Giving Amanda the floor this morning:
As I keep saying, thank you for not voting your best interests.
We need not quote Darth Vader about underestimating the power of the Force. Or in this case, in seeing your tribe retain power. The MAGA base is sacrificing their lives for it.
Digby observed the other day, “As someone remarked to me recently, recall that hundreds of thousands of confederates sacrificed their lives in the 1860s in order to protect their ‘way of life’ by which they meant slavery. Their heirs, having been convinced that their ‘way of life’ is similarly under threat are doing the same thing.”
I dimly recall a friend and I having a chance-encounter beer with a local guy we met decades ago near Fair Play, South Carolina. Probably only high-school-educated, his principle interests were cigarettes, beer and porn on VHS. As we drove away, my friend, formerly with the 82nd Airborne, remarked that whatever we might think of his education, interests, or politics, he was the type who, with the right leadership, would lay down his life in battle if ordered to.
That remark was as unsettling as the local guy was unmemorable. It’s still unsettling today.
Dave Neiwert offers a suggestion to national media accustomed to running stories on Trump voters in rural diners: “Try instead reporting on what it’s become like for non-Trump voters in these rural red areas where the politics of menace and thuggery have taken over—sort of an inverted version of the cliché; the rural Biden voter who can barely show his face at the local café.”
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here: