I was sitting in my recliner yesterday with my head back. I wasn’t tired, although I was lazing off the last of the drugs from my cataract surgery, and it hurt to blink my right eye too much. So I listened to Rachel’s A Block in comfort.
Rachel was talking about all of the cataclysmic events that had happened during her absence. The country also passed a major milestone, although a month later than President Biden would have liked. 70% of all adults have now received at least one dose of the vaccine, and 40% are now fully vaccinated. This is impressive, but at the same time, we are being reminded of what can be. Led by GOP controlled southern states, Covid is on the rise in all 50 states, and we are back over 100,000 new cases a day. And president Biden’s popularity is suffering a hit. While still positive, it has dropped by 10 points in the last 2 months.
With those last words, my stomach turned to ice. The first thought that went through my mind was Fuck me! The GOP is doing it on purpose! They’ll sacrifice them all, including the children.
In one moment, it all made complete sense. Because nothing else does. Trump and the GOP have spent more than 2 years trying to take the shine off of Biden, but nothing has worked. Everything from Sleepy Joe to a criminal son. But after taking the victory laps from the Covid successes, his popularity is suffering from the setback.
Likewise, the actions of GOP Governors like Pissantis of Florida, and Abbott of Texas are senseless and dangerous. Both have signed orders banning mask mandates requirements for schools, and fining administrators for defying them. Pissantis went so far as to bar contact tracing at schools where cases are reported, and even informing parents that there is an outbreak at the school. Sane parents are already revolting, and the media is warning how disastrous this could be for the GOP once school starts, especially with childhood Covid cases already on the rise.
But not if someone else is being blamed! Right now Biden’s Covid approval number is dropping, and that’s all the GOP cares about. From late April through early June, as Biden’s popularity soared, analysts started talking about it starting to become more likely that the Democrats could not only hold the House and Senate, but improve their majorities. Biden’s sinking poll numbers on Covid are a life raft to the drowning GOP, and if sickening their own constituents is what it takes to bring Biden down, then so be it.
How do you get a small child away from his mother in a crowded store? Make a game of it. And Trump, the GOP, and the far right media have done nothing but make a game of Covid from the start. They ridiculed the danger, they made infantile jokes about it, as well as people who took it seriously, and made everything into an issue of personal freedom, as well as culture wars. This also explains why FUX News and the far right have been so feral lately, they need to stoke GOP resistance in order to keep the numbers up.
Here’s why I’m sure I’m right. Because not everybody is playing along, only Trombie Governors in safe states. Hogan of Maryland and DeWine of Ohio are fighting the virus tooth and nail. Governor Kay Ivey of Alabama is seriously pissed that her citizens won’t wake up and smell the coffee, and Arkansas’ Asa Hutchinson now publicly and sincerely regrets signing the school mask mandate ban a few months ago. There are sane GOP Governors out there.
Get this straight. The GOP doesn’t care about optics. They don’t care about your opinion, my opinion, or the media’s opinion. We’re not going to vote for them anyway. If the Covid culture war keeps GOP voters motivated and ready to turn out, and shaves a few points of independent and soft voters from showing up to vote for Biden, then that’s all they care about. Familiarity breeds contempt. And at this point, the GOP is so familiar with their base that their contempt knows no bounds.
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And just how does killing off members of the Cult of the Orange-faced Howler-Monkey benefit the GQP? I know that most of them don’t care who they kill. Most deaths and hospitalizations from Covid are now the un-vaccinated. The largest group of un-vaccinated are the cult. How does killing the people most likely to vote for them benefit them?
Never assume your enemy is rational or smart when the available evidence suggests otherwise.
Because if they can stay ahead of the game long enough to redraw election maps (gerrymander) combined with voter suppression laws, we will be under minority rule for the next 50 years or so. The dead don’t matter.
They are banking on there voter disenfranchisement efforts to help negate the loss of their supporters to DEATH. Add the energizing of the remaining base through whatever latest outrage they can generate and they firmly believe victory is THEIRS.
Be a shame for all that to come to nothing, wouldn’t it? We should really do something about that.
“Governor Kay Ivey of Alabama is seriously pissed that her citizens won’t wake up and smell the coffee . . . .”
Well, she’s not so pissed off that she’s restored any SENSIBLE measures like reimposing a mask mandate or rescinded her order (from this past May) prohibiting businesses from requiring proof of vaccination before entering.
She is encouraging vaccination, but I don’t know if anyone is listening to her.
I’m scratching my head trying to figure who would listen to her.
I wish Max van Sydow was with us today so he can play chess with the Desantis Death Angel.
Better yet, Badminton ala De Duva.
If that’s the plan, it’s a stupid plan. It’d require these idiots to stay alive long enough to vote for them in 2022. That’s looking more dubious on the day. Uncle Joe gets this under control by end of the year or next, won’t matter anyway. And all the voters who would have voted for them that would still be alive? Gone and not coming back.
Oh and it’s hardly though people are unaware whose goddamn fault this is.
I just got around to reading today’s new posts. And I am devastated because I believe you are spot-on. That the GOP is so batshit crazy mad for power that they are every bit as cruel as your thesis suggests.
I am sickened. I feel like my spirit is being crushed in one of those junkyard car crusher machines. So much so I’m writing this through tears. I have to go for now, and try to put myself back in a frame of mind that holds at least possibility of hope.
Sounds like you never grew up around an environment where such cruelty is a bug rather than a feature, delliot. It says much for your character that you thought so much of even THESE people. But this is who they have always been. The only difference between now and when I was growing up is that now they no longer have any reasons (that they can see) to hold back. All we can do is protect as many as we can. It’s just everybody won’t make it…and I hate that as much as you do.
You frequently respond to things I have to say, sometimes complimentary and sometimes critically. But there is much I’ve said online both here and another popular progressive site that, had you read or paid closer attention seem to escape you.
Being in my mid sixties I remember a good deal of the racial strife and some horrific things that went on in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. My small midwestern hometown in southern Illinois saw its share of racial tension and flare ups as the regions own tortured history is mixed – there was a strong movement afoot prior to the Civil War for southern Illinois to break off and join the Confederacy. It was only the prominence and will of John A. Logan that aborted that movement. Ironic since he was at the time pro-slavery, but he was PASSIONATELY pro Union. (He would however become an abolitionist) His legacy in his/my hometown is complicated to say the least, and again so with a little P.O.S. seditionist Congress Critter (I grew up and went to school with his big sister) now being feted as a “favorite son” and despite the Museum and the library founded by his mom that still bears the Logan family name there is a decidedly racist bent in the town. Always has been, and it’s risen up again although folks back there hotly deny it.
Given we had a major university six miles away with a fair number of students living in my hometown because they could rent cheaper than in Carbondale, and that there was a decidedly robust international contingent I was exposed to people and learned about cultures (both good and bad) from early on.
But the worst was closest to home, because I had a grandfather who was as despicable a human being that ever took part in the Klan. I have NO reason to doubt some of the stories he told about abusing his authority as a Police Captain in a fair sized community down south before the Klan literally had to hustle him and the family not just out of town but out of the state in the middle of the night in the 1920s, and get him a job as a federal railroad cop based out of my hometown. Which was welcoming enough to someone like him.
If his attempted indoctrination of me didn’t take it wasn’t for lack of trying, and part of the shame I will always carry is that between him, other adults back there and some people I grew up with for a time enough did that I used terms I shouldn’t have, and even harbored some attitudes that were dishonorable. The larger shame is that I carry the same blood as that sonovabitch. It is a shame I will carry to my own grave.
My consolation is that his family name/line will die with me as I didn’t have any children. My aunt didn’t have children and my two sister’s children have different names and never knew my grandfather at all. And what they learned about him was all bad
I DO know, and did before I went into the Marines how ugly humanity can be. I have also known my entire life that that kind of ugliness has always existed in this country, and that even when driven largely underground for a time it was still there like the chicken pox virus, just waiting for a chance to break out and “flourish” in all its painful ugliness.
I even knew that conservatives, in the wake of Hoover slapping down the Klan (not because of their racism – what set him off and cause him to go ape-shit and turn his people loose was the Klan overplaying its hand down south and making threatening phone calls to the wives of FBI agents down there) conservatives turned to the GOP and helped Nixon utilize the infamous “southern strategy.” But they tried to be careful, and control the monster they nurtured.
In hindsight it was inevitable (although to be fair some predicted it all along) that the time would come when the “masters/wise men” would lose control of the monster as happened with Trump.
What hit me so hard yesterday was the realization that one of our major political Parties that spent decades exploiting the racism out there not only came to accept it during Trump’s Presidency, but have chosen to embrace it and openly feed it to trash our Constitutional safeguards. Because yes, they will lose some of their own people to death by Covid. But when you look more closely at refusal to be vaccinated African Americans are as a group as resistant (albeit for different reasons) as the MAGA goobers. The impact on that voting block in deaths and mistrust (as in why bother voting? Democrats can’t be trusted either) will hurt us a lot more than it will the GOP.
The realization that a major Party has become THAT vile, to seemingly have made a carefully calculated choice and to carry out that strategy of destroying lives, livelihoods and all manner of things with a ruthlessness worthy of General Heydrich and Col. Eichman is depressing.
At least to me.
For what it’s.worth, I hope your vision is improving as your eye heals. Best wishes for healing Murfreesboro.
I meant MURF (cursed autocorrect!)
Murf: You misspelled the Governor of Texas’ name.
It’s Abutt.
Vote!