A Party of Trolls

See the happy trolls. See them use Twitter! Troll them libs, trolls, Troll!

Remember when the Republicans put forth polices, proposed new bills, and fought for their passage? Remember when they composed a party platform that clearly stated their ideals, their values, and their plans for America?

You remember that?

Well, you’d have to be somewhere in your late 40s, because they haven’t done much of that since the 80s, and it wasn’t pretty even then. The 1980s was when the GOP’s ‘War on America’ started in earnest, with hacking at the social infrastructure, huge tax cats that were supposed to ‘kickstart’ the economy (they didn’t) and other draconian measures that undermined the middle class and increased poverty while increasing the number of billionaires.

More Billionaires demanding more tax cuts to be paid for by an ever-shrinking middle class.

Because more billionaires is just what the country needed, of course.

After a while of attacking the poor as lazy, cutting taxes for the rich, defunding or under-funding social programs, and starting wars based on lies (Thanks, George W.), the Republicans grew exhausted, (and lost the White House for eight years) and decided instead of trying to govern, which was hard, they would just… not. Not govern, not try to pass anything particularly helpful, even to their own voters (their donors are another story), just not really do much of anything except make sure nothing that they didn’t propose themselves (and they proposed next to nothing) would pass. Didn’t matter if it might be beneficial to the American people, if the Democrats like it, it must die. No Republican would be allowed to vote ‘yes’ on any Democratic legislation.

Mitch McConnell’s stated goal was to make sure Obama was a ‘one-term president’. If it hurt America in the process, well, tough. The stimulus Obama and the Democrats managed to pass after the crash of 2008 was too small, and everyone knew it. But it was all they could do because of McConnell and the GOP. The Republicans didn’t give a F. Economists now say it lengthened the recession by probably four years. That was McConnell’s plan, to screw the country to kill Obama and the Democrats to gain power, America was just in the line of fire. And it worked.

The GOP has passed one major piece of legislation in ten years, the Trump tax cuts which has already added trillions to the debt, and will add trillions more. As usual, they were sold as a revenue ‘enhancer’ and failed to be so. Sold on lies, just like everything else the GOP has advanced in the past 40+ years. Passed, btw, though reconciliation, which is good when they do it, but totally unfair when the Democrats do it.

Feh.

The Republican party is not a party of policy, it’s a party of trolls. I mean that literally; they don’t live under bridges (if they did they would know how badly those bridges need repair and pass the infrastructure bill) but they live for bullying and trolling others, especially liberals and everything they classify as ‘liberal’. It’s not just the only thing they got, since they’ve abandoned policy (and don’t have the votes to shove through far-right judges anymore), trolling the libs is the only thing on their agenda, it’s what they live for. Troll tweets, troll appearances on Tucker, Hannity, and Pirro, troll bills, troll amendments to bills, troll commercials (that idiotic ‘taking-my-Glock-to-congress thing? What the F was that about?), troll signs outside congressional offices, troll calls for ‘debates’, even chasing after their fellow congresspersons in the halls to scream at them for the cameras. Liberal bait, thrown out to catch liberal outrage. Fox News is a 24/7 troll bait/outrage machine. It’s how they keep the ratings up.

Throw in some White grievance and you got yourself a network.  

The GOP is a proud party of proud trolls. Especially the ones elected in the last few cycles, the younger ones with social media savvy got themselves elected not to change the country, to make anything better, but to tweet, Facebook, Tic-Tok, Instagram, and get in front of as many cameras as possible. Screw policy, their job isn’t legislating, it’s being a media star and then moving on to a berth at Fox, or, in a pinch, OANN, or even NewsMax if they have to. Maybe they’ll start their own media empire using the taxpayer’s salaried position as a stepping stone.

That’s right, we’re funding their own little troll staircase to better things. This is where we are, an entire party that acts like a frat’s twitter account. All performative, all bad faith, all smug and snort, not an honest click of the keyboard among them.

Now this is the place I’d say what we should do to combat this. I don’t have much for you, except to ignore the worst of it, but that’s hard to do with the amplifiers they have. It’s not just the right-wing media turning up their volume, it’s also the left and the mass media helping spread their nonsense. The left gets pissed, and the MSM both-sides the ‘controversy’. Just hunker down and keep doing the work that makes them troll in the first place. Don’t engage. Be like AOC and keep walking. Let them collect their embarrassing campaign b-roll, they will anyway.

They’ll keep pushing until they humiliate themselves, if they can actually feel shame or humiliation.  

Vote for the Human Middle Finger

Donny, innocently ‘scratching’ himself. Yeah, subtle as ever.

It is now blatantly clear: Trump has no plan to deal with the coronavirus. None. The closest he came to a plan was to cross his fingers and hope he could lie it away. 231,000 dead Americans later, we see just how well this has worked. He rails about his great economy, and if everyone would just stop worrying about the virus that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, ignore all precautions and open everything up again, the economy would come ‘roaring’ back. He’s never understood that to save the economy, you have to control the virus. It’s like selling an old car; ‘two dented fenders, seized motor, broken windshield, otherwise mint’. You can’t ignore what’s in front of you and skip to what you want it to be. Everyone knows this.

But to around 40% of voters, that doesn’t matter. They don’t care about the Trump administration’s display of utter incompetence, doesn’t bother them at all. Some will support him no matter what, believing him to be the most sinned-against president in history (he’s not), dragged down and plotted against by the evil cabal of liberal elites (no to that as well), others seems to think his ‘policies’ (racism, misogyny, fewer taxes on the rich and large corporations, snuggling up to murderous dictators, kidnapping children, I could go on and on…) are great for Americans, or at least for them as an individual. Then there are those who just want to see the world burn, who see Trump as a human ‘middle finger’, a ‘fuck you’ to all they and he, hates.

Trump hates all the things that they hate. Fuck you! 

They don’t care that Trump has no plan for the next four years, that he can’t articulate even a vague plan. They just care about ‘owning the libs’ and ‘liberal tears’, the fact that another Trump term will finish his campaign of tearing apart democracy is something they don’t care about, just as long as those ‘libs’ keep crying. The world burns and they’ll go down with it, as long as the evil liberals go first.

Four More Years?

Just what are they torching democracy for? They can’t say, but then neither can the GOP or Trump himself. The Republican platform was literally thrown out for the first time since… the founding of the party? The new plan was ‘Whatever Trump Wants to Do”.

Here’s what Donny told the ace, tough interviewer, Sean Hannity, when he asked what Trump was planning in a second term:

"Well, one of the things that will be really great -- you know, the word experience is still good. I always say talent is more important than experience, I've always said that. But the word experience is a very important word. It's a very important meaning. I never did this before. I never slept over in Washington. I was in Washington, I think, 17 times, all of a sudden, I'm president of the United States. You know the story, I'm riding down Pennsylvania Avenue with our first lady and I say, this is great. But I didn't know very many people in Washington. It wasn't my thing. I was from Manhattan, from New York. Now, I know everybody and I have great people in the administration. You make some mistakes like, you know, an idiot like Bolton. All he wanted to do was drop bombs on everybody. You don't have to drop bombs on everybody. You don't have to kill people." 

And when he was thoughtfully given a do-over chance at the question again:

“I think I’d be similar.”

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe four more years of an out-of-control pandemic, hundreds of thousands of more deaths, economic free-fall, more Nazis killing people, more racial protests, more of the decline of America’s position in the world is exactly what they want, I mean beyond drinking all those sweet, sweet liberal tears. Maybe that’s exactly what they want to happen. Bring on the new civil war, as they were itching to go ‘elite’ hunting anyway, a zombie apocalypse, with liberals as the zombies and Trumpers as Rick and Chuck.

Vote for the Human Middle Finger, bring it on faster.

And watch the world burn.

Here’s the Deal

Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the end-dream of the far-right move to control the courts.

Here’s the deal, as Joe Biden would say. The moderates in the Democratic Party constantly complain that the progressive wing won’t support them, won’t turn out for elections featuring moderate candidates, and complain that the moderate policies they push are, well, too moderate.

The progressive wing says that they have no seat at the table, that their ideas are consistently ignored, even ridiculed, and their support, when granted, is rarely rewarded. Why bother when they’re not listened too, are given no power in return for your support, and left out of major policy decisions?

In the past, campaigns have been won using the progressive’s ideals and style: Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign was a progressive (for its time) campaign, and Obama’s 2008, and especially his 2012 campaigns were as well. And then they turn into moderates. It’s almost a bait-and-switch. What happened?

Clinton ran hard into a wall GOP hate, constant bogus investigations, and he quickly tacked right. Obama was always more moderate than he campaigned, and was only too happy to run a center left administration. He also faced strong GOP opposition, taking too long to take their threats seriously, not believing the Republicans when they said they wanted to destroy him.

The deal is? The Republicans DO want to destroy you! Believe them when they say this, they’re serious. And they have been working towards this for decades. Denying Obama more than a hundred judicial nominees, and a SCOTUS seat, to pack the courts with far right (and unqualified) judges. It was a major, long awaited play for them and now this last rush to pack the Supreme Court is endgame, probably checkmate.

How does our moderate Democratic candidate want to address this? With a plan to take back the stolen courts with a legal expansion, to protect rights and laws that have been passed?

No.

He wants a blue-ribbon, bi-partisan committee.

Joe.

Pal…

No.  

Buddy, you’re a nice guy, I like you, already voted for you. But this is not the way to handle what the Republicans have been up to. This is pretty much what they (barring killing it altogether) want you to do. It’s like this; you know when you would ask your parents “can we go the movies” or “have pizza tonight” and they would say ‘We’ll see.” “We’ll see” was always “No.”

Always.

It’s a parent’s way of saying ‘no’ without have to disappoint expectant, hopeful faces by slapping them with a blunt declaration.

A ‘committee’ is the “We’ll see” of government.

This is just a way to get the subject off the table and kill momentum. This is exactly why the left has had it with the moderates and why the Democrats have gotten steamrolled by the right time after time. The moderates seem to think they're dealing with a reasonable, functioning GOP, and no amount of evidence will convince that they face a party of radicals, intent on destroying them and repealing the 20th Century. Haven't they been paying attention to the hearings going on right now?!

The moderates will dither, think, investigate and when they finally decided to act, it'll be a year too late. The right has no compunction to follow rules and will be throwing case after case at the now far-right SCOTUS to kill voting rights, healthcare, kill gun restrictions, and destroy protections for the LGBTQ community. They’re achieved their dream, and they’re giddy with power. They will move as fast as they can, while a bi-partisan, blue-ribbon panel meets, drinks coffee and snags Costco poppy seed muffins from the muffin basket. And talks and talks…

The GOP is seeing their electoral power shrink as the country changes and diversifies, and instead of trying to appeal to a larger majority, they doubled down on what they have, and threw themselves into a decades long quest to install their minority power in such a way that they can still control the country without being elected by a majority. Packing the courts (as McConnell himself called it) would do just that.

If the GOP insists on going forward and voting in this last attempt to killing the Living Constitution, the Democrats must take steps to reign them in, using every tool at their disposal. We have to hit the ground running, prepared to contain and repair the damage done by righting the system and restoring some fairness to institutions that have been deliberately broken.

We don’t have time to stop and think too much about it, and I doubt that are any sane Republicans who would participate in such a committee (the party would never forgive them).

It’s up to us, Joe, don’t tie our hands when we need them to fight.