Many of us have been saying for years that Donald Trump is a dangerous fool, and that the Republican party has become the party of treason. Do you agree with us now?
So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION?
A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founder’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections.
That’s an outright admission that he wants to overthrow the government and install a dictatorship ruled by his whims. So what are we doing about it? NOTHING.
And still a significant proportion of the Republican party don’t comprehend the magnitude of his betrayal of the country.
…Donald Trump is viewed unfavorably by almost one in three (29%) voters who backed Republicans in the midterms, including 33% of “Reagan Republicans,” 34% of “Traditional Republicans,” 34% of Fox News viewers, and even one in five (21%) voters who backed him in 2020.
One third regard Trump unfavorably…which means two thirds still think he’s peachy. He’s admitted he’s willing to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot the Constitution, and all these people who in other circumstances fervently announce their support of the Founding Fathers, and are outraged that anyone would teach their kids any criticisms of 18th century America, are just fine with it. Do you want to be a banana republic? Because this is how you get a banana republic.
How can they let this admission of treachery slide? Because the Republican party is also the stupid party. Case in point: Herschel Walker.
Herschel Walker bashes pronouns: “Why are they bringing pronouns in our military? Pronouns?! What the heck is a pronoun. I’m sick & tired of that pronoun stuff. Aren’t y’all sick & tired of that pronoun stuff? So why don’t we call this senator Former Senator? That’s his pronoun.”
You know what still stings? Fifteen years ago, I was at an organization meeting for the local Democrats, and they were looking for volunteers to run for office, and I volunteered to run for the school board. Everyone looked at me like I was a crazed madman, and quietly suggested I put my hand down and that we get someone who was electable. Ouch. It sill burns.
But somewhere, a group of Georgia Republicans met, looked over the available field of conservatives willing to run for high office, and they picked Herschel Walker, a man who every day demonstrates that he has a turnip in his skull instead of a brain. Someone with the mind of a slow child, who didn’t get past his fourth grade grammar lessons.
He doesn’t understand reason, either. His recent babbling gaffe about werewolves and vampires got the attention of Obama, and he’s not happy about it.
Walker: Well, what’s sad is they’re always trying to mislead people. That’s the same as you listening to the Obama talking about I’m talking about vampires and werewolves.. why don’t they tell the whole story?
The whole story
is that he used a fictional horror story as evidence of the importance of faith. Obama neglected to tell everyone that Walker was a godly man who interpreted cheesy movies as evidence for Jesus.
Walker discussed his internal would-you-rather werewolf vs. vampire debate in the context of recalling a movie he said he had watched about a vampire. He concluded his story by talking about the importance of faith because in the movie, he said, a person who did not believe in God tried to kill a vampire with a cross and failed because they didn’t have faith. On Fox, Walker said,
The whole story is the story involved people having faith, having faith and continuing to go out and do your job, having faith to get things done. So they don’t tell you the whole story.
Shut up, Herschel. Shut up. In that Democratic meeting, I was willing to put my hand down and let someone else electable run, and you can’t even stop running off at the mouth about a story that was an embarrassment for you.
That’s the Republicans for you, the party of stupid criminals.
Treason? Not even close, per the Constitution and long established case law.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIII-S3-C1-2/ALDE_00013525/#:~:text=Article%20III%2C%20Section%203%2C%20Clause,on%20Confession%20in%20open%20Court.
Annoyingly, he’s skirted sedition repeatedly as well.
But, I have faith in Trump’s idiocy. Given increasing legal pressure, he’ll forget caution and finally cross the legal line and likely, cross it big time. With a high probability of loss of lives in both his worshipers and anyone near them.
It seems Walker’s candidacy is a measuring reed of the ignorance of the GOP base.
Or their hatred of anyone who isn’t busy hating whoever they hate. From what I hear, many (most?) of them don’t like Walker, but they hate Democrats (or non-rabid Republicans, for that matter) more.
Unfortunately, it looks like a lot of the people who are voting Democrat are doing it only because they hate the people running against Democrats. Just like the Republican voters, just a different target for their hate.
Let me guess: Being an open atheist with opinions that are a little further to the left of acceptable, respectable, “centrist” Dems makes one “unelectable?”
If the Democrats were ever interested in cultural and economic progress, those days are long, long gone. The Clintionista cancer of triangulation, neoliberalism, and being beholden to the upper class killed any hopes that the Dems can be a serious force for Leftist political change. (No. Their current list of half-measures and compromise solutions don’t fucking count.) At least, as a member of the “unelectable,” PZ is in good and honorable company.
I agree with just about everything in the post except only that I don’t think that Republicans are stupid. That’s the scary part.
But one thing that jumped out at me was really a minor point in the post and not part of the larger argument: the story about your being dissuaded from running for the school board.
[I’ve written this before but can’t remember where. I hope I’m not repeating myself on Pharyngula.]
I remember a “Politics Monday” segment on The PBS Newshour, back when Bernie Sanders was still a viable candidate for the presidential nomination, and Amy Walter could hardly construct a simple declarative sentence without some version of “electable” in it. It wasn’t even subtle. Indeed, I’d describe it as shameless.
And note that Sanders is certainly electable as evidenced by the fact that he’s still a Senator; but he can’t be nominated as a Democrat because the pro-war, pro-oligarchy Democratic leadership will have none of it. [Just before posting this comment, I noticed that Akira MacKenzie already beat me to mentioning Bernie.]
Electability ought to be determined at the ballot box, not by self-fulfilling prophecies of neo-lib TV pundits and other celebrities.
(By the way, did the “electable” candidate get elected?)
Of course! Doing SOMETHING will likely result in (Gasp!) violence, and that might look bad come election time. That and cracking down on fascists and Christian theocrats might make the sanctimonious civil libertarians at the ACLU cry. (i.e. “WAAAAAH! FASCISTS AND THEOCRATS HAVE FEELNG AND RIGHTS TOO! WAAAAAAAH!”)
No. The board is packed with conservatives and religious nuts.
Re. Centrist (conservative) Democrats.
I watch the podcast by The Young Turks- the changes of the primaries are nominally to be more inclusive, but by a strange coincidence it will also stack the deck against progressive candidates.
In 2020, yes. In 2016, no, but she won the popular vote. Of course, we don’t know whether Sanders would have won against Trump on either occasion. We do know he didn’t get enough votes in the primaries to win the nomination.
Among his many flaws, Trump is incompetent.
What most likely cost him the election was his handling of the major pandemic of the last 50 years, Covid-19 virus.
Because of his incoherent and uneven response, we had 1.4 million dead of the virus. Over 300,000 of them were antivaxxers who managed to kill themselves with ignorance and ideology.
He could easily have been the hero of that pandemic.
All he had to do was…nothing.
Just stand aside and let the doctors and scientists do what they are trained to do, which is to fight diseases.
A card board cutout could have done that.
Trump did the opposite, made things a lot worse.
@ 5
I can help her with that: Bernie wasn’t “electable” because 1) he was a scary “socialist” and that won’t fly in our greedy capitalist society where even “liberals” love the almighty dollar and hope to live like upper class royalty, 2) he’s a Jew.
@ ^ Akira MacKenzie : Yes. Sadly, it’s quote possible she – Amy Walter – was right..
Or wrong.
Would Sanders have won over Trump in 2020? Barring access to some alternative unverse we’ll never know. Its a moot point now. We can imagine and hypothesise and guess but we cannot know. Ditto for Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris (who dropped out on this day back in 2019 I think) or other contenders that mightve become the Democratic nomnee – but did not do so.
We can argue about the might’ve beens here forever.. or y’know not.
Because what use is it now?
Seriously.
Want to imagine a Dukakis or Mondale or John Glenn Presidency whilst we’re at it?
The devil you say! It’s almost as if there is no real difference between the political parties.
On second thought, strike that. There IS a difference. The Republicans actually believe in something they are willing to fight, kill, and die for in order to achieve it. sure, it’s racist, captialistic, Christian nonsense, but to quote John Goodman in The Big Lebowski“at least it’s an ethos.” Liberals and Dems–with very few expectations–stand for nothing save maintaining their wealth and their elected jobs. Their supposed devotion to civil rights, the working class, women, church-state separation, etc. is just a performative façade that they are willing to abandon when they become politically inconvenient and their lucrative positions are endangered.
I still think Louie Gomert has more stupid than Walker. Walker has the excuse that it’s a medical condition, while Gomert relies on a lifetime of expertise in stupid. Meanwhile, MTG is exploring the outer reaches of the “ignorant” axis. Someone should arrange for her to interview Ye about the jewish space lasers.
I think that what is going on here is that a whole lot of people have been praying Voltaire’s prayer, including a few pagans who’ve sacrificed lambs and the fruit of the vine, and they over-charged the prayer and it’s really coming down. Let’s hope cthulhu doesn’t wake up and eat us all – Voltaire’s prayer unlocks forces that are beyond the ken of ilk and kin.
@ 5. billseymour : By the way, did the “electable” candidate get elected?
Er, yeah. Kinda by definition.
^ #15 raising obvious questions of which candidate and elected to what exactly and how but anyhow.
Yes, of course being called “electable” as and seen as such is going to help and make some difference – not be everything and not decide for sure – but help. Obvs.
Does that suck?
Also obvs yes.
So how do we get progressives to become seen as & talked about more as “electable” and how much self-fullfilling prophecy can we make happen?
StevoR @15: by “electable”, with the scare quotes, I meant the Democratic candidates that would, presumably, have been better. As PZ pointed out @7, no Democrat was gonna win in any event; and I can easily imagine PZ making some campaign points that would, at least, get some people thinking. That seems like moving in the right direction even if we don’t reach the destination yet.
PZ, the next time that there’s a school board election, please do run as an independent. 8-)
Fifteen years ago, … I volunteered to run for the school board.
Could’ve sworn that, >15 ya, our esteemed host definitively declared an out atheist could never win any western-MN election and therefore he would never run for any office.
You. Should. Run. Anyway.
The irony about Trump’s latest word vomit is, he’s one of the few of us who’s actually sworn an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.* Not that I guess there’s anything legally actionable here (sigh), although perhaps it goes to intent in his forthcoming seditious conspiracy trial. (Yes, I still believe it’s forthcoming. I have to.)
I am, also, because at the time I first registered to vote, North Carolina made us swear a variant of the Presidential Oath. (Nothing like that in Maryland, though.) Which is a (small) tale in itself, but I’ve told it before…
Ah, darn, the second asterisk got eaten. I swear I typed it (before “I am”).
billseymour@5,17,
Apologies – I thought you were referring to the presidential elections in which Sanders failed to be nominated, not to PZ’s abortive first step on the road to the White House!
KG: you’re partly right. Although my parenthetical question was specifically about “PZ’s abortive first step on the road to the White House” (LOL…we can hope), I was indeed drawing a connection between that and Sanders’s failure to get nominated. If the corporate media (including, for the sake of this argument, PBS) hadn’t been continually harping on the “electable” trope, there could have been a different outcome. (But I agree that we can’t really know.)
You know PZ, in all the things I’ve ever read on this website, literally NOTHING brought a bigger smile to my face than this.
Do remember that 15 years ago was right about the time that PZ was in the national news for murdering Jesus in the kitchen with a rusty nail. The protestation that it wasn’t Jesus it was just a cracker literally only made things worse.
It was a weird time. I can’t remember a time where the populace was acting more insane … except all the other times since then, so I guess that’s just normal.
@20. Nemo : For some reason this blog seems tohave an issue with asterisks – I find they disappear if on their own and need a full stop in front of them to get them to appear. Eg. like this :
.*
Not really new –
“I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any hon. Gentleman will question it”.
“Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party . . . There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power.”
John Stuart Mill, in a Parliamentary debate with the Conservative MP, John Pakington, May 31, 1866.
Historically, though, they just let the stupid people vote for them, not actually try to run anything.
Crip Dyke @24: yes, I had forgotten about the cracker.
Dunno, PZ. The Republicans spent decades training their base to hate one specific name above all others, and had stockpiles of propaganda against that one person ready to roll the instant they started to run in anything but a guaranteed-blue-state position, they literally were saying out loud they hoped the Democrats would pick that one candidate, and the Democratic Party still went ahead and nominated them in 2016. No matter whether you like Hillary Clinton’s politics or not, her nomination proves to any rational person that both parties are the “party of stupid”.