Month: December 2020

The Republicans have now set a new precedent for electoral mischief. They now say that presidential elections are not settled until the electoral college votes more than a month after the election has passed. I suppose they might relent and acknowledge reality if the loser concedes or if the Democrat loses but we now know that they will back any attempted post-election attempts to overturn an election at least until the electoral college votes.

And frankly, there’s a fairly good possibility they will refuse to do it even then. After all, the congress has to certify so they may very well further insist that it isn’t done until January. And forever more it will be accepted as a matter of faith among GOP voters that Trump actually won and the Democrats stole it. These people will do nothing to disabuse them of that notion:

Congressional Republican leaders rejected a resolution that asserted that Joe Biden is president-elect, the latest effort by the Hill GOP to refuse to accept the election results even though it’s been clear for weeks that President Donald Trump lost.

The rejection came Tuesday in a private meeting after House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer offered a motion to affirm that it is preparing for the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rules Committee Chairman Roy Blunt of Missouri voted with House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy in blocking the motion, effectively preventing the inaugural committee from publicly accepting that the upcoming inauguration will be for Biden. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, voted with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Hoyer voting in favor.

“The extent to which Republicans are refusing to accept the outcome of the election and recognize Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as our next President and Vice President is astounding,” Hoyer said in a statement. “Their continued deference to President Trump’s post-election temper tantrums threatens our democracy and undermines faith in our system of elections … Republicans are refusing even to allow (Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies) to say that President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris will be inaugurated on January 20, even when there is no serious dispute over that fact.”

Blunt responded to criticism that Republicans would not approve Hoyer’s motion to recognize Biden as the President-elect. “It is not the job of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies to get ahead of the electoral process and decide who we are inaugurating. The JCCIC is facing the challenge of planning safe Inaugural Ceremonies during a global pandemic. I would hope that, going forward, the members of the JCCIC would adhere to the committee’s long-standing tradition of bipartisan cooperation and focus on the task at hand,” Blunt said in a statement.

This marks the latest attempt by Democratic leadership to proceed with transitioning Biden to the White House, with Hill Republicans throwing hurdles in the process.

For weeks, Hill Republicans have denied Biden has won the presidency, multiple lawmakers telling reporters they will wait until the Electoral College formally votes on December 14.

In fact, many conservative House Republicans have argued next week will not mark the end of Trump’s desperate efforts to overturn the election results. Some, like Rep. Jim Jordan, are encouraging not to concede next Monday.

Please don’t tell me they are cowards who are terrified of Trump and the Proud Boys. I’m sure they are. But they are more afraid of losing power and turning themselves into RINOs by living in reality. (And by RINO, today’s definition means it’s one who has not fully pledged fealty to Donald Trump.)

Honestly, I don’t get the sense that these people are even slightly uncomfortable with this. Look at how they are clutching their pearls over Biden’s appointees being “extreme” and shrugging their shoulders over Trump’s clow-coup as if it’s just business as usual. They are trolls and traitors and they don’t have even the slightest guilt over what they are doing.

They are all Trump. Every last one of them.

Krugman’s newsletter today is interesting and I found it strangely comforting. It turns out that the globalization we’ve all been dealing with for so many years — for better and worse — has actually flattened out. And it has been doing that for some time.

This comforts me because it means that a certain level of danger wrought by some daft trade warrior like Trump may not be so acute in the future. And it offers opportunities and necessary focus on domestic economic matters.

And maybe without this sort of sharp competitiveness, we can also focus on the most important global issue which requires us to cooperate or we will kill life on the planet: climate change.

Anyway:

Many years ago, when I was still a youngish academic on the make, my late parents gave me a gift — a sweatshirt decorated with the words “global shmobal.” At the time, you see, I was going to many, many international conferences. And when my parents asked what the conference in Milan, or São Paulo or Tokyo was about, I apparently routinely answered “global shmobal.”

And why not? When I decided, in grad school, to specialize in the study of international trade and finance, there were surprisingly few Americans in the field — it didn’t seem all that important to a big country with what was at the time a mainly inward-looking economy. But in the years that followed, as world trade grew by leaps and bounds, global economics began to attract a lot of attention, which among other things meant a lot of conferences.

We’re not just talking about academic attention, either. The broader public was also fascinated by global shmobal. Over the course of my adult life, there have been two blockbuster economics best sellers: Lester Thurow’s 1992 “Head to Head” and my colleague Tom Friedman’s 2005 “The World Is Flat.” Both books saw international economic competition as the central issue of the future, although Thurow thought it would be competition among advanced countries while Friedman, writing during the “China shock,” saw the world as, well, flatter, with almost every country in the fight to attract business and capital.

But a funny thing happened just a few years after “The World Is Flat” came out — or so it seems to me. I can’t quantify this, but my sense is that the issue-engaged public — the kind of people who probably bought Thurow’s and Friedman’s books, who take an interest in world affairs — got a lot less interested in global shmobal.

Oddly, one of the few influential people who stayed obsessed with international trade and investment flows, at least until he shifted his focus to trying to overturn the election he lost, was President Donald Trump. But Trump’s trade wars were very much his own idea; they never had much of a constituency (and business, of course, hated them). Trump tried to portray President-elect Joe Biden as a patsy for China, but it never really stuck.

Why did global competition fade from prominence in the public mind? Part of the answer is that the great surge in world trade from the mid-1980s until around 2008 turns out to have been a one-time event. We haven’t seen anything like a collapse in world trade, but the share of trade in world production has on average been, um, flat since 2008. The Economist has labeled this condition, where international linkages are stagnating, “slowbalization.”

This slowdown in globalization isn’t a terrible thing; as I recently tried to explain in a wonkish little paper, there’s no law saying that world trade must grow as a share of the world economy. Globalization is driven by a race between the technology of transportation and the technology of domestic production, and there’s no reason transportation must consistently win. But slowbalization certainly makes global shmobal less sexy, so interest shifts to other issues.

Beyond that, my sense is that a growing number of people have come to appreciate something that breathless talk about global competition tended to obscure: We have met the enemy, and they are us.

This is very much true when it comes to economic issues: Conflicts of interest within countries are much more important than conflicts of interest between countries. And although it’s a terrible thing to say, recent political events have taught Americans, at least, to fear the rising power of some groups within this country more than we fear some hypothetical threat from abroad.

Obviously the world is still out there, and while world trade may be stagnating, it’s still much bigger than it was a few decades ago. But America’s future will be defined by what we do at home, not on some global playing field.

The Attorney General of Texas is a a corrupt wingnut. This is from October:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is in hot water again. In a letter obtained by the Austin American-Statesman and KVUE-TV, seven senior aides said they believe their boss is “violating federal and/or state law including prohibitions related to improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses.” The brief letter says the officials reported the violations to law enforcement but did not provide details about the alleged crimes.

Separately, Paxton was indicted five years ago on felony charges of securities fraud. There is still no trial date set.

So naturally:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is in hot water again. In a letter obtained by the Austin American-Statesman and KVUE-TV, seven senior aides said they believe their boss is “violating federal and/or state law including prohibitions related to improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses.” The brief letter says the officials reported the violations to law enforcement but did not provide details about the alleged crimes.

Separately, Paxton was indicted five years ago on felony charges of securities fraud. There is still no trial date set.

Everything is bigger in Texas, including the lengths its top attorney will go to to do the anti-democratic bidding of President Trump.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a request with the U.S. Supreme Court that it review a lawsuit challenging the election results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Texas is suing those states on the extremely dubious theory that they somehow violated the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause in how they handled their elections. It floated allegations — some of them straight-up conspiracy theories — pertaining to the states’ changing their election practices in ways not explicitly authorized by the states’ legislatures.

Texas is asking the justices to block the use of the current results in those states — which Joe Biden won — and to give the legislatures, all Republican-controlled, the opportunity to appoint their own electors to the Electoral College instead.

The U.S. Supreme Court has the power to adjudicate lawsuits between states. But Texas will first need the court’s permission to even formally file the lawsuit, where it is also seeking expedited review.

Capping off several weeks of increasingly absurd lawsuits seeking to disrupt Biden’s win, the Texas lawsuit is especially bizarre.

It’s ridiculous. But I’m sure Trump has made it worth his while …

This is typically unethical but also pathetic. As his power wanes he’s clinging to what he has left.

President Trump isn’t just accepting pardon requests but blindly discussing them “like Christmas gifts” to people who haven’t even asked, sources with direct knowledge of the conversations told Axios.

Trump recently told one adviser he was going to pardon “every person who ever talked to me,” suggesting an even larger pardon blitz to come. As with most Trump conversations, the adviser wasn’t sure how seriously to take the president — although Trump gave no indication he was joking.

 The president relishes his unilateral authority to issue get-out-of-jail-free cards. Lately, though, he’s been soliciting recipients, asking friends and advisers who they think he should pardon.

Trump has also interrupted conversations to spontaneously suggest that he add the person he’s speaking with to his pardon list, these sources said.

The offers haven’t always been welcome.

One source felt awkward because the president was clearly trying to be helpful but the adviser didn’t believe they had committed any crimes.

The adviser also believed being on the list could hurt their public persona.

The White House declined to comment.

Trump argues the preemptive pardons may be necessary because the Biden administration will target his former aides, the sources say.

President-elect Biden has said he doesn’t want to pursue the Trump team, and he has vowed an apolitical Justice Department.

 As Axios first reported, Trump’s decision to pardon Michael Flynn set the template for a wave of pardons to friends and loyalists.

One senior administration official said the practice has since expanded, with pardons being discussed “like Christmas gifts.”

 The White House pardon system doesn’t entirely consist of the president’s free-wheeling offers.

White House attorneys are working through a more traditional process, even if it doesn’t cover every person Trump has discussed, a source familiar with the process said.

You have to love the fact that he just assumes everyone he talks to is some kind of criminal who would benefit from a presidential pardon. He truly does think everyone is just like him.

Ari Berman credits organizing by Stacy Abrams and other activists for overcoming one legacy of Georgia’s segregationist past:

Incredible GA stats showing power of organizing against suppression by @staceyabrams @nseufot @MsLaToshaBrown etc

-1 million new voters registered from 2016-2020, 2/3 people of color

-# of unregistered voters fell from 22% to 2%

-Rejected mail ballots fell from 3.4% to .2% pic.twitter.com/DIVpqyzH8q

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) December 7, 2020

Berman cites Nsé Ufot, executive director of Abrams’s New Georgia Project. Democrats are energized and organized:

This organizing work seems to be paying off. A million mail-in ballots have been requested for the runoff, an impressive number considering that 1.3 million people voted by mail in November. “I don’t think we’ll approach the numbers for the general, but I do think we’ll exceed turnout rates for any runoff we’ve seen in recent Georgia history,” Ufot says.

On-the-ground, year-round organizing, I’d argue, had more to do with turning Georgia blue than Democratic opposition to Donald Trump, or the candidacies of Joe Biden or U.S. Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. Good candidates are important, but they go nowhere without good local support and organizing, especially if they run in red districts. Even a candidate with Barack Obama’s natural talents might have remained in obscurity had he run for state senate in southern Illinois instead of along Chicago’s lakeshore.

The problem is that in rural areas new candidates are often on their own. Democrats’ organizing there is thin or nonexistent. No one teaches local county committees the rudiments of countywide get-out-the-vote organizing. Almost no one.

Could it be that one reason Americans’ faith is so low in their government, its elections, its scientists, and its law enforcement is because it so clearly operates two (if not three) systems of justice?

Florida state police executing a search warrant early Monday morning raided the Tallahassee home of a blonde white woman who captured part of the raid on camera. Police entered, guns drawn, to confiscate a phone and computer belonging to Rebekah Jones, a former state Department of Health data scientist.

“Imagine if the camera wasn’t recording,” Jones tweeted later. “Imagine if I weren’t white.”

Americans don’t have to imagine. That’s the issue. It is the issue that sparked massive protest marches from coast to coast this summer after police shot and killed Breonna Taylor in her Louisville home in March. Not on camera. And after police killed George Floyd by suffocation on the streets of Minneapolis in May. On camera. And after police shot and killed Rayshard Brooks in an Atlanta fast-food parking lot in June. On camera.

Those three Americans were all Black. Jones and her white family survived their encounter with law enforcement.

Jones built Florida’s COVID-19 dashboard, but was fired last summer after refusing requests to alter (falsify) the coronavirus positivity rating data to align with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s plans for reopening the state’s economy.

The Washington Post reports that state police were sent to the home Monday to seize electronic devices:

Law enforcement officials allege the scientist, Rebekah Jones, may have also used the devices to hack into a health department website in November and to send an unauthorized message to Florida emergency personnel, urging them to speak out against the state’s pandemic response. She has denied the accusation.

“This is what happens to scientists who do their job honestly. This is what happens to people who speak truth to power,” Jones said in a tweet Monday afternoon the raid. In an interview Monday night with CNN’s Chris Cuomo about the circumstances of the raid on her home, Jones again denied the allegation.

https://twitter.com/CuomoPrimeTime/status/1336157469622538240?s=20

Meanwhile, the outgoing president of the United States is reportedly discussing giving pardons “‘like Christmas gifts’ to people who haven’t even asked,” sources tell Axios.

Donald Trump personally has approached Republican state officials in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan with requests that they overturn certified November election results showing he lost. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) has called Trump’s lawsuits aimed at overturning election results there an “assault on democracy.” 

Isn’t what Trump is doing attempting to falsify election results, and isn’t that criminal? MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked Monday evening. In fact, Trump’s personal efforts to reverse election results are likely federal crimes, said Andrew Weissmann, former lead prosecutor for Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

What remains in question is whether someone in Trump’s position in this country will ever face prosecution for committing such crimes, Weissmann said.

“Are we a nation where those at the highest levels of this country will be held to account if they commit a federal crime?” Weissmann asked. Which is why, he suggested, it cannot be constitutional for the president to commit crimes for which he then pardons himself.

For three Black Americans this year, petty crimes or no crimes meant extra-judicial killing by police. A low-ranking state employee asked to falsify data faces official harassment for whistleblowing while superiors who asked her to falsify the data suffer no consequences. And the president of the world’s longest functioning democracy conspires to invalidate election results and undermine the will of the people in public violation, perhaps, of several federal laws while supporters agitate for a military coup.

Confidence in this republic lasting much longer seems to be flagging. Wonder why?

ICYMI:

This year saw record-breaking turnout, with more than 81.2 million Americans casting their ballots for Biden—the most votes cast for any presidential candidate in U.S. history.

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) December 7, 2020

I think this is what’s most infuriating about this “stolen election” nonsense. It’s ridiculous to think that Biden stole his electoral college victory in front of everyone in several states with Republican election officials. But I think it’s just as inane that someone who got 7 million more votes could be denied the presidency because of an anachronism that makes no sense in the modern world.

Think about it. If Trump had managed to pull off a close win in a couple of the states, along the lines of what he did last time, he would have won despite losing by 4% and 7 million votes. And we would all be nodding our heads and saying that his win is legitimate because of the absurd electoral college.

Instead, we have Donald Trump and his brainwashed cult having a fit and insisting he actually won despite Biden having a decisive win in the electoral college and more than 7 million votes in the popular vote. And they have got practically the whole Republican party screaming that Biden is an illegitimate victor.

There is more wrong with all this than just Donald Trump.

I’ve been wondering if Trump’s crusade against GOP officeholders might gin up the “down with RINOs” hostility among his cult and move to start a 3rd party. It seems unlikely, but you never know with him. He could see himself as Teddy Roosevelt (who lost, when he went 3rd party btw) or if this is all just a massive grift, it might be more lucrative for him. Let’s just say I wouldn’t rule it out.

A.B. Stoddard looks at how Trump’s antics are hurting the GOP and I think it’s worth thinking about:

It’s hard for Republicans to think straight these days. Stop the count, no, wait—do a recount. Elections are rigged and fraudulent. But the January 5 Georgia runoff will be legit, so GOP voters need to psyche up and turn out.

It’s all so confusing.

And in their confusion, Republicans seem not to have noticed the new dynamic which is emerging. The combination of the “Stop-the-Steal” ragers and the fear of the silent Republican establishment types are mothers milk to Trump.

Angry and afraid people fighting—over him—is the very top of his hierarchy of needs. It’s his version of self-actualization. And while he may be forced to give up the office of the presidency, he will not give up being at the center of this storm. Republicans don’t seem capable of understanding where this eventually leads. So let me spell it out for them:

Donald Trump is going to destroy their party.

Not because he wants to or even because he’s trying to. But because the destruction of the GOP will be required in order to fill his psychological needs.

Trump started his Saturday morning on a RINO hunt, tweeting about a Washington Post report revealing only 25 Republicans in Congress—of 249 queried—would admit that Joe Biden had won the election. His reaction:

25, wow! I am surprised there are so many. We have just begun to fight. Please send me a list of the 25 RINOS. I read the Fake News Washington Post as little as possible! https://t.co/cEBM0bYuQ9

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 5, 2020

In the afternoon he asked Georgia’s Republican governor to overturn the election which had already been certified in his state. Hours later Trump flew to Georgia for a rally that was supposed to be about boosting the two Republican Senate candidates, but was mostly about lying that he won Georgia. Trump insisted that he really did win Georgia, despite it being “rigged,” and warned about the runoff that “they’re going to try and rig this one, I’m sure.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who rebuffed Trump’s demands hours earlier took a beating at the rally. Trump said that Kemp should be ashamed of himself and openly suggested that Rep. Doug Collins should primary him in two years.

Here’s the problem with living in Trump’s conspiracy world: There is no way for Trump partisans to get revenge against the shadowy forces who “stole” the election that Trump lost by a historic margin.

But now that Trump has demanded that specific elected officials break the law on his behalf, there will be a list of officeholders Trump’s people can mobilize against.

You can’t vote out Dominion. But you can go after Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensberger and Doug Ducey and any (and every) other Republican who refused to steal the election on Trump’s behalf.

And that’s where the anger that Trump is stoking in Republican voters is going to be channeled in the coming months. Because it’s literally the only place it can flow.

Rudy Giuliani, has also put Republicans on notice, because while he won’t be taking the blame for the fruitless hunt for fake fraud, someone has to. Last week he raged on Twitter at Republican state legislators who he said have let America down by not trying to overturn their states election results.

Who does Giuliani mean when he says “Republicans”? That label doesn’t mean much these days. After all, Trump wasn’t a Republican before he ran for president.

Jared Kushner bragged to Bob Woodward, Trump “basically did a full hostile takeover of the Republican Party” because his resonance with voters was less about policy and more about “attitude.”

And that sounds about right. Which means that after the 2020 election, the definition of who is a “real” Republican will be made by simple binary answer: Were you with Trump in his attempt to steal a “rigged” election, or against him? Are you in, or out, of the Trump personality cult?

[…]

What Mitch McConnell and company don’t seem to understand is that this is the endgame: The MAGA cult no longer sees Democrats and the media as Enemy Number One. The Republicans who aren’t legally permitted to deny reality are now the big threat. And Trump is going to spend the next two—or four—years at war them.

As Trump pretends he’s running for president in 2024, he will batter the Republican party. A Politico story this week quoted a donor who said he would immediately contribute to Trump’s new PAC, and noted that most donors would feel pressure to do the same, just to avoid his wrath. Jon Thompson, a former Trump campaign aide was quoted saying “If he starts holding grudges against sitting officeholders and donors who decline to throw their support behind him, it is going to put Republicans in a bind.”

Duh.

In the coming war Republicans wanting to win elections and hold power will do battle with Trumpkins who can’t win swing voters, but dominate primaries, fundraising, and the Parlersphere. Georgia won’t see the only toxic primary in 2022. Lara Trump could run against Rep. Mark Walker in North Carolina, and the fight to fill retiring Sen. Pat Toomey’s seat in Pennsylvania should be a doozy as 75 of the state’s Republican state legislators signed a letter this week to the state’s congressional delegation calling for them to dispute the 2020 election results in Congress.

This gives Democrats the upper hand in all those races, should Trumpkin candidates prevail in primaries. Republicans will no longer benefit from MAGA devotees Trump mobilized in 2016 and 2020—but notably not in 2018—while the party loses swing voters by fashioning Trump into an eternal victim of a “stolen” election. And all of this—every bit of it—was foreseeable.

As Jonathan V. Last wrote on October 8: “Go write this down: After November 3, the price of admission to GOP politics is going to be an insistence that, actually, Donald Trump did win the election and/or would have won if it hadn’t been stolen/rigged.”

Republicans will soon notice that Trump won’t give a hoot about judges, just fighting. Trump is telling aides and allies that he’s doing all of this because his supporters need to see him fighting a Biden victory. He will keep fighting Biden and the Democrats and the media but he will also pound any Republicans who do not bend the knee. Relentlessly. No policy or posture or line of propaganda will be pleasing enough to him. They can expect frequent put downs, pressure to flatter him and demands that they flout reality.

[…]

What awaits Trump, after the season of election fraud TV ends on January 20, is serious legal exposure. He will make sure the GOP pays a price at each twist and turn of his coming prosecutions for various and sundry crimes. From obstruction of justice, to tax fraud, and so much more. Trump’s legal morass will be a chronic story in the years to come. Republicans will be asked to comment on each sordid discovery and ruling, and anyone unwilling to zealously defy the facts and fight back will be punished.

He will imply a right to revolution.

Republicans will have to soon accept Trump isn’t actually trying to be president again, or lead or unite a party. He simply intends to dominate and there is never enough submission. The next few years for Trump will be all about scalps.

Republican scalps.

I don’t know if this is true. I suspect they will fall in line because it is to their benefit to do so.

But if this does unfold as she suggests, it’s going to be very hard for me to argue in their defense, even though I know it’s destructive to he system and will likely result in something horrible. They just deserve it so very much.

I wrote this for Salon back in September of 2015 and I think it speaks to how the Republican base has thought about democracy for a long time:

Last week, as the nation observed the anniversary of 9/11, one could not help but look back at that time and contemplate the reaction by our fellow citizens and foreign nations. Rick Perlstein wrote a very poignant piece a couple of years back about the solidarity that horrible day inspired among all Americans and people around the world — and how it was lost.

Perlstein describes how bills such as the vote to authorize war and the Patriot Act passed nearly unanimously and without debate, which he says happened because in that moment of oneness,”it seemed unimaginable that this extraordinary grant of executive power could possibly be abused.” The man who should have been president, Al Gore, famously said, “George W. Bush is my commander in chief.”

Lefties from Ellen Willis to Barbra Streisand immediately fell into line and supported the president unequivocally. Bush memorably put this new sense of trust and good will into words when he addressed Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001, and asked the American people to pull together for the sake of the nation as a whole. He also admonished them to be decent to the people of Middle Eastern descent who lived among us.

“I ask you to uphold the values of America and remember why so many have come here. We’re in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them.”

Here is the notoriously fractious Congress all gathered together on 9/11 to sing God Bless America on the Capitol steps.

But as Perlstein pointed out, it didn’t take long for all of that solidarity to fall apart. One year later, conservative pundit Peggy Noonan was writing:

“So the Southerners are eyeballing the young Muslim males. Maybe these guys are bad guys. They allow themselves to think this in part because one of the things Americans regret most since Sept. 11 2001 is their lack of suspicion. We’re all very live-and-let-live. Before Sept. 11, young Muslim males could tell someone in passing that soon those towers in New York will go boom. And fearing to offend, fearing to hurt the feelings of another person, we’d let it pass. We’d mind our business, give them the benefit of the doubt. And now we wish we’d been less friendly, less trusting, less lazy or frightened. We wish we’d been skeptical. Hell, we’re the only nation on earth that is now nostalgic for paranoia.”

Noonan went on to condemn the “young Muslim males” — medical students — who inspired the column as bigots for failing to properly soothe a hysterical woman who panicked to see them eating dinner in a Georgia restaurant. (Jeb Bush, by the way, called the woman to congratulate her for her sharp observation.)

Anyone who was in America during that period also remembers the intense patriotic fervor exemplified by the anthem of the era, Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red White and Blue (the Angry American)”:

Hey Uncle Sam
Put your name at the top of his list
And the Statue of Liberty Started shakin’ her fist
And the eagle will fly
Man, it’s gonna be hell
When you hear Mother Freedom Start ringin’ her bell
And it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you
Brought to you Courtesy of the Red White and Blue
Justice will be served
And the battle will rage
This big dog will fight
When you rattle his cage
And you’ll be sorry that you messed with The U.S. of A.
‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass
It’s the American way

As the Dixie Chicks found out, anyone who didn’t agree could expect to be met with a furious reaction from conservatives who enforced the new patriotism with near religious fervor. And their love of country was not confined to the military. When president George W. Bush donned a Navy flight suit and landed on an aircraft carrier in a fighter jet to (prematurely) declare victory in Iraq, the right wing went into a major collective swoon. You could even buy a bronze bust of George W. Bush wearing the jumpsuit that was advertised with this stirring sales pitch:

“President Bush is a Leader who has the courage to lead. It is political courage. It is not poll driven it is conviction driven. It is consistent and does not change because of pressure or threats of political survival. It is reconfirmed every day. It differs from combat courage in that it is thought oriented not reaction oriented. Combat courage does not necessarily translate into political courage. Combat courage is admirable and you only know if you have it when you are in combat. President Bush has demonstrated that he has political courage and this is why he was re-elected. By owning a bust of President Bush, Commander in Chief you will be making a statement and in a politically charged environment, it takes courage.”

In those days, Republicans believed that government and military leaders were heroic protectors of all we hold dear. But even as kitschy as Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” performance was, and as overweening as the GOP’s patriotic love of men in uniform, that statement above is a remarkable validation of the American dedication to the concept of civilian control of the military. He might have been wearing a fake uniform (he liked to do that) but they acknowledged and respected him for his political leadership.

Something seems to have changed their minds. According to this new YouGov poll, these same patriotic Republicans still love the military passionately but are no longer attached to that moldy old concept of civilian control:

“Republicans (43%) are more than twice as likely as Democrats (20%) to say that they could conceive of a situation in which they would support a military coup in the United States.”

More to the point, only 32 percent of Republicans state unequivocally that they would not conceive of a situation in which they would support a military coup. One would be tempted to think this is simply a matter of partisanship, but there is no evidence that Democrats have ever entertained the notion of a military coup, no matter who was president, even one as widely loathed as George W. Bush. It’s as “un-American” as it gets.

For years the right has accused the opposition of being unpatriotic and failing to properly love America. And here they are, endorsing something that’s only seen in Banana Republics and totalitarian police states.

But there is some good news in all this. It’s likely that as soon as they get a president they like, they will once again discover that the Constitution is sacrosanct and the president is worthy once again to be the Commander in Chief. For instance, the latest Washington Post poll shows that they are not so cynical that they cannot imagine anyone having the qualities that are required for such a job:

1) Republicans say by 64-35 that Trump is “qualified to serve as president.”

2) Republicans say by 60-35 that Trump is “honest and trustworthy.”

3) Republicans say by 53-45 that Trump understands the problems of people like them.

4) Republicans say by 54-42 that Trump “has the kind of personality and temperament it takes to serve effectively as president.”

So we can all rest easy. As long as a qualified leader like Donald Trump is in charge they are unlikely to support something as radical as a military coup. But Barack Obama has clearly worn on their last nerve. And you don’t even want to think about what will happen if Hillary Clinton becomes Commander in Chief. One can easily imagine them calling for this coup and telling themselves “it’s the American way.”

For these folks the American way is whatever they want it to be including, apparently, a military dictatorship.

This rant by Jake Tapper over the weekend was excellent:

.@jaketapper: As GOP officials "deal with these horrors of a president whose hideous lies are putting their election hopes in Georgia at risk, and more importantly… even putting lives at risk, it has to be asked: Did you not know who this man was when you took him in?" #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/pNoRvqIZM7

— State of the Union (@CNNSOTU) December 6, 2020

To be perfectly candid, one of the great challenges in covering the Trump era has been listening to public figures telling start lies. And trying to discern whether the individual is cynically, purposefully misrepresenting the truth, is misinformed and possibly incapable of understanding the facts involved, or possibly suffering from some sort of psychological issue.

In other words, are they dishonest, stupid or crazy? In Trump’s case it’s all three. But when it comes to Republican officials, it’s definitely the first. He calls it coddling and enabling and it certainly is that. But it’s more than that. They are collaborators.

The whole monologue was good ending with the clip of Trump reciting “The Snake”