This is a warning.
If there is one thing that can be learned from Senator Joe Manchin’s cowardly failure this week, there are too many Americans who have no understanding of this country at all. But, unfortunately, all of Joe Manchin’s talk about the need for a bipartisan bill for voting rights appears to be a smokescreen for something darker – and as a result, Mitch McConnell and the rest of the herd will play him like the sucker he is.
John Cole sums it up:
I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.….
In short, Joe Manchin is an idiot and needs to be reined in, and probably has pissed away the opportunity to help the state of West Virginia with any filthy lucre because why should they? We can’t count on him, why would they send projects here? Send it to Murkowski or someone who might vote with the Dems to get to fifty.
Perhaps 40 years ago, this type of foolishness might have been acceptable – but it definitely is not now. Not when there is a race to the bottom among Republican governors to see who can be the biggest asshole. Ron DeSantis is winning, but Gregg Abbott is giving him stiff competition.
It’s not funny at all. Because some of us have already figured out where it’s going to lead:
I have the Cassandra feeling this spring because it is so obvious where all of this is heading. President Trump tells a big lie that elections are rigged. This authorizes him and others to seek power in extra-democratic ways. The lie is institutionalized by state legislation that suppresses voting, and that gives state legislatures themselves the right to decide how to allocate the electoral vote in presidential elections.
The scenario then goes like this. The Republicans win back the House and Senate in 2022, in part thanks to voter suppression. The Republican candidate in 2024 loses the popular vote by several million and the electoral vote by the margin of a few states. State legislatures, claiming fraud, alter the electoral count vote. The House and Senate accept that altered count. The losing candidate becomes the president. We no longer have a “democratically elected government.” And people are angry.
No one is seeking to hide that this is the plan. It is right there out in the open. The prospective Republican candidates for 2024, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley, are all running on a big lie platform. If your platform is that elections do not work, you are saying that you intend to come to power some other way. The big lie is designed not to win an election, but to discredit one. Any candidate who tells it is alienating most Americans, and preparing a minority for a scenario where fraud is claimed. This is just what Trump tried in 2020, and it led to a coup attempt in January 2021. It will be worse in January 2025.
And once installed – and let’s be clear – like 2016, it will be an installation, not an election. They will go berserk, setting up their own version of Gilead by doing their damndest to strangle the opposition. Figuratively if not literally. Personally, I think it’s the latter. As someone who has seen a good deal of the world, I know both the good and the bad of this globe, and one has only to look at places like Hungary and Poland to see how easy democracy can be stolen from out from under a population.
History is littered with the corpses of those who did not take the threat seriously. Dr. Snyder has studied the rise of fascism and published three very excellent books warning all of us of the danger: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century; The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America; and Our Malady.
Overwrought, you say? He’s been right in all of his predictions so far. He predicted that Russia would invade Ukraine in 2014; He documented Trump’s Russia connection in 2016, And he predicted the big lie.
He’s trying to want us again. Will we listen? I know I am – but will the apathetic herd wake up in time?
The anti-voter laws proposed and passed by Republican state legislatures around the country move the scenario to its next step. Halting them might well be the only way to halt the scenario as a whole. Businesses that want to avoid chaos between now and 2022 and prevent system breakdown in 2024 would be well advised not to donate to politicians who repeat the big lie and suppress the vote.
We have to act now. This is what no one wants to hear. We want to believe in American democracy. We want to take pride in new laws, a growing economy, the end of covid. I get all of that. I want to feel that way too. I have not yet figured out how to tell this story. In waking life I feel as I did in the dream, facing those senior citizens. I couldn’t convince a single one of them. And so I just stood in the doorway and kept talking. And woke up in the middle of the night and wrote this.
It’s a truly awful feeling to be Cassandra, isn’t it?
History seems to be littered by the corpses of people who had information about the Clintons. Epstein was not the last one to die suddenly for no reason at all.
Get vaccinated! COVID could really enhance the brain damage already present otherwise.