More strange bedfellows
MSNBC’s “Deadline White House” on Tuesday featured a long segment with members of Operation Saving Democracy. Led by Lt. Col. Amy McGrath (USMC, ret.), the group boasts “almost 600 retired Generals, Admirals, Ambassadors, cabinet and service secretaries, appointed leaders, elected officials, and Senior Executive Service leaders have come together at this time of significant threat to the essential tenets of our Democratic institutions and values.” Joining McGrath were Adm. Steve Abbot (USN, ret.) and Rear Adm. Michael Smith (USN, ret.)
The group believes “The extreme far-right authoritarian ideology that has taken hold in the GOP is an attack on democracy itself.” They hope their credentials and numbers will make an impression on the Trump cult, or else help mobilize ordinary Americans against the domestic terror threat Trumpism poses.
“Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy,” Abbot states into the camera.
“Donald Trump” is a collective noun here, shorthand for a deeper problem.
Here’s another bipartisan group (albeit less illustrious) out to save the country from that existential threat. Led by former Biden speechwriter, Mathew Littman, and including former Georgia Democratic congressional candidate Marcus Flowers, former Republican congressman Joe Walsh, and former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham, Mission: Democracy is more blunt about calling fascism fascism:
Our mission is to educate all Americans about the dangers posed by MAGA fascism and to encourage them to use our democratic process to help diminish the MAGA influence in our government.
Their ad is more over the top, beginning with a staged book burning:
🚨We cannot kick the can down the road with fascism.
— Mission: Democracy (@MissnDemocracy) September 19, 2023
From Marjorie Taylor Greene to Lauren Boebert, we must stop fascists and everything they stand for before it’s too late for America.
Share this latest ad far and wide and let’s #StopFascism. pic.twitter.com/yEC8WdL9pk
Despite viral video of two Missouri Republican state senators with flamethrowers setting fire to “books” to chants of “Let’s go, Brandon,” Snopes reports that what the pair claim to have incinerated with their flamethrowers was “pile of empty boxes meant to represent what they described to as ‘woke,’ ‘liberal,’ or ‘leftist’ policies.”
Sure, and the mock gallows erected in front the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and crowd chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” were metaphorical too, like the dead and wounded that day. This is where Ann Coulter once tossed her hair, rolled her eyes, and sighed, “It was just a joke.”
Coulter recently called Trump a “gigantic p—y” after he referred to the conservative commentator as a “has-been” and a “stone cold loser.”
Actually, the appearance of all these strange bedfellows gives me more hope than I’ve had the last few weeks.
As for the flamethrower duo, someone on formerly Twitter captioned their pyro performance video, “Peaked in high school.”