“We all hoped and prayed that the vaccines would be 100% effective and 100% safe, but they’re not! We know that fully vaccinated individuals can catch covid, they can transmit covid, so what’s the point?!” — Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin
Each year, a few people wearing coats die of hypothermia in places like Wisconsin, “So what’s the point?” Johnson did not add. Maybe next time, he’ll ask why we bother with vaccines, what with Covid’s low mortality rate.
Former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt has heard enough bullshit from my Republican congressman, Rep. Madison Cawthorn. Cawthorn is back in the news for a Daily Caller interview he did in 2020 in which he recounts a trip to Russia that eventually resulted in him meeting his soon-to-be ex-wife in Miami. Schmidt likens Cawthorn to fictional con-man Tom Ripley. But Schmidt was just getting warmed up:
(Albrecht Muth was a social-climbing German intern and fabulist for “a lesser-known Republican senator.” Muth at 26 married a Georgetown socialite 44 years his senior. He eventually strangled and bludgeoned her to death. There is a Miami connection to Muth’s story, too.)
We have tried. But while Asheville contains a large block of blue votes in the district (old and new), mounting an effective campaign in this otherwise red district takes money, organization, and name recognition no Democrat has had since Heath Shuler.
Please resist the temptation to think that because these politicians are idiots that they are not a threat to the republic. The Asscociated Press covers the slow-motion insurrection still in play a year after the attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump:
In battleground states and beyond, Republicans are taking hold of the once-overlooked machinery of elections. While the effort is incomplete and uneven, outside experts on democracy and Democrats are sounding alarms, warning that the United States is witnessing a “slow-motion insurrection” with a better chance of success than Trump’s failed power grab last year.
They point to a mounting list of evidence: Several candidates who deny Trump’s loss are running for offices that could have a key role in the election of the next president in 2024. In Michigan, the Republican Party is restocking members of obscure local boards that could block approval of an election. In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the GOP-controlled legislatures are backing open-ended “reviews” of the 2020 election, modeled on a deeply flawed look-back in Arizona. The efforts are poised to fuel disinformation and anger about the 2020 results for years to come.
All this comes as the Republican Party has become more aligned behind Trump, who has made denial of the 2020 results a litmus test for his support. Trump has praised the Jan. 6 rioters and backed primaries aimed at purging lawmakers who have crossed him. Sixteen GOP governors have signed laws making it more difficult to vote. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll showed that two-thirds of Republicans do not believe Democrat Joe Biden was legitimately elected as president.
The result, experts say, is that another baseless challenge to an election has become more likely, not less.
“It’s not clear that the Republican Party is willing to accept defeat anymore,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die.” “The party itself has become an anti-democratic force.”
I am catching up with Levitsky’s book now, and it’s got me pretty spooked. Donald Trump will devour the Republican Party from within, David Frum warned in January 2018, and they will reject democracy. They have. Even then, Frum was late to his own party. Republicans are no longer going through the motions but, under cover of law, attempting to neuter democracy and replace it with an authoritarian state.
Democrats, perpetually outgunned in messaging against Republicans, are failing to drive home to their voters the stakes in coming elections.
“The most motivated voters in America today are those who think the 2020 election was stolen,” said Daniel Squadron of The States Project. “Acknowledging this is afoot requires such a leap from any core American value system that any of us have lived through.” Such a leap that average, less-engaged Americans cannot wrap their brains around it.
Reacting to Schmidt’s tweets, one Twitter user responded with the Joseph Heller quote at the top. Up-is-downism and Trump’s grifting has penetrated much of the Republican Party. The next few years are going to be a rough ride.