Most people here are probably old enough to remember an old cigarette commercial with the hook, “Wuddya want? Good grammar or good taste?” That was an anti-intellectual argument meant to justify the wording of a catchy jingle, “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” It should be “as” a cigarette should, but all in all, that is very small potatoes compared to the anti-intellectual tsunami crashing down on America today.
We live in quite a paradox: our culture has never been more technologically advanced, yet respect for education and learning has never been at such a low ebb. It used to be that knowledge was respected. Now the prevailing view is “my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.” No it is not. The essence of a democratic two-party system is that the electorate is informed and takes its choice from clearly defined options. It’s a no brainer that people vote with their guts, that’s an axiom of politics. But nowadays there is little or nothing to politics except for guts. The informational, logical component has been largely excised.
Take for example last week’s debacle in the Senate. On Thursday the Republicans were finally persuaded to end the game of chicken — at least for a few weeks — and not wreck the nation’s credit rating any more than it is, nor tank the economy and trigger a gobal recession. Chuck Schumer let it be known in no uncertain terms how he felt about this unnecessary display of histrionics and he was excoriated for it. Joe Manchin covered his face with his hands and reportedly told Schumer his speech was “f**king stupid.” Really? Does that mean it was normal to take the U.S. dollar to the point of collapse and we should have thanked the Republicans for not committing political seppuku? Or, are they lunatics that we now humor? Even the fact that this event occurred and we’re having this conversation about it should be sending off a four alarm disaster alert. How stupid are we going to allow ourselves to get before we tank ourselves utterly? Or is it already too late? Washington Post:
Read the headlines and try not to weep:
Our elected representatives in the U.S. Senate, which laughably calls itself “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” agreed Thursday not to wreck our economy and trigger a global recession — at least for a few weeks. Republicans had refused to raise the federal debt ceiling, or even to let Democrats do so quickly by simple majority vote. They relented only after needlessly unsettling an international financial system based on the U.S. dollar.
The frequent games of chicken that Congress plays over the debt ceiling are — to use a term of art I recall from Economics 101 — droolingly stupid. In the end, yes, we always agree to pay our obligations. But the credit rating of the planet’s greatest economic superpower has already been lowered because of this every-few-years ritual, and each time we stage the absurd melodrama, we risk a miscalculation that sends us over the fiscal cliff.
Today’s trench-warfare political tribalism makes that peril greater than ever. An intelligent and reasonable Congress would eliminate the debt ceiling once and for all. Our Congress is neither.
In other news, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) was speaking to a crowd of Republicans at a country club in his home state Saturday when he tried, gently, to boost South Carolina’s relatively low rate of vaccination against the coronavirus. He began, “If you haven’t had the vaccine, you ought to think about getting it because if you’re my age —
“No!” yelled many in the crowd.
Graham retreated — “I didn’t tell you to get it; you ought to think about it” — and then defended his own decision to get vaccinated. But still the crowd shouted him down. Seriously, people?
And that’s just a sampling. Here’s more. Everyday there is more of the same, stupidity elevated to legitimacy via lawmakers who put propaganda above truth. Charlie Sykes, the Bulwark:
We wake this morning to several stories that challenge our powers of description.
Let’s start with Texas, where the governor has issued a mandate against mandates, because small government, private business, FREEDOM!, or something. Greg Abbott’s order bans COVID vaccine mandates “by any entity” including private businesses in the state.
As the Wapo notes this morning, “Abbott’s move puts him at odds with some large corporations and with the Biden administration, which last month announced plans to require all employers with 100 or more workers to adopt vaccine mandates or testing regimens. A number of large private companies in Texas have issued mandates.”
It also puts him at odds with “conservative” notions of limited government, the rights of private businesses… and himself. This is the same Greg Abbott, who tweeted just a few days ago:
Ah well, never mind.
BTW: The whole narrative that Southwest Airline’s flight cancellations were due to anti-vax strike turns out to be bogus. “The airline and the union that represents its pilots took pains throughout the weekend and on Monday to say that the disruption was not caused by protests over the airline’s recently announced vaccination mandate, denying an idea, fueled by some early news reports, that had gained traction online among conservatives and anti-vaccination activists. Conservative lawmakers pointed to Southwest’s cancellations as evidence that vaccine requirements could harm the economy.”
Ted Cruz jumped right on this, even linking to an article which refutes his ridiculous statement but I guess he figures his constituents don’t/can’t read, so they’ll just take his word for everything.
Joe Biden’s illegal vaccine mandate at work!
Suddenly, we’re short on pilots & air traffic controllers.#ThanksJoe https://t.co/wviOzLt7Iv
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 10, 2021
And then there’s Texas GOP chair and anti-vaxxer Allen West’s battle with COVID-19. He’s lying in a hospital bed touting the wonders of Regeneron and monoclonal antibodies to combat the coronavirus. The kicker here is that those methods of vaccination cost $2,100 a dose whereas the vaccination shots that Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have developed cost about $20 a shot — but there isn’t a lot of conspiracy theory attached to Regeneron, so I guess that’s supposed to justify spending ten times as much? Right? I mean, you won’t be injecting privacy-violating chips that will magnetize your body and render you powerless against the mind control beep beeps coming from the 5G towers, so it’s worth it to pay over two grand for something that costs twenty bucks, right?
And then there’s the right-wing Claremont Foundation trying to deny that John Eastman wrote out a recipe for Mike Pence to follow to steal the election. That’s definitely worth a look. Again, from Charlie Syke’s newsletter this morning.
In the memo, which was revealed recently in a new book by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Eastman lays out his step-by-step plan for getting Trump reinstalled:
- Pence defers on counting electors for several states that Joe Biden won, saying there are multiple slates of electors in them.
- When the counting is finished, Pence declares the total number of electors is 454 — rather than 538 — at which point Trump has a majority.
- When Democrats complain that one needs a majority of 538 instead of 454, Pence relents and says that, since no candidate has a majority, the House will decide the winner, as per the Constitution.
- (In Eastman’s own words:) “Republicans currently control 26 of the state delegations, the bare majority needed to win that vote. President Trump is re-elected there as well.”
According to the Claremont Institute, though, this is not tantamount to asking Pence to overturn the election. And that could be construed as true, only in the most literal and generous of legal readings. What Eastman was doing was providing a procedure by which Pence could simply facilitate the expected result of Congress overturning the election. But at least he wouldn’t ask Pence to try to do this himself, I guess.
If you are an informed member of the American electorate, you are basically in the minority. The American electorate of 2021 is in the main uninformed or misinformed. And now misinformation and deliberate disinformation have become the GOP’s greatest tools, because they know people vote with their guts at the ballot box, so they’ve decided to simply forego policy and persuasion and gin up hysteria and fear, instead. Then they assure their constituents that only by reelecting them can America be saved.
There is no appeal these days to rationality or choice, it’s all drama and lies. The GOP is a rotted hulk, soon to become a ghost ship. The intelligentsia of that party has departed and one assumes, historically speaking, that a new Republican party will rise from the ruins of the old, as the current GOP arose from the remnants of the defunct Whigs in the mid-1800’s. Something has to happen. Democracy is based upon two functioning political parties. The situation we’re in now puts us at risk to lose democracy in lieu of authoritarianism.
But the Republicans think that they will prevail with their tactics. And why do they think that? Because this is who’s running their party.
Who knew that “1984” was going to become the Republican playbook? But here we are, or am I wrong? And this is who he really is, but this truth gets either whitewashed or swept under the carpet.
Fiona Hill was quoted in an article a few days ago, “If he makes a successful return in 2024 democracy is done.”
I feel like we’re at a really critical and very dangerous inflection point in our society, and if Trump — this is not on an ideological basis, this is just purely on an observational basis based on the larger international historical context — if he makes a successful return to the presidency in 2024, democracy’s done. Because it will be on the back of a lie. A fiction. And I think we have to bear that in mind. And I was hoping that with the book, I might be able to reach out, because I’m not a partisan person, to people who care very much about the United States and about its democracy to really think about this long and hard.
I find it deeply disturbing that the number one identity that people put forward in polls now is whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican rather than an American or someone from a particular region. Even religious or ethnic/racial identifiers seem to be subsumed in this in some of the polling. And so, you know, those of us who are independent in mind and practice but politically engaged, where do we fit into all of this? We used to fit into America. I have a lot of friends who are immigrants like myself who have been here for a long time, who come from many, many different places — not all from Europe. And they say, “This is not the America I came to. This is not the America we chose to come to.” And they were deeply disturbed by this. But many people fled these kinds of authoritarian or autocratic regimes, which are highly personalized, deny social mobility and where you have kleptocratic cliques of cronies who are really trying to take charge of policy, and that’s what this [deep polarization] is about.Thisis not about ideology. It is a manipulation of particular social issues — abortion, immigration, all kinds of issues.
This America is looking dangerously like Russia — based on the divisions of Russia in the 1990s and then the Putin system that came out of that. China, Hungary, Venezuela — many of the countries that are expelling immigrants from the region. This is what we’re dealing with. In all of these places, all of these issues are being manipulated and people’s grievances are being whipped up.
Big money is being poured into disinformation these days. There are powerful forces trying to destroy democracy, but nothing so powerful as the complicity of the GOP.
The media are owned by big corporations, which (a) hate paying taxes and (b) hate having their businesses lose money through losing eyeballs.
So they stoke anger (because it gets eyeballs) and lie (more eyeballs) and never notice that the future is going to have government telling what they can cover.
If they ram fascism down our throats, then I wonder how they feel about the majority putting a hurt on them. Boycotts. Destroyed business locations. Hunting down those responsible. We are in a war for our very lives. Time to wake the fuck up. When Trump rounds up his political enemies,(like his mentor Hitler), it is a harder deal when his brownshirts show up at YOUR door. Maybe it’s Karma for us to cower in fear the way our ancestors made black folk fear for their lives & their childrens’ lives. Maybe because I knew my 5 uncles who served in ww2, & my uncle who was a green beret who fought in Vietnam, or my dad’s 17years in the air force, or my own time in the navy…but my family has known that democracy needs warriors, not semi-educated marshmallows sitting around their TV sets.
Now waiting for the hall monitor to comment.
I think the very first question of any 2024 debate featuring Trump as a candidate should be the following: “Mr Trump, you’re running for President in 2024 but in 2020 and 2021* you continued to claim the 2020 election was fraudulent and that you were the legitimate President. However, as the 24th Amendment limits a President to no more than two terms, how can you justify running this year *IF* your contention that you have been the legitimate President for the past four year is correct? And if that contention is NOT correct–or is no longer your position–does that mean that you lost the 2020 election through a fair election process?”
*That 2021 can be extended to 2022 and 2023, if Trump continues his little excursion to Fantasyland.
Too much rational thought. Trump would say, like the bandit in Treasure of the Sierra Madre, ” badges…we don’t need no stinking badges”. Logic is lost on a toad. Sorry toads. I know you are are a higher life form than him. Good try there Joe.
Wow…I’ve never seen a cigarette commercial before, but they’re on YouTube. The Flintstones advertised Winstons? Yuck.
Also…they “taste good?” What does that even mean? Cigarettes don’t look like they’d taste like anything other than smoke. They reek…I’m pretty sure they don’t taste good.
Where did you grow up, Rory, that you’ve never seen a cigarette commercial before? Or, you’re too young, is that it? You’re either too young or from another planet, let me know which one.
Scott, I’m not the hall monitor, but my comment on your comment is: Thank You. I couldn’t agree more.
Having turned 68, I’m also too old for this stupid shit. Thanks 4 the support. Just read Slaughterhouse 5 again for the umpteenth time. This is, as vonnegut said, a children’s crusade.
With apologies to Vonnegut, the opening line can with modification describe what’s happened – “Listen – Donald Trump and his supporters have come unstuck from reality!”
HERE ALL .. been waiting for this ..
per MADDOW TRUMP TELLS ALL GOP to stop voting!
Rachel Maddow reports on a statement by Trump with perhaps the most bipartisan appeal of anything he has ever uttered: that if his Big Lie about his losing bid for reelection in 2020 isn’t “solved,” then Republicans will not vote in 2022 or 2024.