Category: Assholes
Scum grows on the Supreme Court

Scum grows on the Supreme Court

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The travesty of legal debate displayed by the “conservatives” on the Supreme Court this week is just what decent people would expect.

I pass over without remark the ridiculous sophistry that attends all arguments marshaled by “justices” who owe their fealty to the Federalist Society—the fake legal society that exists solely to create bullshit smokescreens for “conservatives” to throw up around them.

Instead, I want to draw attention to Amy Coney Barrett’s astoundingly heartless suggestion that the torment of a state-enforced pregnancy could be expunged simply by taking the child off the mother’s hands though easily arranged adoptions.

No decent person could even let such a idea escape their lips. Behind it is blackness, thoughtless superiority, judgmental disdain for others. Perhaps a person like Amy Coney Barrett could carry a pregnancy to term and then let the baby go to who knows whom, to be raised who knows how, never giving a thought to the welfare of the child she brought into the world. But no decent person could. The thousands of decent women who will be forced do just that will suffer thousands of tragedies at the hands of Amy Coney Barrett and her fanatical religious colleagues on the the court.

And so will all the women and children impregnated by rape and incest, for which there is no exception in these vile “conservative” anti-abortion laws. Amy Coney Barrett and her co-conspirators on the court didn’t even think their tragedies worth a single mention during the arguments last Wednesday.

These “justices” are as intelligent as weasels and as empathetic as wolves.

And they are salivating with glee at the thought of finally being able to impose their minority opinions on the majority.

Only villains are so vicious. And “conservatives.”
What is lower than scum? Republicans.

What is lower than scum? Republicans.

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Even though I’ve been railing about Scum America for years now, I still get mail about how harsh I am on Republicans. I stopped caring about such mail long ago. The people who write it are out of touch with reality, or Scum America sympathizers, or pie-in-the-sky optimists who still think Republicans are just normal people with strong opinions.

I can’t be bothered with criticism from such people, especially when the fate of our democracy is balanced on a knife’s edge.

I’m not the only one. Yesterday, Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald explained, in much politer language than I tend to use, why he has had it with Republicans.

Pitts had earlier referred to “Mike Pence and others who have apparently sworn an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Florida taco bowl connoisseur who used to be president” as “you people.” A number of his readers took umbrage. One of them said, “‘You people?’ How dare you lump all Trump voters like that.”

Now I’ve been saying for a long time that anyone who still supports Trump is objectively scum—for the simple reason that if you stand together with assholes, justify their assholery, revel in their asshole antics, and imitate their asshole attitudes, you are yourself an asshole.

But Pitt puts it more elegantly.

I venerate the ideals on which this country was founded. . . . Unalienable rights. Life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Freedom of speech. Of faith. Of conscience. Government by consent of the governed. Equality before the law. Because of those ideals, America already was a revolution even before it won independence from England. Despite themselves, a band of slaveholding white men somehow founded a nation based on an aspirational, transformational declaration of fundamental human rights.

And then came the taco bowl connoisseur and his acolytes. Their values — more accurately, their lack of values — have coarsened the country, impoverished its spirit, debased what once was revered. Like something out of “It Can’t Happen Here,” Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel of a fascist takeover, our foundational ideals suddenly seem flimsy and insubstantial, thin tissues of fidelity in a hurricane of contempt.

Lack of values, coarsening, debasing, and mocking what is best in the American idea. That’s what I call scum. These people are not Americans except in the sense that they happen to live within the nation’s geographic boundaries. They understand nothing of America’s true greatness or its world-historical experiment in rational self-governance. They do not deserve to be citizens since they know nothing of the responsibilities of citizens.

Those of us who have seen this coming from a distance are not surprised. We realized long ago that these people form a nation of apostates within America, people who have functionally abandoned their loyalties to the living heart of America.

It’s a realization that forces a choice: Shall we embrace fidelity or surrender to the storm? For some of us, that’s no choice at all. Hence, “you people” — less a call for division than a belated recognition that division has already come, that some of us have seceded from common cause, common ideals, common hope — and that the rest of us must recognize that, if only so that we can be clear-eyed about saving ourselves.

To be clear-eyed about these scummers, we should know exactly where they differ from real Americans. And Pitts ends his piece with a powerful summary of those differences:

You people don’t believe in freedom of speech. My people do.

You people don’t cherish the rule of law. My people do.

You people don’t support democratic ideals. My people do.

You people don’t value facts and reason. My people do.

You people don’t honor the aspirational and transformational ideas that made this country great. My people do.

For those reasons and more, you people are not my people.

My people are Americans.

We decent Americans now must choose. It is no longer a conscientious stance to pretend that Republicans are not rebellious anti-Americans in our midst. No decent American—whether politican or average citizen—should any longer treat them with courtesy or respect.

They are scum.

We need to sweep them away before they destroy everything that America once was and could be again.

Being the scum that they are, they are intent on civil war If they can’t get their way. We may just have to give them that war—and make sure it ends the same way as the last one.
Well, well. So “conservatism” is all about racism after all.

Well, well. So “conservatism” is all about racism after all.

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Who would have thought it?

Only all my readers. As I showed in chapter 3 of my book Asshole Nation: Trump and the Rise of Scum America, modern conservatism is nothing but a con perpetrated by asshole capitalists manipulating asshole racists to hate everything admirable about America.

Now Larry Sabato, one of America’s foremost researchers in the field of political science, has demonstrated that Republicans are undeniably racist, undeniably selfish, and undeniably scum.

In a post delicately titled “Can Democrats Win Back the White Working Class?” Sabato’s Center for Politics at the University of Virginia has unveiled the research that proves Republicans are all about racism. I urge everyone to read this groundbreaking piece. But here I just want to quote the conclusions drawn from a great deal of regression analysis. Here we go:

Racial resentment and party identification are by far the strongest predictors of conservative ideology. Evangelical identification has a significant impact as well, but its effect is not nearly as strong as the effects of racial resentment and party ID. Family income has almost no effect on ideology and economic insecurity has a negative effect, which means that greater insecurity is associated with less conservative policy preferences.

These findings indicate that while ideology was by far the most important predictor of candidate preference among white voters in 2020, ideology was itself largely explained by feelings of racial resentment. Conservative policy preferences among white working class voters on a wide range of issues were closely connected to their racial attitudes and specifically to their belief that white people have been losing ground in American society because of unfair advantages enjoyed by Blacks and other nonwhite groups.

So all the self-humiliating Democratic hand-wringing after Hillary Clinton’s loss was pure BS. Scum America did not vote for Trump out of economic despair over the failure of their shot at the American dream. They did not turn against Democrats because they felt justifiable anger over their permanent position in the bottom 99%. They voted for Trump because he expressed their deep-seated racism and promised to make it ascendant in America.

In a new post out today, the same researchers come to another conclusion that is backed up by statistical analysis, which you can peruse at your leisure. Here is the conclusion:

Whereas Biden voters are animated by racial and social justice concerns, Trump voters fear they will suffer personally, socially, culturally, and economically from the effects of immigration. 

In other words, we are now two different nations. Democrats belong to Decent America, a land in which decent people are decently concerned about the difficulties of their fellow citizens. Republicans belong to Scum America, a land in which hateful racism fuels resentment, selfishness, unpatriotic separatism, and bullying insistence that scummers will get their way or else they will burn down everything.

Conservatism has always been about nothing but making America safe for racism in order to protect ruthless capitalism from suffering again the defeat that almost killed it during the first half of the twentieth century.

If we don’t stop “conservatives” from passing “laws” that will allow their plants inside state government to count the vote in upcoming elections, Scum America will get its way.

And the world will lose its last best hope.
Why “conservatives” are so irrational

Why “conservatives” are so irrational

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Last night, I heard Paul Krugman talking to some talk-show host on MSNBC. He said something that clears up all the unintelligible behavior that is happening on the right these days.

You would think that an existential threat like COVID would itself be enough of an incentive to make people do whatever they could to escape its clutches. Yet Republicans all over America, together with right-wing nutjobs all over the world, react to COVID erratically and irrationally.

Some of them refuse to wear masks, which is an effective way to cut into the spread of the virus. Some of them refuse to get the vaccines, which is highly effective at preventing hospitalization and death if you do get the disease. Some of them imagine that COVID or the masks or the vaccines are liberal plots to enslave them. Other’s imagine that Dr. Fauci and the press are leading them to slaughter by advising them to get the vaccine. Others insist that they should have the right not to save themselves and their families if they so choose (ignoring the threat they pose to others, of course). Others would force everyone not to wear masks or get the vaccine if they could.

Krugman admitted that none of the well-known conservative “principles” could explain to him why Republicans are acting this way.

Does “small government” demand such irrational behavior? Apparently not, since the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, is trying to force all levels of government in Florida not to take action against the vaccine in the most “big-government” fashion.

Does “deregulation” of business demand this craziness? Apparently not, since DeSantis also wants to force all businesses not to make customers wear masks or prove that they have been vaccinated.

Does “freedom” demand it. Apparently not, since he is trying to force all parents throughout the state to send their kids to schools that will do nothing to prevent the spread of the virus.

So, Krugman said, he was stymied until he began to notice the anger with which these Republicans respond to any suggestion that they should have to do anything that they don’t feel like doing. That is what tipped him off to what is really at the bottom of all this.

First, it’s the deeply held sense of privilege that Republicans hold. In their minds, it seems, certain people—that is, white people mainly—should never be inconvenienced in any way.

Second, it’s the deeply held sense of power that Republicans insist is theirs by right. In their minds, they should be able to do anything they want, no matter how destructive and antisocial, and they will insist on it if they have to power to force others to submit.

Those two Republican vices explain everything that is happening in America today. All the Republican insanity that has brought America to political chaos, and the world to medical disaster and even the threat of human extinction is rooted in those two vices.

So I recommend a parlor game to all decent Americans. It goes like this: Watch the news with your friends. When you see one of the innumerable Republican idiocies that occur daily, see who can be the first to figure out how their sense of privilege or sense of power of both explain it.

Because nothing else will.
It feels good to see GOP assholes get schooled. But showing them up for idiots won’t stop their evil.

It feels good to see GOP assholes get schooled. But showing them up for idiots won’t stop their evil.

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Did you see the clips yesterday of General Mark Milley, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Lloyd Austin, Defense Secretary, attacking idiot GOP representatives for the foolishness of their hysteria about “Critical Race Theory”?

If not, you can check out their slap-downs HERE and HERE.

Such straightforward knock-outs of “conservative” BS hearten liberals. Such public demonstrations of the profound ignorance that fuels the “discourse” of Republicans and Trumpists are all too rare.

But they don’t make a dent in the pointy heads of lying Republicans, who are either too stupid to recognize their own stupidity or—which is much more likely—calculate that they will never suffer any consequences for making claims that are blatantly false and self-serving. After all, their hero Trump still hasn’t paid any significant price for a lifetime of lying, conning, cheating, and harming others.

Those who fall into the first category of being too stupid are delusional. They actually believe they are smarter, not stupider, than those of us who live in reality-based reality.

They think they “know” things that the rest of us don’t. They have a secret alternate “history” in which, they believe, all the Framers were Republican, faux-Christian, rapacious anarchists just like themselves. They have “religious principles” that the rest of us reject, like hating everyone who doesn’t mouth their articles of faith. They have a nonsense “philosophy” in which “freedom”—by which they mean the license to do whatever they want while preventing others from doing the same—is the be-all and end-all of ethics.

These people are fools—but dangerous fools because they have power. It’s like letting a five-year old run his own life. If he’s lucky enough not to kill himself, he childish selfishness will surely make life miserable for everyone around him.

The other group of rotten Republicans—those who are not stupid but know full well they they are vicious—have given up any allegiance to truth. They lie incessantly in an attempt to instigate chaos in which they hope to loot democracy and seize power.

They don’t care about truth because they have given up shame. And they have given up shame because they have “learned” that there is no consequence for lying. If Mitch McConnell’s decades of mendacity were not enough to teach them that, then the coming of Trump drummed that “lesson” into them. So even demonstrating that they are lying cannot stop them from lying shamelessly and throwing bombs in every direction into the body politic.

Question: How do you deal with shameless liars?

Answer: You don’t. You can’t. And trying to is a chump’s game. You just have to beat them, roll over them, crush them. Can you imagine trying to “reason” with the Confederacy once it had declared its animosity to the Union? What fool would have continued to try to “negotiate” with them once they declared war? The only proper way to respond to the Confederacy was to destroy it.

The Republican party has declared war on the Union. It fired the first shots at the Capitol insurrection on January 6, and the refusal of Republicans to condemn the insurrection is an effective endorsement of it. “Reasoning” with them is no longer possible. They simply must be destroyed.

So it’s distressing to see liberals still thinking that demonstrating Republican ignorance, stupidity, and mendacity matters any more.

Take, for example, the issue I started with—the GOP attempt to level “Critical Race Theory” against liberals, and even against the military.

They don’t care what Critical Race Theory really is. So the devastating demonstrations of GOP ignorance and mendacity by General Milley and Secretary Austin yesterday don’t dent their brazen helmets a bit.

For them, “Critical Race Theory” is just a dog-whistle, a trigger term that arouses anger in their tribe’s lizard brain. To them it signifies the same thing that is signified by all their buzzwords (“socialist,” “communist,” “woke,” “liberal,” “godless,” and so many others). They all signify that someone is trying to make them feel bad for being white supremacists, racists, and all around scum human beings.

Of course, the fact that they should feel bad for being white supremacists and racists and scum—and should feel even worse for teaching their children to follow their example—would never occur to them.

That is because, on top of everything else, they are assholes.

Now I get a lot of criticism when I use that word. Sensitive people seem to find it offensive. But, as those who have read my books know, I use the term in a very specific way first suggested by Aaron James on pages 4-5 of his book Assholes: A Theory:

A person is an asshole when, and only when, he systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.

In other words, assholes want to be able to do and say whatever they please, no matter how harmful, without suffering either criticism or consequences.

This is precisely the motivation behind the Republican attack on “Critical Race Theory,” about which they are completely ignorant. To them, it is just another way that society tries to make them feel guilty—which they can’t stand because they are assholes. Every aspect of their crusade is assholic:

  • If you won’t admit that white people have oppressed minorities from before the nation’s founding, you are an asshole for demanding the special privilege of not accepting the truth of history like everyone else.
  • If you do it admit it, but won’t also admit that today’s white people have derived enormous unfair benefits from their ancestors’ oppression, you are an asshole for demanding the special privilege of not accepting logical consequence like everyone else.
  • If you admit the benefits, but don’t feel that you owe anyone who was deprived of the same benefits any consideration, you are an asshole for demanding to enjoy the benefits without caring about your fellow citizens.
  • If, on top of that, you insist that your disadvantaged fellow citizens give you a complete pass for enjoying unjust benefits, you are an asshole for demanding to be immunized against just accusations of anti-social selfishness.
  • And if, on top of that, you insist that those reminding you of your assholery be suppressed, attacked, beaten down by any means within your power, you are a vicious, thuggish asshole for condoning the use of violence against your critics.

To sum up: Republicans are assholes who don’t even pretend to care about rationality and consistency and will say and do anything to justify their irrational hatred of decency.

Nothing good can happen in America, or in the world for that matter, since America is still the dominant nation on earth, until Republicans are completely crushed as a political force.

We need to stop trying to negotiate with evil. Stomp it out, blow it up, get it out of the way of decent people. Only then can we get on with the task of making the world better.
Can COVID help save American democracy?

Can COVID help save American democracy?

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COVID-19 has been, and still is, a dire threat to humanity. It has killed millions worldwide, and—due to the criminal ignorance and power-hungriness of Scum America, its political hacks, and its homunculus avatar Donald Trump—it has killed over 600,000 in the United States alone. Despite all that devastation, however, it is possible that COVID could have at least one beneficial effect on humanity?

If you believe, as I do and as Lincoln did, that American democracy is the last best hope of mankind, then it is just conceivable that COVID may do one good thing for the world—namely, prevent American democracy from being destroyed by toxic conservatism.

How would this work?

I heard one of the many medical experts on TV the other day expressing concern that states with high vaccine-hesitancy rates would be the loci of COVID resurgences when the weather makes the conditions for infection favorable again in the fall and winter. This expert’s fear was that the protection afforded by the vaccine will limit the virus’s victims to a much smaller group of people—the ones who aren’t vaccinated.

This is precisely the group of people most likely to be toxic conservatives, Scum Americans, Republicans, and Trumpist neo-fascists. It is precisely this group of people who are hurriedly trying to pass laws that not only legalize voter-suppression in red states, but also legalize voter nullification: they are actually passing laws that will allow Republican state legislatures and conservative judges to overturn the will of the voters if the voters choose liberals and progressives.

So the virus will go to work in the fall. It will attack precisely the people who are trying desperately to undermine American democracy by turning the entire voting process into a sham. In evolutionary terms, nature is preparing to work for the benefit of the species. It is getting ready to wipe out the weakest members of the species, the ones least adapted to survive. Among human beings, those are the ones who are least intelligent and least attuned to reality. In America, that group is largely populated by Scum Americans and Republicans.

The only question is whether COVID can eliminate a large enough swathe of Republicans before the 2022 elections to make ineffective their attempts to undermine the process. We are witnessing a race between nature and evil like nothing we’ve seen before. If COVID can knock off enough Republicans before 2022, the world will be safe for democracy once again. If not, the human race will destroy itself by sucking down the poison of toxic conservatism.

Oh, I know I’ll get the usual reactions from conservatives about how horrible I am to applaud the demise of God-fearing Americans. I don’t care. First of all, Republicans are not God-fearing. Alignment with God just isn’t consonant with their worship of Trump, who is the most demonic force in American history. You can’t be on Trump’s side and have any relationship with God that isn’t a delusion.

Second, though, I am not applauding their demise. I am just recognizing the truth that Republicans have chosen their own deaths. By choosing to treat mask-wearing and social distancing and government health standards as infringements on their “personal liberties,” they have elevated their stupidity and selfishness to levels of arrogant self-harm unthinkable before this crisis. They have chosen their fantasies about “freedom” over the reality that the pandemic will kill or seriously debilitate those who refuse to protect themselves. They have chosen ignorant death over intelligent life.

So be it, then. Evolution favors the intelligent, at least in the human species.

Republicans are not intelligent. They are so stupidly hubristic that they choose their own death rather than admit that their inferior beliefs are killing them. They are dedicated to letting nature terminate them.

Let’s just hope that COVID does the work quickly enough to prevent Republicans from destroying the one thing the humanity needs most of all: continued progress toward the liberal democratic ideals that America has pioneered.

The world will be better off if COVID helps America defeat toxic conservatism. Only then will humanity, following America’s renewed progressive lead, get back on track to emerge from the long shadow of ignorance and selfishness into the sunlight of enlightened self-governance.
Now even mainstream commentators know that the GOP is the home of Scum America

Now even mainstream commentators know that the GOP is the home of Scum America

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I’ve been saying it for years: the Republican party is the political arm of Scum America.

Finally, a mainstream commentator—and a Republican one at that—is agreeing with me in print.

Micheal Gerson has published this article in the Washington Post describing clearly how sociopathically violent and demented the Republican party is.

Here is Gerson’s assessment of the GOP at this critical moment for American democracy that is being fueled by the horrific demon, Donald Trump:

If Trump has a political philosophy, one of its main tenets is toxic masculinity — the use of menace and swagger to cover his mental and moral impotence. And the mini-Trumps have taken their master’s lead. When Trump operative Stephen K. Bannon proposed that Anthony S. Fauci should be beheaded, when Trump ally Joseph diGenova said a federal cybersecurity official should be “taken out at dawn and shot,” when Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani urged Trump supporters to engage in “trial by combat,” all of this was more than paunchy, pathetic, aging White men talking smack they could never back up. It exemplified a type of politics where cruelty is the evidence of commitment, brutality is the measure of loyalty and violence is equated with power.

In other words, Republicans are Scum. I don’t know why it has taken the mainstream media so long to recognize this.  I wish they had listened to me even as recently as 2019, when I explained how Republicans became the home of Scum America in this post:

When the Republican party was about to go extinct in the 1960s as a result of progress made by Democrats from FDR through LBJ, it launched its infinitely cynical counterattack—the infamous “Southern Strategy” of Richard Nixon and Roger Ailes. By appealing to the segregationist Southern Democrats who were warring with the extremely progressive Northern Democrats, the Republican party welcomed Scum America into its midst. . . .

Ever since, Republicans have used the idiot Scummers to win elections by playing on their base instincts. Republicans developed a dog-whistle vocabulary that signaled racism, xenophobia, homophobia, white supremacy, and love of violence to the scum base, while at the same time being coded enough to be defensible by someone without a functioning conscience.

What the Republicans originally wanted was only the Scummers’ votes so that they could muster a slight majority against the Democrats. What they got, however, was a fund of hate and vitriol that soon took it over. And for the past forty years, Scum America has been embedded in the Republican party.

Over time, scum attitudes spread throughout the Republican party, elevating more and more Scummers into political positions. Finally, scum attitudes dominated the Republican party, pushing out the few Republicans who still considered themselves decent Americans. . . .

The result is that today’s Republican party is composed entirely of Scum Americans. Let them try as they may to tack politically around Trump’s obvious and outrageous racism and corruptness. Let them try to mount fake defenses of indefensible and immoral policies (like the shameful “guns don’t kill” defense, or the despicable “strong borders” defense, or the innumerable and contemptible “religious freedom” defenses). They show themselves to be scum just by standing by while Trump defecates on everything decent in American life.

If people had only been willing to see back when I wrote this that Republicans are Scum, they might have been prepared for the insurrection of January 6. But they weren’t.

Now Republicans are whitewashing the whole Trump presidency, and especially their vile insurrection. They are doing this to provide cover for their most audacious perfidy yet: the destruction of the last bulwarks against them—free elections and the courts. Here is Gerson again:

This approach to politics is disturbing at any time. But now it has fastened itself upon an object, a project. Rather than trying to win future elections by attracting new voters, Trump Republicans wish to reshape the electoral system to produce more favorable results. Instead of using the 2020 presidential loss as a guide for additional outreach, Trump Republicans want to ensure they can claim and enforce a victory in 2024 with essentially the same vote total as 2020 — probably the high-water mark of the Trump coalition.

Since their vote total in 2020 was in the minority, what Republicans are trying to engineer is permanent minority rule, which they have been heading for ever since Reagan. 

If you want to know how close they are to achieving this goal—which would be the end of Madisonian democracy—you really must read this utterly terrifying article by Perry Bacon Jr. It describes in detail how Republicans are rushing to decapitate the electoral system and the courts to ensure their capture of total political power in 2022—and forever after. 

Read it. And then decide whether this is America’s last stand. 

Take it from someone who saw this coming. It is.

The Trumpist insurrection lie that George Orwell foresaw in 1939

The Trumpist insurrection lie that George Orwell foresaw in 1939

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For as short time after the January 6 insurrection, decent America thought that Republicans had finally admitted their own perfidy.

There it was, in full-color video, irrefutable evidence of Trumpist/Republican evil: a secessionist rebellion recorded in real time.

Adding to the feeling that the tide was starting to turn was the admission of prominent Republicans that Trump has fomented the insurrection. Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy, both slime-sucking Trump lickspittles, gave public speeches denouncing Trump and all his retinue.

But the days went on. Trump left the White House on January 20. There were no terrible, swift consequences for the Trumpists in Congress who stoked the insurrection and even voted to overturn the election results after the insurrection had failed.

Graham and McCarthy went crawling back to Trump. Supporters of the insurrection in Congress, like Matt Gaetz, Josh Hawley, and Majorie Taylor Greene kept their heads down for a few days while they tried to figure out whether they would be caught. But then they started doing what they always do—blaming Democrats while disregarding their own treachery.

This week, the trajectory of Republican deceit has finally reached its zenith. For instance, Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) taped a statement saying, “Let me be clear: There was no insurrection. And to call it an insurrection, in my opinion, is a bold-faced lie.” He claimed that the video of “orderly” rioters in Statuary Hall “looked like a normal tourist visit.”

As anyone who watched the insurrection play out knows, Clyde’s remarks are the real barefaced lies. Here is a photo from the Independent of what Clyde was doing in the House chamber on January 6. (He’s leaning on the barricade, the only person without a mask—a typical virus-denying Republican asshole—whose whole face is visible.)

image

Does he do that every day to protect himself from normal tourists?

When the liars call an obvious truth a lie, we are in the realm of Nazi-level deception.

In 1939, just before Hitler was about to invade Poland, George Orwell predicted that ruthless authoritarians would lie about obvious facts.

In a review of Bertrand Russell’s recently published book Power: A New Social Analysis (1938), Orwell wrote a paragraph that eerily applies to Trump and his fascist hordes. In reply to Russell’s reassurance that authoritarian governments had always petered out in the past, Orwell wrote:

Underlying this is the idea that common sense always wins in the end. And yet the peculiar horror of the present moment is that we cannot be sure that this is so. It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two and two will make five when the Leader says so. Mr. Russell points out that the huge system of organized lying upon which the dictators depend keeps their followers out of contact with reality and therefore tends to put them at a disadvantage as against those who know the facts. This is true so far as it goes, but it does not prove that the slave-society at which the dictator is aiming will be unstable. It is quite easy to imagine a state in which the ruling caste deceive their followers without deceiving themselves. Dare anyone be sure that something of the kind is not coming into existence already? One has only to think of the sinister possibilities of the radio, state-controlled education and so forth, to realize that “the truth is great and will prevail” is a prayer rather than an axiom.

George Orwell, “The Taming of Power,” in The Adelphi 15.4 (January, 1939).

“The election was stolen.” “Two plus two is five.” “Normal tourist visits.” These are lies, pure and simple. Not “differences of opinion” but outright lies. Even the people who say such things know they are lying.

Trump made this kind of shameless lying possible. It began the day after his inauguration, when he sent Sean Spicer out to assert that a picture of Trump’s pathetic inauguration crowd was actually a picture of the hugest inauguration crowd ever.

And it seems that Republicans have learned this lesson from Trump’s outrageous lying: as long as there are no consequences, you can keep it up.

Is it possible to defeat these liars? If we had the time, surely.

But we don’t have the time. Unless we can beat them back by the 2022 elections, there won’t be any more real elections after that.

Republicans at the state level are passing laws as fast as they can to prevent Democrats from voting and to backstop possible Republican losses. The non-insurrection-stolen-election lie is all the excuse they need.

Democrats decry these “laws.” But not enough of them are outraged that some of these laws slice the throat of democracy entirely by allowing state legislatures to overturn the vote in any part of their state. You can read about it in this article from the New York Times.

If Republican legislatures get to decide elections instead of the people, democracy is finished.

We already know that Republicans will stop at nothing to seize and keep power. The insurrection proved it.

The only timely solution that can beat these bastards is the “For the People” Act, which would explicitly outlaw all the voter-suppression tricks that Republicans are trying to get on the books before the next election.

If Orwell’s prediction spooks you out, start demanding that Democrats bust the filibuster in the Senate to pass “For the People” Act.

Otherwise, Hitler will have been defeated in vain.
Now Republicans think counting slaves as 3/5 of a person was a good idea

Now Republicans think counting slaves as 3/5 of a person was a good idea

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At least two Republican state legislators have claimed that the Constitution’s “three fifths rule”—the provision that counts “other Persons,” that is, slaves as 3/5 of a person—was a good thing. According to them, it was a successful plot by Northerners to eventually put and end to slavery.

Now this is just what you’d expect from Republicans—namely, stupid. The three fifths rule was a compromise made by the anti-slavery people with the slave-owners, who of course wanted their slaves counted as whole persons. That way, the slave owners would get all the benefits of having inflated population numbers while having total control over their slaves.

Giving slave owners only three fifths of the number was considered necessary in order to get their votes to ratify the Constitution. At the same time, however, it embedded slave-owning in the new society created by the Constitution because it allowed that there was a difference between regular citizens and “other Persons.”

(Check out this article from the Washington Post to read about this Republican idiocy.)

Of course, one would never expect Republicans to know the truth about history, especially if it doesn’t suit their purposes. But the lengths to which they are now willing to follow their ignorance in order to gain any sort of advantage is utterly depraved. In adoring Trump, they have learned to adore complete, brazen, ignorant, mean, and outrageous shamelessness.

Put this together with today’s news that Facebook will continue the ban on Trump. Republicans are up in arms. Why? The media are once again “censoring” conservative opinion. They won’t let Trump speak. They castigate Republicans and “conservatives” who spread Trump’s flagrant lies.

Let’s get this straight for the morons who continue to fight this loser’s battle. Spreading verifiable lies repeatedly and shamelessly is not “free speech.” It is deceptive, anti-social depravity. And those who do it need to be squashed by society for its own safety.

Here’s what Republicans don’t get. Decent people don’t want to hear their “opinions” because they are ignorant, stupid, self-interested, mean-spirited, hateful, arrogant, and vicious. On top of that, their “opinions” have now moved into the territory of sedition. Republicans are now onboard with violent overthrow of the Constitutional order, blatant voter suppression, and forceful minority rule by “lawful” Republican seizure of the voting apparatus in Republican-contolled states.

It is any wonder that society no longer wants to hear their bullshit?

Whatever is lower than scum—that’s what Trumpist Republicans have become.
Tim Scott: “America is not a racist country.” Oh—and pigs started flying yesterday.

Tim Scott: “America is not a racist country.” Oh—and pigs started flying yesterday.

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Tim Scott—the only African-American Republican senator and one of only three African-American Republicans out of 535 members of Congress—said prominently in his response to President Biden’s address to Congress on Wednesday night that “America is not a racist country.”

Sure, he filled his speech with the usual Republican lies—that voter-suppression laws like Georgia’s are actually voting security laws meant to guard against rampant voter fraud (which doesn’t exist), that Democrats are vicious “socialists” who are trying to destroy America’s “freedoms,” and that Joe Biden is dividing America because he won’t do what Republicans want him to do. Republicans gonna lie.

But nothing beats “America is not a racist country.”

No, America is not a racist country. But black men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men, black households have only 59% of the median income of white households, African-Americans are 1.65 less likely to own a home than whites, black median household income is less than half that of whites, and blacks have lost 2.7 years of life expectancy to COVID while whites have lost only 1 year. (See this USA Today article for these statistics.)

No, America is not a racist country. But white people tend to live in 75% white neighborhoods, while black people live in 45% African-American neighborhoods. And 25.6% of African Americans live in zip code with few or no primary-care physicians while only 13.2% of whites do. And the average non-white school district gets $2,226 less per year per student than majority-white districts. And majority non-white schools are less likely to offer advanced academic courses. And black students are punished more often and more severely than white students, with black girls seven times more likely to be suspended and four times more likely to be arrested at school than white girls. (See this article from The Root for these statistics.)

No, America is not a racist country. But it has an awful lot of racists in it and a whole lot of people—some 74 million, or nearly half of the voting public—who support politicians who push racist policies, politicians like Donald Trump, the many Trump-wannabes, and almost the entire Republican party.

So America is not a racist country. It’s a nearly half-racist country—at least as far as the politically active part is concerned, and that’s the part that makes the decisions about how we will live.

And that racist near-half is perfectly all right with using disguised “public policy preferences” to achieve racist results—like charter school laws that disadvantage minority students, anti-public-health-care laws that disadvantage minorities, anti-affirmative-action laws (even reverse-discrimination laws!) that disadvantage minorities, harsh criminal laws that disadvantage minorities, anti-gun-control laws that flood minority communities with guns, and unabashed voter suppression laws that try to strip political power from minorities.

So, again, America is not a racist country. It’s a half-racist country.

And Tim Scott, despite being African-American, doesn’t understand or doesn’t care—and certainly doesn’t mind—that he associates with the racist half.