Trump’s actions since November 3. Because his goal hasn’t been to keep the office of the president. It’s been to keep the Republican party.

On the morning of November 4, Donald Trump faced two problems. The first was that he was going to lose the power of the presidency. The second was that this loss endangered his ownership of the GOP.

Now, owning a major political party isn’t as useful as being president. But it’s not nothing, either. In a two-party system, you can exert a great deal of power by being the head of a party. You have businesses and foreign governments that will pay tribute to you. You have capos spread across the country, ready to do your bidding. You have an audience of something like 40 million partisans who can be mined for contributions and mobilized as a flash mob whenever you need them.

A political party is, to paraphrase El Blago, a valuable forking thing. Why would anyone willingly let go of it?

So for Trump, the lawsuits, the posturing, the couping—yes, it would be nice if he wound up as president on January 21. But that’s the secondary objective. The primary objective was to stop the Republican party from leaving him and, if possible, tighten his grasp on it.

And while everyone laughs at how incompetent Trump’s Elite Strike Force has been as a matter of law, they miss how effective it’s been as a matter of politics.

Mission: Accomplished.

How does a party move on from a defeated leader? It’s a routine process that occurs after a choreographed series of steps from the stakeholders.

The defeated leader concedes and steps away from public view.

The base voters melt back into the countryside for a short period—usually a few months—until they reemerge to begin fighting against the opposing party’s new regime.

The partisan media immediately start a fight over What Went Wrong, as the various factions try to blame each other in order to gain advantage in the bid to find a new leader.

Ambitious elected officials begin to put themselves forward as the face of the opposition in the hopes of eventually taking over the top position in the headless party.

Trump’s post-election fight has been designed to short-circuit each of these steps.Trump will not leave the public eye.

His insistence that he won increased the activation of the Republican base.

The base’s acceptance of his claim forced the partisan media to toe his line and even created demand for more partisan options when Fox wavered in its willingness to deny reality. (The explosion of Newsmax and OAN as they went full-2020 Truther can only force Fox further away from the mainstream and into outright propaganda.)

This entire dynamic has stopped cold any questions of blame assigning or intra-party fighting.

Consider: It is the Democrats—who won a large victory!—who are engaged in recriminations and the re-thinking of their electoral pitch. There has been absolutely none of this—zero—on the Republican side. You can’t ask “what went wrong” when you’re not allowed to admit that you lost.

The next generation of ambitious elected Republicans isn’t just frozen in place. They’re subjugated. They’ve looked at the voters and realized that the best path forward is demonstrating absolute fealty to Trump. Which means that their incentive is to outbid their peers in expressing support for Trump’s claim of victory.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: For anyone who wants a future in Republican politics, the price of admission is not admitting that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. You have to either skirt this reality, or outright deny it.

But this isn’t just a question of a fact, it’s a mindset. Because it means that the minimum ante for Republican politics is now support for an insane conspiracy theory.

And once you’re embracing “The guy who lost by 7 million votes actually won in a landslide, because Deep State,” then “Hey those QAnons have some interesting ideas” is only the next step. And not a very big one.

The election is over. Trump lost.

But the battle for the soul of the Republican party is over, too.

And Trump won.

I have no warm feelings for the GOP. I’ll let the Never Trumpers mourn its passing. But the fact is that whatever you want to call it,something is leveraging the institutional power of what we used to think of as the Republican party and it is very, very dangerous.

Former Reagan White House official Linda Chavez condemns Republicans Ted Cruz, William Bennet and others a) for submitting to a bully like Donald Trump in the first place, and b) for helping him promote the fiction that the 2020 election was “fixed’ and so rife with vague irregularities that legislatures in four states Trump lost should nullify the election.

Chavez writes at The Bulwark:

The intellectual dishonesty here is breathtaking. For individuals and organizations that champion the rule of law and claim the mantle of the founding principles of our nation to call for overturning an election reeks of hypocrisy. It was one thing for them to advocate for so flawed a man as Trump to lead our nation. But the American people have spoken and to continue to claim that the election was stolen, that votes were fraudulently counted, is to attack the very foundations of our democratic institutions. They sow distrust in democracy itself—formerly the provenance of the far left. Politicians may fear the wrath of Trump’s legion of followers if they speak out, but what is it that drives the “thinkers” like Bennett and Eastman? They should know better than to parrot insane conspiracy theories and promote specious legal arguments.

“Formerly the provenance of the far left” is unworthy of reply. As for scions of the right knowing better, where has Chavez been for the last couple of decades?

An unidentified man with a backpack walked into the Teamsters Building in Spokane shortly after 10 a.m. local time Wednesday. He told Pamela Brown, a worker in the building housing the Spokane County Democrats office, he had a bomb. He also wanted Brown to “get ahold of the social media… and all the media… and I want you to put out this manifesto… ‘Here, you take this manifesto,'” Brown said. She called 911 and police told her to evacuate the building.

By evening, local police reported no bomb was found, although the suspect set a small fire in the building that went out after police discovered it, the Seattle Times reports. The suspect is in custody and no injuries were reported.

There are few other details at this time, and no report on the contents of the “politically toned” manifesto to indicate the man’s motives or political leanings.

As the Spokane incident unfolded, The Plum Line (Washington Post) warned readers the threat of right-wing terrorism is on the rise. Paul Waldman noted that Kim Ward, the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate, said she had received a call from the outgoing president about supposed fraud in the election. But she had not seen a letter 64 of her colleagues signed before it was issued. It urged the state’s congressional delegation to reject state’s Electoral College votes awarded to Joe Biden.

Asked if she would have signed the letter, Ward conceded, “If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it’ … I’d get my house bombed tonight.”

Waldman reminded readers of other recent incidents that are cause for worry:

• Heavily armed protesters surrounded the home of the Michigan secretary of state, after a plot to kidnap the state’s governor was thwarted.
• Other secretaries of state who refused to steal the election for Trump have found themselves and their families threatened.
• A prominent supporter of the president went on TV and said that a federal official who countered Trump’s false claims about voter fraud should be “taken out and shot.”
• In Idaho, anti-mask protesters terrorized local officials’ families.
• Public health officials all over the country have been threatened and harassed.
• The American right made a hero out of a teenager who went to a protest and allegedly killed two people.

QAnon believes the world is secretly run by a satanic cabal of cannibal-pedophile Democrats and celebrity elites. Donald Trump was going to destroy the conspiracy, all according to Q’s divine plan. What might believers do after Joe Biden takes office in January instead?

Waldman continues:

You can apply the same logic to the only slightly less-deranged worldview propagated every day not just on fringe outlets like OAN and Newsmax, but much of the time on Fox News as well. If you actually believed the lie they’re telling their audiences — that our democracy has been destroyed by a sinister conspiracy bent on dismantling America, outlawing religion and rounding up anyone who dissents — then violence would seem completely appropriate.

It would not be much of a leap to imagine yourself the equivalent of a resistance fighter in a Nazi-occupied country in World War II, taking up arms in the noblest of causes.

The Republican Party in Arizona has ratified #StopTheSteal’s call for believers to give their lives for their god in makeup and hairspray. If past Republican defeats are any indication, expect runs on gun stores and extended shortages of ammunition. Past hoarding amounted mostly to security-blanket clutching. But as they say in investing, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Dave Neiwert tweeted Wednesday a February 2019 Daily Kos post on the American right’s fantasies about winning a second Civil War, noting the hashtag #CivilWar is trending. His response was what you would expect.

Collecting some of the prime replies to my earlier #CivilWar tweet demonstrating once again that yeah, these guys really do want to kill half the country. pic.twitter.com/CYjBXYaAyV

— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) December 10, 2020

“Nothing secedes like secession,” Charlie Pierce wrote in commenting on 17 states of the New Confederacy that joined Texas in asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election. Their appeal may appear a joke to legal experts. But it is no joke that over a third of states are on board with voiding the U.S. Constitution.

“The Republican Party is now a seditious, subversive organization, a Fifth Column of organized authoritarian yahoos,” Pierce writes. “Where’s Joe McCarthy when you need him?”

Republicans think Donald Trump getting evicted on January 20th is a crisis worth overturning an election for…

…. but don't think millions of Americans getting evicted from their homes b/c of the pandemic is worth doing a damn thing.

— Jesse Ferguson (@JesseFFerguson) December 10, 2020

McCarthy’s party is busy doing nothing to alleviate the suffering of Americans in red states and blue states that were once the United States.

(h/t ER)

Rush Limbaugh thinks it may be time for the wingnuts to secede. I think we’ve heard this before:

RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): All right. Mr. Snerdley is asking if we’re ever going to be able to win. And he’s talking about elections. Votes. Are we ever gonna be able to win without taking back some of these cities? He’s talking about blue cities like New York, Philadelphia. I assume you mean Detroit? Do you include Milwaukee in this? Definitely, all right. What about Oakland, California? Too far gone. San Francisco? You think we can get San Francisco? Look, we won election after election after election without winning these cities or the states they’re in.

Actually, no. They have lost the last 7 of 8 popular votes. The one they won was when the country was in the middle of the Iraq war and the man who won it left office with a 28% approval rating. Back when there were racists in both parties and liberal in both parties — and the GOP wasn’t so far right they were falling off the edge of the world — it was possible for both parties to have an urban-rural coalition. That is no longer true. We are a different country. And these people simply cannot accept the truth.

Anyway, he continues:

 I actually think that we’re trending toward secession. I see more and more people asking what in the world do we have in common with the people who live in, say, New York? What is there that makes us believe that there is enough of us there to even have a chance at winning New York? Especially if you’re talking about votes.

…There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs. We can’t be in this dire a conflict without something giving somewhere along the way.

Are they sure they want this? It might not turn out the way they want it to:

Final figure is actually 71% of GDP generated in counties Biden won, once Nassau (NY) finished counting. Plus Biden won 91/100 largest counties in US, more even than HRC 16 or Obama 12. Clinton's counties generated 64% of GDP. High-output diverse metro US loudly said no to Trump https://t.co/5x2TmKK37V

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) December 5, 2020

I mean, if they don’t want the money that metro US generates and redistributes to rural America and elsewhere in red states, who are we to force it on them? They deserve their freedom.