Friday, February 7, 2020

The Long Knives Are Coming Out

And so the purges begin.

Der Sturmtrumper, his open corruption and brazen criminality dismissed by a malevolently complicit and yet somehow still spineless GOP Senate whose members have explicitly said that it didn't matter that the president violated the law, has come unglued and unleashed.  He promises revenge for this attempt to hold him accountable to the law.  He once again talks about being President For Life.  He lashes out with increasingly incoherent ferocity at everyone who spoke up in defense of the Constitution.  It’s a spectacle worthy of any debauched king, and precisely what we had a revolution to get away from.

He’s already fired several of the people who spoke truth to power while under oath, as well as a guy who happened to be related to one of those people because fuck you that’s why.  His worthless son has explicitly called for retribution against a sitting US Senator for daring to vote as the evidence commanded him to vote.

His Fascist minions are openly calling for blood.  Their word, not mine, by the way.  Blood. 

For those of you who are surprised at this, all I can say is, Seriously?  What did you expect?  Reason?  Humility?  Patriotism?  Humanity?  Whatever you were smoking I hope you brought enough for everybody.

It’s only going to get worse.  You know that.

Trump has never been shy about who he is.  He is a grifter with a track record of fraud going back over half a century.  A racist who has been repeatedly sued for it since the 1960s, which is why he was endorsed by every major neo-Nazi and white supremacist organization in America in 2016.  An entitled boor whose public behavior marks him as a singularly useless waste of space.  A thin-skinned bully who dishes out insults and persecution but melts down at the slightest sign of opposition.  A stupid person’s idea of what a smart person would look like.  A guy who made his living shaking down the people who worked for him and conning everyone else into thinking this was acceptable.  A so-called businessman who somehow managed to go bankrupt selling booze, red meat, and gambling to the American people.  An authoritarian with ambitions of dictatorship, and a sociopathic cult leader.  A carny barker of the highest order. 

Say what you will about the man, though, he knows his marks – he told us in 2015 that he could murder someone in broad daylight and not lose a single supporter and he wasn’t wrong. 

Trump supporters make the best marks, by the way.  Not only are they in on being conned, they’re proud of it. 

The Republican Party is getting ever closer to achieving its goal of destroying the American republic and replacing it with a one-party dictatorship of the damned, and if there is an election in November at all (something of which I am no longer confident) I expect it to be rigged like the ones they used to have in the Soviet Union.  There’s a reason Moscow Mitch, the Most Corrupt Man in Washington (impeachment notwithstanding), has blocked every single bill that would protect America’s election security from foreign interference, after all.  He knows very well his party can’t win a fair election and he’s not about to take that chance.

I spent nearly a decade living in the dress rehearsal for this with Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) here in Wisconsin and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and enablers in the Wisconsin legislature – a body so thoroughly gerrymandered and illegitimate that the last time we had an election the GOP got 46% of the vote and ended up with 64% of the seats.  As a historian I’ve studied the collapse of past democracies.  I’ve seen this movie.  I know how it plays out.

Buckle up, my fellow Americans.  It’s about to get ugly.

5 comments:

Ewan said...

Gee, David. What's the _bad_ news?

[Also, what's happening at a local level in WI? Y'all are ground zero..]

LucyInDisguise said...

Thor has indicated that you have, indeed, uttered the Understatement of the Millenium!

"[A]bout to get ugly"? The last three years have already been ugly - what's coming is (please standby while I consult my thesaurus ...)

Damn.

Gonna have to invent some new words here.

Lucy

David said...

@Ewan - Yeah, I'm definitely preparing for the worst, what can I say. Not much on the ground in Wisconsin these days since we elected a new governor who is a) not a Koch Brothers meat puppet and b) not actively trying to destroy the state. Naturally the GOP legislature has tried every means at their disposal, legal or otherwise, to get around him. So far we're at a stalemate. I had lunch with Tony Evers once. He's a remarkably intelligent man and someone who cares about this state a great deal. It's a shame that all he can do is keep the Republicans from poking us with sharp sticks, but that is in itself a service.

@Lucy - it's been Ugly. Now it's going to get ugly with a capital F.

LucyInDisguise said...

David, take a couple of minutes when you get a chance and read this:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/2/8/1917821/-I-am-a-Black-woman-Trump-and-his-supporters-are-right-Democrats-are-destroying-America?utm_campaign=trending

Thoughts?

Also, Fugly does not do justice to the level of horror about to befall this country. Seriously, I don't think a word exists that even comes close. We are entering uncharted seas, and I believe there be dragons here, Cap'n.

Lucy

David said...

I think she's got a point but it's not the point she's trying to make. The country was founded on both its ideals and its flaws, and to emphasize the one at the expense of the other is to miss half the story. The United States is a great nation, and like every great thing it has great virtues and great vices and the trick is to keep both in mind.

We have a regime that emphasizes and extends the vices these days. That sees racism, xenophobia, Social Darwinism, theocracy, inequality, and cruelty as its only purpose. But there is more to the story than that. We also have ideals and - inconsistent as we may have been - we have moved to implement them.

We face a choice: do we surrender to our worst, or do we try to do our best?

Trump and his minions have made their choice.

I will make mine differently.