I try to remain friends, or at least friendly, with people who disagree with me on issues. It's important to do so, even if that means avoiding certain topics.
Unfortunately, recent events have now made that impossible. To my conservative friends (not Republican friends, conservative friends), I must offer my sympathy. Whether or not I can still offer my friendship is up to you.
The need for cooperation
America has become an increasingly divided country in recent years. That is not news. It has been observed and reported on for 25 years how the divide in this country is widening, even to the point that "Liberals" and "Conservatives" see each other as living in entirely different universes in which they do not even interact with each other, much less agree.
Throughout this process, I have tried to be a voice for remaining connected. If we cannot disagree without remaining at least cordial, we no longer have a country. Too, the division of American into Red Tribe and Blue Tribe is not entirely accurate. Just because someone holds a particular usually-leftist view doesn't mean they cannot hold some other usually-rightist view. That's OK, and such a person should not be ostracized by either tribe. To do so is to further hasten the demise of the USA as a viable country.
I have tried to call, at various times, for at least remaining cordially engaged, and have tried to do that myself. My social circles are mostly left-wing, but I have deliberately tried to remain friends, or at least friendly, with the conservatives I know; in part because I believe they really are good people, even if we disagree on many topics, and in part because avoiding the echo chambers of both the activist left or the fundamentalist right is simply good for one's own mental health and acuity. Extremists, both left and right, are a threat to civil society (as they will immediately turn around and declare you an obvious supporter of The Other Side(tm) for not being as radical as they are, in whatever direction).
However, I must today change that position, at least in part. In particular, I must say to my conservative friends and colleagues: I'm sorry.
I am sorry that you do not have a conservative president. I am sorry that there is no conservative party in America anymore to represent you. I am sorry that our political system has left you high and dry. I can sympathize, and I can empathize.
But I cannot forgive if you continue to support the active death and destruction of America itself under the false guise of pseudo-conservatism. And I will no longer pull my punches when calling out said pseudo-conservatism.
The Great Failure
Let's start with Donald Trump. He is a divisive figure, no question. A large chunk of the country worships the ground he walks on, because he's as openly racist and sexist as they are. That's not the case for everyone who voted for him, by any means. You may support him for some other reason, I can’t say; but if you still support him at all after the absolute debacle that is the COVID19 pandemic, then you are lost.
We were lost before it even began
Within the past week, we have passed 1 million Americans infected with SARS-Cov2 (aka "the novel coronavirus", aka COVID-19), and surpassed the 50,441 Americans who died in Vietnam over the course of 20 years. And we are not even getting started with how long this pandemic will last.
To be clear: Trump did not cause COVID-19, nor is it his fault that it turned into a pandemic. That would have happened regardless. However, the way the US federal government responded to the pandemic, or rather, utterly failed to respond, rests squarely on Trump's shoulders.
"No one could have predicted this," Trump claimed. That is so patently false as to be satirical. You know who predicted it? Every medical specialist and epidemiologist in the country.
Oh, and also George W. Bush in 2005:
Awareness of the need to prepare for a pandemic was bipartisan. Here's Barack Obama in 2014:
The second video also includes Trump's position: Or rather, lack of one.
Even people outside the government knew it was coming. Here's Bill Gates warning about the need to prepare in advance, back in 2015.
The Obama administration set up a pandemic office to plan ahead and coordinate responses to a pandemic, should one happen, which it was patently obvious would happen at some point. SARS, MERS, H1N1, and Ebola all made it clear that some disease along those lines was going to get big sooner or later. Yet Trump disbanded that office in 2018.
Barely 2 years ago, we had a government agency whose job it was to deal with exactly this sort of scenario. They had plans; they had playbooks; they had logistical structures in place to activate, and a list of what to do in order to activate more logistical support when it became needed.
And Trump ditched the whole thing, citing "budget cuts," a year after he finally rammed through a massive corporate tax cut that ended up mostly in stock buybacks.
It's not like we didn't have warnings. This disease is called COVID-19 because it first appeared last year. It was already developing in China in late 2019. And yet the Trump Administration did nothing.
As far back as 4 January, government medical experts tried to get the White House to pay attention to the threat. The CDC and other agencies met with Trump in January, January, to warn of the coming virus threat. Trump wouldn't listen, because any disruption in the status quo might upset his public image.
We knew it was coming. Trump didn't want to hear it, so he didn't. We literally wasted months doing nothing, all because Trump didn't want to believe something that would be inconvenient.
Last week, Donald Trump said "nobody could have predicted something like this."
— Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) April 8, 2020
This is a picture of a memo sent *to him* 5 weeks earlier warning that #COVID19 could infect 100 million & KILL 2 million Americans.
In times of crisis, the American people deserve honest leaders. pic.twitter.com/7CZViXaUQR
Trump later claimed that he didn't read the intelligence reports from January. I don't know which is worse: If he is lying through his teeth to cover his own ass, or if the President of the United States isn't even reading his own intelligence reports.
How many people are dead as a result? How many trillions of dollars of economic damage has happened as a result?
So we didn't do anything about COVID-19 reaching the US for over two months. But that's just the beginning of Trump's abject failure.
Adding grifting to incompetence
Let's start with Personal Protective Equipment, PPE, also known as "masks, gowns, gloves, and disinfectant" for medical workers. One would think that a nationwide coordinated response, run by a pandemic response team under the Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA), would be the most effective and cost-efficient means to combat the spreading disease. Instead, however, the Trump administration instructed the states to outbid each other on the open market for PPE for their hospital staff... but then had FEMA also bid against the states for supplies, thus driving up the price.
Trump's slumlord son-in-law Jared Kushner even said on national TV that it wasn't the Federal government's job to... actually use the national PPE stockpiles they already had.
The New Yorker has a much more detailed writeup on the sad story, so I won't repeat it here. Now, this has never been an actual policy of the federal government, so once Kushner said it, they even changed the FEMA website to pretend that was actual policy, rather than what a selfish dolt made up on the spot.
But it gets worse. According to numerous reports Trump's FEMA has taken it on itself to confiscate medical equipment purchased by states. Yes, really. And yet the states rarely get any of those supplies from the Feds, or when they do, it's haphazard and inconsistent. It's to the point that some states are buying supplies and smuggling them into the state in secret to keep FEMA from hijacking them.
Here's a longer thread with numerous articles backing up this pure, unadulterated corruption.
This is entirely before we get to the all-important question of testing. There is near universal agreement among health experts that we cannot end stay-at-home orders until we have vastly more testing and tracking capacity. We have to be able to spot who is sick early, before they infect others, and then trace back to identify other people who are infected but not yet showing symptoms. Until we do that, sending people back to crowds is a death sentence. Of course, we utterly botched containment back in January when testing would have been most effective. Now we're playing catch up.
Trump claimed on 6 March that “anyone who wants a test can get a test.” That was a total lie. They promised that 4 million tests would be available within a week. That did not happen. In fact, in early April the Trump administration ended its funding for testing sites. As in, the most important thing we can do to be able to "reopen the country" the Trump administration refuses to do. This is yet another piece, most effectively handled by the federal government, for which the states have been told they’re on their own.
We're being shamed by Senegal. Senegal, of all places, is making us look like schoolchildren in the testing department. South Korea, which registered its first infection the same day as the US, was testing more people in a day than the US had in weeks (despite Trump's lies to the contrary).
Listening to the President will literally kill you
And then of course there's all the fun about ingesting disinfectant. Whether Trump was musing aloud about an incredibly stupid idea or actually suggesting it, either one is grossly dangerous coming from any President. Snopes has the actual text of what he said, including the video. Whether he was seriously considering it or just trolling reporters as he later claimed, neither one is acceptable behavior. (Indeed, trolling reporters for the lulz during a pandemic should already be an impeachable offense).
Especially since, apparently, enough people thought he was serious that they did start ingesting bleach, and specifically said it was because Trump recommended it.
Were he not President, that would qualify for, at minimum, negligent manslaughter charges. Were he not President, he'd be liable for wrongful death suits.
Break democracy while you're at it
Trump didn't just actively undermine our ability to react to the pandemic in a timely manner; he didn't just continually hamper efforts to respond once it really hit; He is also actively undermining the ability of our democracy to function.
The US Post Office is a marvel of modern logistics. USPS will deliver mail to you anywhere. Even if it's not financially useful or advantageous to do so, you'll get mail delivery. Even UPS and FedEx often have USPS deliver packages for them to inconvenient locations. (Here's a great thread from a postal employee talking about the principles of USPS.)
USPS is not government bloat; Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the US Constitution (remember that thing?) explicitly gives Congress the power "To establish Post Offices and Post Roads." Nonetheless, USPS is a self-funding agency. It's not part of the Federal budget. It really does fund itself just on stamps. That's gotten increasingly hard, though, as the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) saddled the service with a draconian pension requirement that no other organization has. (It has been somewhat exaggerated by some outlets, but the basic problem is correct.) When the economy imploded due to the pandemic, mail volume fell as well and the agency now can't make ends meet. Nonetheless, their workforce (which includes a large number of military veterans) continues to show up and deliver the mail every day, risking their lives to make sure this institution survives.
That's at the same time that, due to the same pandemic, Vote by Mail has gotten increased attention as a health necessity for the fall election. The entire country "going out" to vote all at one place all day long is an incredibly dangerous idea in the midst of a highly-contagious, airborne pandemic. Instead, a number of states have already switched to Vote at Home (via mail, drop-boxes, or various other means), which have been shown to increase voter turnout, be just as secure, and now has the added benefit of voting not being physically dangerous to your health during a pandemic.
The obvious move? As long as we're tossing around trillions of dollars of stimulus money, toss a coin to your mail carrier and give the post office a few billion to keep this absolutely vital public service afloat. That's what a civilized country would do.
Not Trump. He's threatened to veto any stimulus bill that provides funding for the post office, and is using that threat as leverage to force them to raise prices, specifically on Amazon packages. Why? Because, as the Chicago Sun-Times put it:
...the Washington Post is mean to him, critical of his many lies, incompetencies and failures. The Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns Amazon, which delivers lots of packages through the mail. Trump thinks — those two words look strange paired together, don’t they? — that if he hurts the postal service, he’ll hurt Bezos.
It’s like burning down your home to get rid of a mouse.
And, oh yeah, just for good measure, he delayed the support checks the government is sending out, paltry though they may be, so that Trump can put his name on them to use as a campaign tactic, along with a letter "from" him.
"Petty" is too small of an adjective to describe just how selfish and toxic this person is. (I won't even dignify Trump's behavior by calling him a man.)
The collaborators
I'm sure someone is going to whine that I'm not covering some other story about someone else's incompetence, or that I'm only quoting from "the liberal media" above. Tip: Any time someone whines about "the liberal media" what they really mean is "it's not the propaganda I like hearing from Fox News, Breitbart, or the Daily Caller."
Fox, despite its name, is not a news agency. It's a propaganda outlet. It has been for over 20 years. It's the American version of Pravda, even more corrupt than Russia Today.
And they have parroted the party line all the way. A party line that has gotten people killed. (Ample video there of Fox anchors brushing the pandemic off as a Democrat conspiracy to undermine the Great Leader.)
Yes, media bias in this country is a major problem, and it's not just a right-wing problem. But "I don't agree with it" doesn't make "it" wrong. The best independent analysis I've found is this breakdown, which categorizes outlets both by their bias and by how close they are to actual facts and news rather than partisan whining. You'll notice there are ample left-wing outlets in the schlock category in the bottom left, none of whom I've cited here. You'll also note where Fox is: In the "Hyper-Partisan bias" and "Nonsense damaging to public discourse" categories.
There are still non-schlock respectably conservative-leaning news outlets, although they're a dying breed as Fox and its ilk have taken over. Support those rather than the propaganda machine that is the Murdoch empire.
If we are to survive, literally, we need to all be working from the same set of true, verifiable facts.
Trump must go, as must Trump supporters
All of that is just his criminally incompetent handling of the greatest threat to American lives since the Civil War. That's not even counting the 18,000 times President Trump has lied to the public since taking office.
All politicians bend the truth a bit. That's not surprising, given that politics is mostly marketing. Marketing is all about spinning the facts to make what you're selling look good, without actually breaking the facts. But that is a far cry from absolute, flat out, bald-faced, lying to the American public as a matter of course.
Note: none of what I've noted above is about policy. Tax rates, abortion, gun control, trade policy, gay marriage, bathroom usage... I didn't get into any of those topics on which reasonable people can have honest, if heated, disagreements. I also didn't even touch the literally dozens of impeachable, corrupt actions he's taken while in office, or the fiasco that was the 2016 election. This is about raw, basic competence at the job.
Donald Trump is criminally incompetent at his job. Almost deliberately so. And more than 100,000 Americans are going to die as a result of his deliberate, malicious incompetence before this is all over.
If the government were "run like a business" (which is already a fantastically stupid idea), this would-be CEO would have been fired long ago.
I will be as blunt as possible: Donald Trump presents a clear and present danger to the United States of America. I will forgive you for supporting him in 2016; it was hard to contemplate just how unfathmonly bad he would be for the country. But if you still support him in 2020, after his utter incompetence has cost tens of thousands of American lives, as well as the national economy itself, then I do not support you. We are not friends. Do not try to sell me on him. You are quite simply dead to me. I hold you in contempt, the same contempt that Trump holds all of America.
The Democrats have even given you a gift this year: They nominated the least progressive, least reform-minded, least interesting milquetoast dweeb they could find for President. Joe Biden is the least threatening candidate to your conservative worldview they could find, making it all that much easier for you to abandon the trainwreck while still calling yourselves conservatives. People love to tout “Regan Democrats”, well, it’s time for you to become “Biden Republicans.”
You have until November to decide if you're going to support a failed cancer of a President. If you do, then I have no further time or respect for you.
The Party
And then there's the Republican Party.
It's often said that, compared to a world-scale, America has no left-wing party. It has a conservative party and an ultra-conservative party. That's only partially true.
It has a moderate-conservative party, the Democrats. And it has a corrupt anti-democratic hostile actor, the Republicans.
The Republican Party is not a conservative party. It used to be. Back in the 90s it could still claim to be conservative. But over the last 20 years it has ceased to be a political party within a democracy. Today, it is a pure, unadulterated power-machine hell bent on retaining power no matter the cost.
The Republican Party does not believe in American democracy, and therefore is an illegitimate party.
Gerrymandering
Gerrymandering is as old as the republic itself (the term dates to 1812), and all political parties have tried to do it at one time or another. However, in the past decade the Republicans have turned it from a mildly corrupt "spoils of war" into a precision machine to undermine democracy.
In 2010 the Republicans actively worked to take control of state legislatures, and were overall successful. They then used the fact that in most states, the legislature draws the district maps for both Congress and their own districts to stack the deck to ensure that Republicans not only held state Houses for the next decade but the US House of Representatives, as well.
In itself that's not new, but what was new was the nationwide coordinated effort to do so plus the use of advanced data modeling for the first time. The late Thomas Hofeller, a Republican strategist, leveraged modern machine learning tools to digitally test out tens of thousands of different possible maps in each state to see which would give Republicans the biggest edge, without looking like it was giving them the biggest edge. The WBUR link above has some examples of the absurd districts that result, but there are ample other examples.
It was a coordinated, national, deliberate attempt to undermine the will of the voters. That's not just a partisan accusation, either; that's according to Hofeller himself, and his own files, which his daughter released last year after his death in 2018. The Republican National Committee, at a nationwide level, actively and deliberately ensured that the will of the voters didn't matter in states across the country. They even said so themselves.
Vox has an excellent video on North Carolina, specifically:
Citizens don't like to be told they don't have a choice of who to vote for, of course, so in the last few years a number of grassroots initiatives have sprung up in various states to change the law so that district lines are drawn by independent commissions rather than the legislature. Many of these have been successful, through citizen ballot initiatives of various kinds. (The details vary by state.) The people want to choose their representatives, not vice versa.
And in nearly every state, the state legislature has tried to override the will of the people and roll back gerrymandering reform. And in every single one of those states, it's a Republican-dominated gerrymandered legislature.
In Michigan, Republicans sued to stop an independent redistricting commission on the grounds that their rights were being violated (because they could no longer rig the process). Just recently an appeals court ruled against them.
In Missouri, voters approved a broad reform referendum in 2018 that included gerrymandering reform, lobbyist gift bans, and other reforms. The Republican-led state legislature has been trying to repeal it ever since, claiming that voters just didn't understand what they were voting for. Even in the midst of the pandemic, they're still trying to get the votes together to repeal the anti-gerrymandering reforms (perhaps because they know that 2020 is a census year, meaning there is a new opportunity to redraw the map).
And let's not forget Wisconsin, a state so gerrymandered that in 2018 Democrats won 54% of the vote but only 36% of seats in the Assembly (36 out of 99). To even call Wisconsin a democracy at this point is something of a stretch.
We already covered North Carolina. The list goes on.
This is a form of voter suppression.
The Census
What else did the Hofeller records show? That the idea of adding a citizenship question to the US Census for 2020 was, explicitly and deliberately, for partisan and racist ends:
an unpublished study in which Thomas Hofeller concluded using responses from such a question would be "advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites" when voting districts are redrawn.
All those accusations of racism behind that question? They are in fact 100% true, according to the very people who were making the proposal. Even though the question was eventually blocked by the Supreme Court, I personally know people who are refusing to answer the Census because they're afraid of retaliation by ICE (not an unfounded fear, given this administration’s use of the agency), thus undermining representation in their area and state for the next decade.
This is a form of voter suppression.
Vote by Mail
As mentioned, voting remotely and securely has very quickly gone from a good idea worth considering to a matter of public health. Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado, and Hawaii already conduct all elections remotely, a couple more are transitioning to that, and most allow anyone to request an absentee ballot. Over 600,000 active duty military, state department, and foreign service personnel already vote by mail. It's already been empirically demonstrated to be safe, increase voter turnout, and it doesn't have any partisan advantage (PDF). There are some logistical challenges to switching to it, but those are surmountable. (If we can switch hundreds of billions of dollars of our economy to work from home in a month, we can manage this.) Most of all, it don't involve people having to gather in large groups (which is currently very dangerous) in order to exercise their most fundamental right as citizens.
Of course, attempts to expand it have been getting heavy pushback from, you guessed it, Republican leaders, because Vote at Home also makes it harder to intimidate voters into not voting, or prevent people from voting by closing polling places. You know, like Republican-led states have been doing for a decade. And of course such closures are predominantly in black, latino, and other non-white areas, who also, funny that, tend to lean more Democratic in elections.
The worst example, naturally, is the utterly corrupt Wisconsin. (And I say that as someone from Illinois, so that is saying a lot.) The horribly gerrymandered Republican legislature there blocked repeated attempts by the Democratic governor to bolster absentee voting in that state's 7 April primary, happening in the midst of a major pandemic.
Because of the pandemic, absentee ballot requests were through the roof and the state was struggling to keep up, and many poll workers were declining to work the polls on election day, so only a small fraction of polling places would be open. Governor Tony Evers first tried to postpone the election but the Republican legislature overruled him. He then ordered that people who got their ballots late could also return them postmarked by the 13th rather than the 7th. The Republican legislature overruled him. It ended up at the US Supreme Court, and the Court, by an unsurprisingly partisan 5-4 vote, ruled "it might be confusing to change the rules that close to the election, sorry," entirely ignoring the whole "going to the polls is dangerous" and "the state hasn't even sent them their ballot yet so they can't put it in the mail" issues.
Vox has good coverage of the entire debacle. In fact, many people had their vote discarded because the Post Office doesn't postmark precise dates on every piece of mail, thus meaning they aren't "postmarked by 7 April" and so cannot be counted. In fact, they have found thousands of ballots that were either never delivered to voters who requested them and ones that had been cast, postmarked in time, but never returned to the Wisconsin Board of Elections. Each of those voters had to choose whether to lose their fundamental right to vote, or risk their life to do so. That is a sentence that we usually ascribe to failed states run by dictators and drug lords, not to the United States.
The real reason, of course, according to most outside observers, was a Wisconsin supreme court seat that was up for election. Early voting in the state seemed, according to polls, to lean toward retaining the Republican incumbent, and if election day voting was high then the Republican incumbent might be defeated after all.
The gambit didn't pay off. Despite the danger, Wisconsinites came out to vote, virus or no, and the Republican incumbent was defeated. That tenacity came at a cost, however; at least 52 people in Wisconsin have contracted COVID-19 as a result of going out to vote on election day.
This goes beyond voter suppression. It's negligent homicide.
There's only been one serious case of absentee voter fraud in recent memory. It was, in fact, Republicans in North Carolina, who illegally collected people's absentee ballots by lying to them, saying they'd turn them in for them (which is illegal), and then threw them out (which is incredibly illegal). So yes, the only documented threat to absentee or vote-by-mail elections is... Republicans who literally steal ballots.
General corruption
Speaking of North Carolina, here's a nice, direct thread from a member of the state legislature of straight up corruption by the state's Republican majority, all of it centered around ensuring they retain power and others don't have it. That includes overt racial profiling to make it harder for black people in the state to vote. Quoting the state's supreme court, it was “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow" that targeted “African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The Republican defense? They weren’t attempting to disenfranchise black voters… they were attempting to disenfranchise Democratic voters.
This is a form of voter suppression.
Voter ID
Ah, the infamous voter ID laws. Depending on who you ask, they're either a necessary security measure to prevent voter fraud or a bald-faced attempt to make it harder for poor people and minorities to vote (who often don't have as ready an access to the few forms of accepted ID). Which is true?
The data makes it very clear: Voter fraud isn't a thing. Between 2000 and 2012, there were 491 known cases of voter fraud... out of literally billions of votes cast in that 12 year period. If there were even one billion votes cast, that would be a fraud rate of 0.0000491%. With multiple billions of votes cast it's an even tinier percentage.
Despite Trump's repeated claims of "millions" of illegal votes cast in 2016 (all in states he lost, curiously enough), there were four confirmed cases of voter fraud out of 135 million votes cast; that's 0.00000296%. The claim that "3 million people voted illegally" didn't come from an actual study, but from some dude on Twitter that runs a fraud reporting app and from InfoWars, which is a self-satire website that people mistake for not-a-joke.
Even the commission set up specifically to try and prove Trump's nonsensical claims came up empty.
That really shouldn't be surprising. If you want to steal an election, individual voter fraud is the absolute least effective and least efficient way to do so. Now, owning the voting machines that count the votes and leave no paper trail for verification, that's an effective mechanism.
So what's left to justify Voter ID? The fact that they do serve to reduce voter turnout among minorities. That's their intent, and their effect.
North Dakota added a new layer to this heinous tactic. After they required people to have photo IDs to vote, Democrats spent a lot of time, money, and energy making sure that everyone got them, including the American Indian tribes in the state. So the legislature passed a measure that to vote, you have to have a US Post Office-assigned street address. Well, the Indian reservations, as legally sovereign territory, do not have postal addresses. The legislature had suddenly disenfranchised every single citizen who lived on the reservation. When the issue was brought before the US Supreme Court, they (once again by a 5-4 vote) held that because the states have the absolute right to control their own voting laws (so long as they are not facially discriminatory), the law would stand. (The state just recently settled a follow-up lawsuit.)
Voter ID laws work... at racial voter suppression. And nothing else.
The most corrupt man in America
I cannot close without going straight to the top, and the most corrupt human being in America today. No, I don't mean Donald Trump. I mean Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The man who publicly declared that his goal as majority leader was not to serve the country, or even his state, but to ensure that Barack Obama would be a one-term President.
The man who blocked dozens of Barack Obama’s nominated federal judges from being voted on as the Constitution demands, has since pushed through so many conservative ones that over one-quarter of the lifetime-appointment federal appeals judges in the federal courts are Trump appointees.
The man who has turned the entire Senate over to the Presidency and refused to even consider bills that the President doesn't like, violating the separation of powers (including more than 400 bills passed by the US House of Representatives, which he has been clear he will not bring for a vote).
The man who made up a "rule" that a President can't fill a Supreme Court vacancy during an election year, but only if it's a Democrat; he later said, on national TV, that he'd happily fill a vacancy this year because a Republican president was in office. (Sure, he tried to pass it off as the "Biden rule," but that was obvious BS. Senator Biden in the early 90s mused aloud on the Senate floor if it would be appropriate to do so, nothing more, and no “rule” ever came of it. It ended up not coming up at all.)
The man who, as states are struggling under the weight of the pandemic, suggested that states just declare bankruptcy. Why? Because that means the conservative federal judges that he's ushered through (after blocking Obama's judicial appointments for years, installing unqualified conservative judges has been about the only thing he's allowed the Senate to do since Trump took office) to manage the bankruptcy proceedings of the states, and thus force them to adopt austerity plans that would mostly benefit the wealthy, harm to the poor, and undermine wealthier liberal states.
Mitch McConnell has broken all three branches of government, possibly permanently. More than any other human being alive, the top Republican in the Senate is responsible for the undermining of the rule of law and the structural downfall of the United States of America. (And that's in a country where Donald Trump, Grover Norquist, and Newt Gingrich exist, so that's quite an achievement.)
It's not "both sides"
I could continue, but this post is long enough as is. And that's just covering the last few years; this sort of behavior has been going on for decades.
Once again, none of this is about policy. Tax rates, abortion, guns, trade, immigration, none of those are even relevant to this discussion. It's about defending the basic concept of democracy in the first place that allows us to debate those policy questions.
I'm certain someone reading this is now gearing up to say "butwhatabout the Democrats, it's both parties, all politicians are corrupt," blah blah blah. No.
I have a long list of issues with the Democratic party, both nationally and the party hacks that undermine Illinois. But nothing they do comes anywhere close to the undermining of the democratic process itself. It's not a "both sides" issue. The parties are not the same.
The analogy I like to use is suppose you have two "friends." One, Dean, likes to playfully punch you a little too hard in the arm from time to time, and it hurts. The other, Rob, finds it funny to punch you in the face every time you meet and frequently gives you a bloody nose, then insists you "just man up" when you object. Both of these would-be friends are abusive, yes. But only one is committing assault and is a direct threat to your life. To say that both are "equally bad" is the result of gaslighting, not fact.
I get it; it's not easy to admit that there is no conservative party in America anymore. It's especially hard to believe that the party you've supported has been actively undermining you, has been actively undermining the country itself, for years. It's a bitter pill to swallow. In the words of Carl Sagan:
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
I'm sorry, conservative friends; you've been bamboozled. There is no conservative party anymore in America, or rather, the closest there is would be the Democrats. I actually want there to be a conservative party in the US; it's healthy to have a counter balance, and I actually hold some positions that are more conservative than mainstream Democrats would tolerate (and some that are more liberal than mainstream Democrats would tolerate; I'm an equal-opportunity non-extremist). But that is not the Republican Party.
If the Republican Party is not conservative, what is it? I'm sure some would call it fascist, but I am not going to open that can of worms here; what it has become, fundamentally, is corrupt. What it is, fundamentally, is anti-American. What it is, fundamentally, is a danger to the very concept of democracy. And it needs to be destroyed.
The Republican Party must be destroyed, utterly; at the polls, in court, and in the streets; burn it to the ground and salt the earth where it stood. Then let real conservatives build a new, real conservative party in its place.
I generally do not agree with any policy positions of people like Bill Kristol, Steve Schmidt, David Frum, Rick Wilson, or Anna Navarro, as each is an avowed conservative. Yet, I find myself agreeing with them these days, because each of them has recognized what has happened to the Republican Party and the damage that it is doing to American democracy as an institution.
Never forget the deaths and suffering caused by the shortage of PPE, something that could have been prevented by a competent and caring federal government. https://t.co/dtiprqcrpK
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) May 4, 2020
Sorry, conservative friends. You have a choice to make: You can support the Republican Party, or you can support American democracy. You cannot, at this time, support both.
And if you do not support democracy, I do not support you. I can be friends with those who hold conservative views. I cannot be friends with those who support a party that is demonstrably, and by its own statements, corrupt to the core.
Make your choice.