Image du Jour

With thanks to commenter duke of gibbon at Friendly Atheist:

The article is worth reading, on how evangelical"Christians" are really just power-hungry hypocriets. Thinking back, it occurs to me that the "Moral Majority", which Reagan's handlers enlisted to boost his election chances (Tail Wags Dog! Film at 11) was never a religious movement. It was always a political movement. And evangelical "Christianity" is still a political movement.

Burn-Out

I've gotten to the point where, skimming the headlines in the morning, if they mention Trump, the latest polls, the election, etc., I skip the story. I'm not wishing for it to be November 4 -- that won't be the end of it. I'm wishing for it to be January 21, 2021, when President Biden is safely installed in office and the current resident is trying to find some dictator to take him in.

Read It and Weep

Pew has done another survey. This one should give you pause:

Today, about half of Americans (49%) say the Bible should have at least “some” influence on U.S. laws, including nearly a quarter (23%) who say it should have “a great deal” of influence, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Among U.S. Christians, two-thirds (68%) want the Bible to influence U.S. laws at least some, and among white evangelical Protestants, this figure rises to about nine-in-ten (89%).

Here's the breakdown:

It gets worse:

All survey respondents who said the Bible should have at least “some” influence on U.S. laws were asked a follow-up question: When the Bible and the will of the people conflict, which should have more influence on U.S. laws?

The more common answer to this question is that the Bible should take priority over the will of the people. This view is expressed by more than a quarter of all Americans (28%). About one-in-five (19%) say the Bible should have at least some influence but that the will of the people should prevail.

Two religious groups stand out for being especially supportive of biblical influence in legislation, even if that means going against the will of the American people: Two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants (68%) say the Bible should take precedence over the people, and half of black Protestants say the same. Among Catholics (25%) and white Protestants who do not identify as born-again or evangelical (27%), only about a quarter share this perspective.

I've been saying for a while that evangelical Christians simply don't believe in democracy -- their whole religious philosophy is founded on authoritarianism.

However, all is not lost:

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s broad opposition to biblical influence on U.S. laws among religiously unaffiliated Americans, also known as religious “nones,” who identify as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” Roughly three-quarters in this group (78%) say the Bible should hold little to no sway, including 86% of self-described atheists who say the Bible should not influence U.S. legislation at all. Two-thirds of U.S. Jews, as well, think the Bible should have not much or should have no influence on laws.

One thing that tends to get glossed over, if mentioned at all, in reporting on the doings of the "religious" right, is that they're a minority. Unfortunately, over the past couple of generations, the Republicans have managed to put too many of them into positions of influence.

Time to clean house.

Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Today's Must-Read: Am I Surprised?

Not really: The "Christian" right is turning Americans off to religion:

A few weeks ago, the Democratic National Committee formally acknowledged what has been evident for quite some time: Nonreligious voters are a critical part of the party’s base. In a one-page resolution passed at its annual summer meeting, the DNC called on Democratic politicians to recognize and celebrate the contributions of nonreligious Americans, who make up one-third of Democrats. In response, Robert Jeffress, a Dallas pastor with close ties to Trump, appeared on Fox News, saying the Democrats were finally admitting they are a “godless party.”

This was hardly a new argument. Conservative Christian leaders have been repeating some version of this claim for years, and have often called on religious conservatives and Republican politicians to defend the country against a growing wave of liberal secularism. And it’s true that liberals have been leaving organized religion in high numbers over the past few decades. But blaming the Democrats, as Jeffress and others are wont to do, doesn’t capture the profound role that conservative Christian activists have played in transforming the country’s religious landscape, and the role they appear to have played in liberals’ rejection of organized religion.

It's beyond hope that someone as arrogant and self-absorbed as Robert Jeffress would confess to being the problem, if he could even entertain the notion. However:

Social scientists were initially reluctant to entertain the idea that a political backlash was somehow responsible, because it challenged long-standing assumptions about how flexible our religious identities really are. Even now, the idea that partisanship could shape something as personal and profound as our relationship with God might seem radical, or maybe even a little offensive.

But when two sociologists, Michael Hout and Claude Fischer, began to look at possible explanations for why so many Americans were suddenly becoming secular, those conventional reasons couldn’t explain why religious affiliation started to fall in the mid-1990s. Demographic and generational shifts also couldn’t fully account for why liberals and moderates were leaving in larger numbers than conservatives. In a paper published in 2002, they offered a new theory: Distaste for the Christian right’s involvement with politics was prompting some left-leaning Americans to walk away from religion.

I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that most Americans at least in theory believe in traditional American values: equality under the law, welcoming immigrants (and unless you're a pureblooded American Indian, your ancestors were immigrants -- although, taking a somewhat longer view, every human being in the Americas is descended from immigrants, given that there were no humans here until about 15,000 years ago), generosity, a government that actually does provide for the common welfare, those sorts of things, all of which are diametrically opposed to the Republican-evangelical program.

Do take the time to read the whole report -- it's pretty interesting, if a little soft-pedaled.

Via The New Civil Rights Movement.

Guess What's In the News Today?

And yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. . . .

I couldn't resist:

Here's an interesting take on the rationale behind the wall impasse:

(And if you thought it was the "breaking news" about Trump being a Russian asset -- we knew that.)

Today's Must-Read: Exodus

It seems that conservatism, as it is constituted today, and evangelical Christianity -- the real stuff, not the "religious right" -- aren't such a good fit after all:

Since the 1970s, white evangelicals have formed the backbone of the Republican base. But as younger members reject the vitriolic partisanship of the Trump era and leave the church, that base is getting smaller and older. The numbers are stark: Twenty years ago, just 46 percent of white evangelical Protestants were older than 50; now, 62 percent are above 50. The median age of white evangelicals is 55. Only 10 percent of Americans under 30 identify as white evangelicals. The exodus of youth is so swift that demographers now predict that evangelicals will likely cease being a major political force in presidential elections by 2024.

And the cracks are already showing.

In the 2018 midterms, exit polls showed, white evangelicals backed Republicans by 75 to 22 percent, while the rest of the voting population favored Democrats 66 to 32 percent. But evangelicals were slightly less likely to support House Republicans in 2018 than they were to support Trump in 2016—which may have contributed to the Democrats’ pickup of House seats. Trump’s support actually declined more among white evangelical men than women. The 11-point gender gap between evangelical men and women from 2016 shrank to 6 in the midterms.

Here's what seems to me to be the real issue:

To be sure, evangelical Christians have been rewarded for their support of Trump after enduring eight years wandering in Barack Obama’s political desert. They have two new conservative Supreme Court justices, and there have been nine self-professed evangelical Cabinet members, plus a flurry of laws and executive orders clamping down on gender roles, abortion and LGBTQ rights. But experts say this may represent the last bounty for a waning political power. Unlike their parents, the younger generation is not animated by the culture wars; many are pushing for social justice for migrants and LGBTQ people and campaigning against mass incarceration—positions more in line with the Democratic Party.

And, to paraphrase: It's the hypocrisy, stupid!

“The fact is that leaders like [Dallas megachurch leader and Trump supporter] Robert Jeffress and Jerry Falwell Jr. are blatantly power hungry and willing to make these alliances, providing a theology that supports white nationalism.”

It's worth reading the whole thing, which provides some good historical background on the whole movement.

Via NCRM.

Today's Must-Read: Don't Believe, Part II (Update)

As a follow-up to this post from yesterday, I ran across this article this morning that points up just how malignant not only Republicans are in their messaging, but how pretty much everyone in Washington, or writing about Washington, or commenting on Washington, falls into the same traps:

In a recent New York Times interview, Ocasio-Cortez mentioned how hard it is to find affordable housing in Washington; conservative pundits alternated between laughing at this and dismissing it as spin. Judy Miller, on Fox: “I think what she’s talking about is all of the money in Washington, all of the wealth in Washington, all of the power—and a little, simple person like her from New York can’t find a place to live. It is a brilliant political line.”

The author goes on to comment on how easy it is to weaponize hypocrisy.

This one's really hard to excerpt -- read the whole thing. It's not that long, and makes some good points. (Although the author does buy into the "protest" mischaracterization of Ocasio-Cortez' demonstration at Pelosi's office.)

With thanks to commenter SoCalGal20 at Joe.My.God.

Update: Whoopi Goldberg takes down Eddie Scarry, the commentator who first criticized Ocasio-Cortez' clothes.

Political Ad of the Year

To be honest, I'm surprised to see a Democrat playing hardball like this -- watch all the way through:

Thanks to commenter BeccaM at Joe.My.God.

Today's Must-Read: Warren Throws Down the Gauntlet

Tom Sullivan has an eye-opener at Hullabaloo on two bills Elizabeth Warren introduced this week, which got pretty much lost in the brouhaha over Trump's cronies being convicted.

The first is the Accountable Capitalism Act:

Warren's first, the Accountable Capitalism Act, we discussed here on Saturday. It is nothing less than an attempt to save capitalism from its worst excesses.

A sign Warren's Accountable Capitalism Act has hit its mark are the squeals from the right. A hyperventilating Kevin Williamson claims in the National Review the Accountable Capitalism Act calls for “the wholesale expropriation of private enterprise in the United States, and nothing less.” Adding, "utterly bonkers." A blog headline at Reason blasts, "Elizabeth Warren Plans To Destroy Capitalism By Pretending To ‘Save’ It".

The second is ever worse, from the viewpoint of our elected representatives and their owners:

Warren's followup punch, a nearly 300-page Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act dropped on Tuesday and must have sent D.C. insiders rushing to cover their punch bowls. Except with #TrumpfellasTuesday news alerts booming like a trailer voiced by Don LaFontaine, Warren's roll-out may have been lost among the headlines announcing convictions of Trump's known associates. More the shame. This second bill is an attempt to save Washington from its worst excesses.

She's thrown down the gauntlet, all right, not only for the Republicans and the money guys, but for Democrats as well. (Who, as tristero points out in another post at Hullbaloo, are gearing up once again to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.)

Taking the Knee: Beto O'Rourke Gets It Right

O'Rourke is running for Ted Cruz' senate seat from Texas, and he's got Cruz worried. Episodes like this are one reason why:

And in case you were wondering, yes, I support the football players and anyone else who protests the rampant murder of blacks by police. Don't forget it was Trump who shifted it to disrespect for the flag and the military -- another lie from the primary source of fake news.

OK, This Is Funny

The 2020 Republican convention is already having problems:

Cities across the country are turning down the opportunity to host the 2020 Republican National Convention, where President Trump is expected to be nominated for a second term.

The cities that have rejected hosting duties insist Trump and today’s divisive politics are not factors in their decisions. They instead cite high security costs and disruptions in the normal flow of business and traffic.

But Trump is almost certainly a factor in some cities’ decisions to opt out.

Ya think?

It gets better:

“Most of the cities that have turned down the RNC are Democratic cities,” said Evan Siegfried, a New York-based Republican strategist.

I have news for Mr. Seigfried: most cities in this country are Democratic.

Via Joe.My.God.

It's About Time

HRC joins the fray:

The nation's most influential LGBT rights advocacy group announced Tuesday that it will spend $26 million and hire at least 20 additional political staffers to deploy across all 50 states ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. The goal: replicate what happened in North Carolina in Senate, House and governor's races across the nation next year and make the LGBT vote one of the most forceful voting blocs in the progressive movement.

The impetus: Like so many fired-up left-leaning groups these days, it's President Trump.

“I think folks believed that after the Supreme Court ruled on marriage, that we were headed quickly toward a place of full equality in this country,” said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign. “And the president's attacks on our community — and so many minority communities — has served to be, in many ways, a great awakening of our democracy.”

Like many in the LGBT community, I've been more than a little ambivalent about HRC: they've been largely ineffective, and a few moves -- wanting to horn in on the Prop 8 case after spending years arguing against pursuing marriage equality, the focus on ENDA to the exclusion of everything else -- have given me a distinctly negative impression.

However:

The Human Rights Campaign isn't a newcomer to politics. The group has been around since 1980 and has field and volunteer staff across the nation. But Griffin said until now, the group had the resources to drop into a political battle only for a couple of months, then leave when it was over.

Since Trump got elected, donations to the group are flooding in (most donations are under $10), LGBT people are stepping out alongside other progressive groups to protest and, for the first time, there will be a dedicated effort to keep this community politically activated.

The Human Rights Campaign will be investing in all 50 states but will put its North Carolina model to the test specifically in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada. They're all swing states, most of which Trump won, and all have big 2018 Senate races as well as some potentially competitive governor's races.

At this point, although I'm not from Missouri, show me.

Via Towleroad.

Today's Must-Read: It's Not About Jobs

Thought-provoking and fairly depressing article on why Trump won as many votes as he did:

The story we’ve told ourselves — that working-class whites flocked to Trump due to job worries or free trade or economic populism — is basically wrong, the research papers released this week suggest.

They did flock to Trump. But the reason they did so in enough numbers for Trump to win wasn’t anxiety about the economy. It was anxiety about Mexicans, Muslims and blacks.

Here’s how they put it in academese: “What stands out most, however, is the attitudes that became more strongly related to the vote in 2016: attitudes about immigration, feelings toward black people, and feelings toward Muslims,” writes George Washington University professor John Sides. He notes that the media focused on less-educated whites, but negative racial attitudes fueled by Trump were a big motivator for college-educated whites, too.

A substantial share of Trump voters “appeared to embrace a conception of American identity predicated on birthplace and especially Christian faith,” Sides found.

I have to confess that racism/ethnocentrism is something I don't understand, except on an intellectual level. Partly, it's the way I was raised: although my parents held all the biases they were raised with, they were at pains not to pass them on -- we were taught to take people as people. So, when I left my lily-white, heavily Christian small town (there were two Jewish families in town; the first African-Americans moved in the year I went away to college) and started meeting and befriending all sorts of different people, my parents welcomed my Jewish girlfriend, my Cuban best friend, and my black friends.

And partly it's because I know too much about how we came to be what we are: given that we are all descended from a small group of women who lived in East Africa about 200,000 years ago (based on evidence from mitochondrial DNA), and given that the genetic difference between human races is too small to measure (hell, the difference between us and chimpanzees is less than 2%), and given that casual miscegenation has been an ongoing phenomenon throughout human history (and even before we were writing things down: non-African humans living today carry between 2-4% Neanderthal genes), that kind of racial attitude just isn't much of a motivator with me.

But those attitudes are ingrained in American society, it seems: racial prejudice, sadly, is not something we as a people are not going to put to rest anytime soon. It's gotten to be such a sensitive subject that we don't want to talk about it, which is not going to help solve the problem.

And so we have mountebanks like Donald Trump who use those attitudes, who play on them to get the support they need to win elections. It's not just Trump: although I'm generally reluctant to deal in broad generalizations, the Republican party has staked out that territory for itself -- the "party of Lincoln" hasn't been that since 1964. They've deliberately sought out the extreme Christianists (remember the "Moral Majority" and how Reagan thought he could use them to deliver his agenda? Tail wags dog.), the unregenerate Confederate apologists, and the out-and-out racists.

And of course, there are always new scary people: in recent years, it's been gays and Latinos, and now it's Muslims and trans folk. (It's gotten pretty extreme: have you noticed how American attitudes toward Europe have changed in the past twenty years?)

Yes, there is what seems to be an almost hard-wired "us/them" component to our psychology (that's something that goes way back, to the beginnings of sociality -- sociality and fiercely defended group territories go hand in hand) but given our much-touted intelligence, we ought to be able to work past that.

Apparently not.

At any rate, read the whole thing -- it's sobering, to say the least.

Via Digby, who sums it up nicely:

This is an inconvenient story and nobody wants to hear it because economic determinism does not explain it. And if there's any true state religion in America, on all sides of the political spectrum, it's economic determinism. Money explains everything.

Except it doesn't. Humans are complicated creatures motivated by many things and money is only one of them.

It's not even the best one.

Another Day, Another Campaign Rally

He's still running for president -- that's all he knows how to do:

Donald Trump cost taxpayers’ at least $400,000 last night to headline the Celebrate Freedom Concert last night in Washington D.C., utilizing his first 4th of July Speech as president to attack the media, praise an anti-gay pastor and pander for the evangelical and veteran votes.

Trump began his speech by praising Robert Jeffress, the anti-gay megachurch pastor who’s linked homosexuality to both pedophilia and disease. “Pastor, you… have stood with us since the very, very beginning,” Trump said, “and I will always stand with you. I’ve told you that, and I mean that, I will always be with you. I appreciate it.”

The president quickly began pandering for the evangelical vote, touching on the faux “War on Christmas” and promising “we’re going to start saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again.” And although he took the time to block VoteVets, which advises it “represents over 500K vets, military families and supporters” on Twitter, Trump didn’t shy away from seeking the veteran vote, either.

And it seems that pandering works both ways:

.@firstbaptistdallas' choir premiered a song composed to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan https://t.co/VhtAi0C2Qz #CelebrateFreedom pic.twitter.com/DeBQ9t3iHj

— Religion NewsService (@RNS) July 2, 2017

“Thank you to everyone from First Baptist Dallas,” Trump said at the beginning of his speech. “Tonight, we have been inspired by music that fills our hearts, stirs our souls and reminds us all of who we are: one nation, under God.”

“I heard them backstage, I said ‘let me out there, that is the most beautiful music,’” Trump said, momentarily leaving his teleprompter behind. “Your music honors our heroes more than words could ever do.”

There's video at the link, if you really have to see it.

Aside from the rank hypocrisy of his first comment, please take note: a reminder, if you will, that a certain brand of "Christians" strongly favor dictators. (Just look at the history of Europe and America in the 20th century.) That's what comes of following a religion that emphasizes subservience.

That's all the Trump news I can stomach for today.

Georgia 6th

Well, Karen Handel, who has got to be one of the least appealing candidates in modern election history, won -- by about 5 points. There's been a lot of wailing and rending of garments on the left -- sure, it would have been stupendous if Ossof had taken the seat, but what's not being looked at by a lot of people is the actual numbers. Josh Marshall has what I think in the right perspective on this one:

All this being said, this is a heavily Republican district and Republicans just barely held on to the seat. Yes, nbspDemocrats gave it everything they had, with small donors from around the country pouring money into the race. But Republican SuperPacs poured millions into the race too. In the last three elections, Tom Price won this seat by 65%, 66% and 62%. A significant part of those almost 2 to 1 margins was due to the fact that Democrats fielded only nominal candidates who raised little or no money. But these are chicken and egg type questions. It is precisely because this is a strongly Republican district that Price drew no serious contenders. A better measure are the recent presidential results. There John McCain won the district by 62% and Mitt Romney won it by 61%. To use yet another measure, 538 rates it a +9.5 Republican district, which means it’s 9.5 percentage points more GOP than the country as a whole.

Democrats have lost five special elections to fill seats left vacant by Trump's cabinet appointments -- but they have lost by narrow margins. As Marshall points out, these were all "safe" Republican seats. They're not so safe any more.

Which all boils down to one thing: the GOP is going to have a fight on its hands in 2018. Can the Democrats take back Congress? Frankly, I doubt it, although the Senate might be a possibility. (Don't forget how heavily the Republicans in state legislatures have gerrymandered congressional districts to dilute minority/Democratic votes.) There might be some surprises, and a lot is going to depend on how horrible the Republicans' secret health care "reform" turns out to be -- and how smart the Democrats are about using that.

It's going to be issues like health care, jobs, and national security that are going to be key. Harping on how Trump and the Republicans are destroying American democracy isn't going to cut it: most people are very confident in the strength of our system, and Republicans don't think much of democracy to begin with.

And don't think Republican strategists aren't very aware of how their base is being eroded. They'll go low, because that's all they have. (And I can't quite shake the feeling that the press will fall in line.)

It's going to be an interesting couple of years.

Today's Must-Read: About Small Government (Update)

It would seem that The Hairpiece, in his quest to destroy the federal government, is, again, out of step:

Credit: Lowe - South Florida Sun Sentinel

A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that, in the words of NBC’s Carrie Dann, “a record number of Americans say that the government should do more — not less — in order to solve the nation’s problems.”

This is a major change from the 1990s, when most Americans felt that government “does too many things better left to businesses and individuals.”

There has even been a significant shift in the last two years alone. In 2015, 50 percent of voters thought the government should do more. Today that figure is 57 percent. 46 percent of those polled that year thought government did too much. That figure is now down to 39 percent.

Some history:

The financial crisis of 2008 awakened many people to the risks posed by the private sector, and to the need for government services in the wreckage created by Wall Street greed. The Occupy movement triggered an important national dialogue about inequality and the increasing diversion of national wealth to a privileged and powerful few.

The Bernie Sanders presidential campaign gave a political voice to this movement during the 2016 campaign. Even Donald Trump was forced to get into the game. He promised to repair American infrastructure and create millions of jobs, said he would renegotiate job-killing trade deals, and insisted that he would not cut Social Security or Medicare.

I've long maintained that the right-wing insistence on the private sector as the solution to any problem is pure bullshit -- and it looks like it's becoming more and more obvious, now that we have an out-and-out plutocrat in the White House, just how much of a sham it is. Have the private sector take care of infrastructure? That means every road is a toll road. Turn Social Security over to Wall Street? We've seen how good the banksters are with other people's money -- remember the Great Recession of 2008? Make all schools private schools? We know where that leads -- teachers treated like serfs and children graduating without knowing anything. Oh, and how about access to health insurance through the private sector? We know how that worked out: excellent care, for the few who can afford it.

Yes, government does have a very necessary role in all that sort of stuff.

Read the whole thing -- some interesting analysis there.

Update: And another, via Digby, on the same topic (sort of):

Myth 3: The Country Should Be Run Like a Business

Related to the above two myths is the idea that the best person for the presidency is not only a political outsider, but one with experience running a business. Again, this is pretty bizarre. Businesses and governments do very different things to create jobs, providing mandated services is very different from serving voluntary customers for profit, and the federal government can print money and run debts over a very long time period while that might prove fatal to a business. But this, too, was one of Trump’s rationales for running for office; he made money in the private sector (at least in some years), so he’d be good for the government’s bottom line.

The idea that government should show a profit, or at least break even, is sort of bizarre when you look at it: over the past few decades, it's been pretty much proven that the economy does best when the government is running a deficit -- not a big deficit (but then, maybe we should stop giving the ultra-wealthy and the multinationals a free ride), but a moderate deficit.

Read this one, too -- it's short.

My Sentiments, Exactly

*sigh*

Via Balloon Juice.

Hypocrisy, or Chutzpah?

Not only have the GOP turned into a party of sociopaths, they've gotten quite brazen about it:

Mitch McConnell, who suffered no political penalty for his cynical block of a middle-of-the-road Supreme Court nominee spoke out today on Senator Schumer's promise to block any nominee extreme enough to pass Republican inspection.

"Apparently there's a new standard now which is to not confirm a Supreme Court nominee at all," McConnell groused. "I think that's something the American people simply will not tolerate and will be looking forward to receiving a Supreme Court nomination and moving forward on it."

This is where I remind everyone that just several days before the election, Senate Republicans were promising to block any nominee Hillary Clinton might put forward for consideration.

I'm of the opinion that the Democrats should stop playing nice -- use the Republicans' tactics against them until we get what we want ("we" in this case being people who are not Wall street billionaires or Russian dictators).

Especially considering the Hairpiece's list of potential Supreme Court nominees.

McConnell's invocation of the "Biden rule" is 99 and 44/100 percent bullshit. Maybe a little more. Here's what Biden actually said at the time and the context in which those remarks occurred.

A Thought (Updated, and Again)

(A Note: I may be adding links to this as the day goes on, when I find stories that illustrate some of my points.)

This spins off of a comment I left at this post at AmericaBlog, which concerns itself with how James Comey -- working against DoJ and FBI policy and quite possibly in violation of the Hatch Act -- announced "new evidence" in FBI's investigation of Clinton's State Department e-mails and how the FBI is building on it that leak. Aravosis has done a Facebook Live session on it in which he's done a good job of pulling together all threads of the various FBI leaks over the past week and going back to Comey's press conference in July when he announced the results of the e-mail investigation (which itself caused some raised eyebrows, especially considering how he went out of his way to indict Clinton without being able to call for an indictment). You'll have to watch that at the post, since I can't embed Facebook videos. You can skip the first couple of minutes, when he's fiddling with the camera, but it is worth watching.

Here's the comment that sparked my larger thought, and my response:

crazymonkeylady • 5 hours ago

Even if Donald Trump Doesn't win, he has scarred elections for years. And Comey has undermined the trust we have in the FBI for the future. Who do we have left to trust? Nobody.

rmthunter -- crazymonkeylady • 37 minutes ago

This is just another step in what I see as the Republicans' long-term effort to undermine the American system -- shutting down the government when they don't get a budget that guts the safety net, questioning the integrity of the courts when there's a decision they don't like, refusing to fill a Supreme Court vacancy until they can make it a blatant political appointment, using their power of "government oversight" to instigate political witch-hunts against their opponents, and now undermining our trust in not only our electoral system, over and above voter suppression, but also in our federal law enforcement agencies.

After all, a healthy democracy and an oligarchy are pretty much mutually exclusive.

Think back to the Clinton years and the investigations that led to his impeachment. Can you say "fishing expedition"? And shutting down the government when the Republican budget -- no deficit, no revenues -- failed to pass. (That bit them in the ass, happily.) Stonewalling Obama on everything -- it's a good thing the ACA passed when it did, and a good thing the Democrats in Congress took the reins on DADT repeal. Fast forward to the "investigations" of Benghazi!!1! (ten so far?) and E-Mails!!! (which some Republican senator, I've forgotten which one, was dumb enough to admit was purely political against Hillary Clinton).

And how about the reaction to Obergefell? And now, refusing to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Not stalling, not holding interminable hearings, just flat-out refusing until a Republican president can make the appointment. We don't even have the pretense of compromise any more.

I don't think this is random. The pattern is too clear, and while I don't think it's the result of any grand strategy (sorry, I don't do tinfoil hats, and the Republicans aren't that together), it's the inevitable playing out of a trend, with each new player ready and more than willing to build on what's gone before. The Republicans' goal is quite clear, and they've been quite open about it: a permanent majority, by whatever means necessary. (They can't do it by honest elections, because what policies they do have most Americans find distressing, at best. In spite of what the press has been telling us, the only way we've moved to the right in this country is by measure of which wingnuts get elected, and that, more often than not, is not the result of honest elections -- not after all the gerrymandering and voter ID laws and dangling chads.)

I'm a great believer in the processes of history, which itself is a series of reactions. I think right now we're seeing the tail end of the reaction to the liberalism of the 1960s and early '70s -- conservatism has gotten too radical for most Americans to tolerate, and the advent of Trump - and something like Trump was inevitable -- painting the picture in somewhat garish colors is starting to turn people off. My basic optimism says the pendulum will start to swing back.

But, a thought experiment: Way back, when Bill Clinton right after assuming office took the first steps toward open military service for gays and lesbians, the reaction was swift and violent. What you don't hear about these days is that it was a group of generals who went flying to Congressional Republicans to put a stop to it. Now, given that it's at least as likely that there is a group of mid-level officers at the Pentagon who are as unhappy with the left as that group of disgruntled agents at the FBI, transpose that little rebellion to the armed forces.

If that doesn't set you tossing and turning in your sleep, nothing will.

Footnote: When I said "By any means necessary" I meant it. Check out this from Joe.My.God. and think who has the Russian connections.


Update: Just ran across this from the Guardian, which throws some light on the chaos at the FBI:

Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.

“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.

Add this Update, from Rachel Maddow:

This week, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that there has been, I guess you’d call it, like, a breakout? There’s been a breakout from this otherwise insular little Breitbart.com corner of conservative media and political activism.

Those two papers reported that apparently there are Breitbart.com fans, there are Breitbart.com true believers, there are people who buy this stuff who are working inside the New York field office of the FBI.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal were first to report that the New York field office of the FBI used that anti-Hillary Clinton book, and the DVD of the same name, from the Breitbart.com guys, from the Breitbart.com editor and his boss who’s now the head of the Donald Trump campaign, the one funded by Donald Trump’s biggest donor, right? They actually used that Breitbart.com, anti-Hillary Clinton book as their source for launching a local FBI inquiry into Hillary Clinton. That was their evidence. That was their research.

And let's not forget this (via Joe.My.God.):

There is no denying that former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has become one of the most significant surrogates of this campaign cycle.

Mr. Mayor has been going to bat for his longtime pal Donald Trump in just about every conceivable media arena, and recently seemed to slip in a bit of surprising information to Martha MacCallum of Fox News. At the conclusion of an interview on October 26 about the presidential election, Giuliani (while speaking about FBI Director Jim Comey) said, “I think he’s got a surprise or two you’re going to hear about in the next two days. I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.” When MacCallum prompted the Mayor for follow-up, he coyly continued, “You’ll see.”

Don Lemon reported it on his show. Video at the link.

Maybe I'd better rethink this whole "no grand conspiracy" thing.

The Truth Slips Outt

Once again, the Hairpiece tells it like it is. Speaking in Colorado -- of course, it was about how the election is going to be stolen from him by election workers destroying ballots they "don't like" -- he came up with this:

Later in his speech, Trump reiterated: "I don't love the concept of ballots."

Now, we already know he doesn't like elections:

Donald Trump suggested today that the election should be canceled and called for him.

Speaking in Ohio, the Republican presidential nominee questioned why the election was even being held, saying that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's policies are "so bad."

"In just thinking to myself right now, we should just cancel the election and just give it to Trump, right?" he said. "Why are we even having it for? What are we having it for? Her policies are so bad. Boy, do we have a big difference."

Trump is not an outlier among Republicans: they've been trying to de-legitimize our whole system for years, with attacks on the courts, putting fundamental rights up to popular vote, chipping away at women's rights, voting rights, and now marriage rights, to the extent that Trump's statements are the logical next step.

And the scary thing is, a significant number of his supporters are on board with that.