Category: The Regime

The future

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I was going over the election results with a friend who’s one of the most politically astute people I know. She also lives in a deep red state, and most of the people around her are MAGAts.

She said people “need to get their heads out of their ass.” That Trump can’t get away with most of the things he’s promised, because the real people in charge — the billionaire donors and corporate chieftains – “won’t let them. “

“This is the same horseshit we see every time the right wing gets control, whether it’s the White House or the local school board. They overreach, the politicians start to panic because they can’t get reelected if the voters and the donors are unhappy, and they have to pull back. Then the Democrats win the next election and have to clean up their mess.”

And now that I’ve had time to digest the results, it sounds about right.

I actually don’t believe that voters supported most of what Trump says, because most of them don’t seem to know what he’s said — or they think he’s just performing. Voters in generally are poorly informed. The word I use a lot to describe typical voters is “stupid,” but I don’t actually believe they’re stupid. They’re ignorant. And they’re ignorant because they’re not people who read. If they read anything, it’s a headline and maybe the first sentence. Or the sports page. It’s what I think of as hyper skimming. People in general don’t read deeply. People like me are an aberration. Not only do I read all this online content, I read between three to five books a week. That is so foreign to most people, when I tell them, they accuse me of lying.

Superficial reading isn’t limited to right wingers. At the other site where I work, it’s a given that most people don’t read an entire blog post. But they loudly complain in the comments that the story didn’t include some specific piece of information — which was either already in the post, or easily accessed by clicking the link. (I might add here that a rather significant percentage of our readers have post graduate degrees.)

Life is hard, people are overwhelmed, I get it.

I have a story I like to tell about when I was a reporter. I was standing around with the attendees after a public meeting on flooding. I mentioned that a large factor was that the politicians won’t update the flood maps, because then developers would have to follow them and they wouldn’t get as many contributions from developers.

“You should write a story about that,” one of them said.

“I did.”

“Oh. Well, it should have been on the front page.”

“It was.”

People don’t make time to read unless they are already invested in an issue, and by then, it’s usually too late.

Don’t get me wrong, Trump will of course do these horrible, frightening things that make us sick, and he will unleash a wave of violence that will last. He will also have Chief Morals Enforcer Jimmy Don Vance whispering in his ear.

He will sign a national abortion ban, and even as I speak, his people are handing out contracts to build detention camps in Texas. But when meat packing plants are shutting down because they don’t have any more workers, the owners of these multinational companies will be screaming bloody murder.

And if history is any indication, Trump will eventually listen — at least, as much as Putin lets him. Because he hates it when other rich people are mad at him.

His “victory” (I have doubts about that, but that’s another story) is frightening, especially for women. At least some of these people who voted for him did vote for bigotry and fascism and oppression of women, but not all of them. Most of them are just idiots who have no fucking clue what they’ve done.

God help us.

Women fighting back

~ susie

I used to work at Penn’s International House, and I remember how smart and stylish Iranian women were before the revolution. I gotta tell you, this woman is so fucking brave. She will be imprisoned, tortured, and possibly killed.

And this is what happens when you sleep on fascism. Almost overnight, women went from independent living and careers to women who were encased in ancient tribal wear and not permitted to drive.

Always assume the worst of this gang

~ susie

The coup, Part 2

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

There’s this column Thom Hartmann wrote, and I’ve pretty much been a wreck since I read it yesterday. Because if he’s right, the Founders left a big gaping hole in the process when they wrote the Constitution.

First, Republicans need to make sure they’re in control of the House of Representatives on January 6th, 2024, when the new president will be certified.

To do that, even though Democrats might have won enough seats to take back the House in the 2024 election, Speaker Johnson will refuse to swear into Congress on January 3rd a handful of those Democrats, claiming there are “irregularities” in their elections that must be first investigated.

Consider that Johnson is still refusing to swear in Tom Suozzi (who recently won George Santos’ old seat), something Johnson apparently did to maintain enough Republican-majority votes to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas. (Johnson says they’ll swear him in this coming Thursday, but nobody’s holding their breath.)

Like Mitch McConnell withholding Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court for over a year, withholding certification of a handful of Democrats would be easy, legal, and completely immoral. There’s nothing Democrats can legally do to stop Speaker Johnson from pulling this off: he can postpone swearing a member in for as long as he wants.

That keeps Speaker “MAGA Moscow Mike” Johnson in charge of the House, so they can also refuse to accept the Electoral College certificates of election from a handful of states where they claim there are “problems.”

Keep in mind, Johnson was the guy who organized the wave of 138 House members who voted not to certify Joe Biden’s election in January of 2020. That’s why Trump wanted him as speaker.

Go read the entire piece, if you like horror stories:

Johnson has repeatedly said he thinks God Himself put Johnson into the speakership to fulfill some great destiny, comparing himself with Moses: stealing a presidential race “for the greater good” almost certainly qualifies as that. And, although Congress in 2022 raised the number of congressional objectors necessary to stop the certification of a presidential vote, Johnson himself was able to round up more than that number in 2020. This is eminently do-able.

Finally, the Supreme Court long ago ruled that they and the entire US court system have no jurisdiction over “political issues” that the Constitution says must be resolved by Congress. This issue of Congress’ certification of electoral college votes certainly qualifies, so, no matter what the courts might want to say or do, there’s probably no legal tool they can use to block a second Trump presidency under these circumstances.

I think this is what we’re facing. So I have no room in my head for any arguments against Biden. He’s the candidate, and we have bigger fish to fry. We have to save the country from these theocratic and autocratic nuts.

The fact that they’re losing elections right now makes them more dangerous, not less. They have nothing left to lose.