We haven’t quite reached the point yet where the campaigning in the US Presidential election has dragged on for longer AFTER the election than it did before but it feels like it. Law suits continue but with defamation threats and increasingly wild conspiracy theories, the focus has begun to shift elsewhere.
This week we have the Georgia run-off election, which hopefully Trump has sufficiently sabotaged to undermine the Republicans. We also have Congress confirming the votes of the Electoral College — a process that I suspect most people had almost no knowledge of prior to 2020/21 because it is a formality. As of writing this post, these events are yet to happen.
What has happened is Republican’s finding some genuine evidence of attempted electoral fraud! Unfortunately for the GOP, the perpetrator is Donald Trump who attempted to get Georgia to “find” him some extra votes. Well, they did say the fraud was real…
61 responses to “Straw Puppy’s POTUS Polls: Panic Trump”
While it’s quite possible Trump will dwindle into insignificance after he leaves the White House (I’ve heard different opinions on this, and don’t know how it will play out) I don’t think Republicans can turn back now. This is the new normal — never accept any Democratic win as legitimate, do whatever you can to retain power, and it’s okay to be blatant about it.
Given the unlikelihood of neutralizing Republicans politically any time in the near future, I don’t know where we go from here. To hell in a hand basket, quite possibly.
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They’ve recruited and created and stoked the fears of a large number of Americans who genuinely believe in vast secret conspiracies. I don’t see how they can walk that back.
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Plus there is second-generation MAGA in Ivanka and Don Jr, so we are doomed to hear the Tromp name for another decade or two. Oh, to go back in time and smash that orb to break the curse!
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The kids will fade into obscurity faster than their daddy.
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“WOULD YOU RECOGNIZE THE TRUMP KIDS TODAY? YOU’LL BE SHOCKED BY IVANKA!!”
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Currently, we in the DC-Baltimore area are waiting for Trump’s “wild” gathering of protesters tomorrow on January 6, which is when Pence is supposed to certify the electoral votes.
However, it looks like the DC Police is actively trying to stifle any violence before it arises. They struck the first blow by arresting Enrique Torrio, the leader of top white supremacist gang the Proud Boys, right after he landed at the airport and crossed the DC line. The police planned to arrest him on a misdemeanor because he was one of the gang that ripped a Black Lives Banner from a DC Black church. But perhaps on a tip, the police also found two extended magazines for assaut-style rifles and a firearm, and each item equaled one felony charge for Torrio. He won’t be getting out of jail anytime soon.
So the Proud Boys are missing a leader before a critical riot (forget protest} and perhaps the fear of God might have been imparted into the other leaders. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.
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January 6? Starsingers are much more benign.
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As someone who was a Starsinger, when he was younger, yes.
And they mostly come only to people who want them.
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Besides, they bless your house and don’t trash your parliament building.
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And the D.C. officials have called up fifteen hundred armed National Guard troops to quell any attempts at violence by the Proud Boys and the like. That in itself is a good reminder that Trump doesn’t control any military troops at all as they’re all under the control of local officials.
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The Proud Boys have taken back their Blue Lives Matters stance now that cops in Portland are arresting them. Now it’s Fuck The Police!
I am so totally surprised.
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They never really were pro-police. Just pretending to be as long as the police didn’t need to interfere with them.
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The alphabet soup is finally learning that the moment you don’t play the GOP’s crazy ball, you are the BATF.
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Lately, those on the Right here in the US, even relatively mainstream writers like Rod Dreher, have been pushing the notion that fascism isn’t so bad if it destroys the Left. (I’ve seen it in other places, but see here for more on Rod: http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2021/01/just-for-record.html )
This has me a little worried, I’ll admit.
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Not surprising. The American right has been demonizing the left for decades, so why not go all the way?
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“We’ve already established what kind of party you are. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”
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Fortunately Dreher and most of them are chickenhawks. From what I’ve read on alicublog he’d be fine with sending us all to the guillotine but he’s not going to get his own hands dirty. That doesn’t make this kind of ranting any less toxic though.
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OGH sides have too much of a tendency to throw the “fascist” meme out into the political conversation without actually knowing what it means. Trump isn’t really one, nor is anyone on the Left. Trump’s a would-be authoritarian who lacks the military back-up to make it so. And no one on the Left really believes in strong authoritarianism either.
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Cat –
I agree that the word fascist gets thrown around too much, but I think Trump is at least fascist-adjacent, in that he seems to be willing to do anything that allows him to stay in power. Luckily, he’s failing. But his nativist/racist rhetoric, as well as his apparent willingness to categorize large groups of American citizens as undesirable or at least as having certain essential qualities, sure leans fascistic. And be honest, if some part of the American military decided to start a coup to keep him in power, what are the odds he’d say no? I think he’d be happy to let them do so.
All of the above, combined with his bombastic rhetoric, calls to a golden past and willingness to endorse violence to achieve or maintain his power, certainly calls to mind the first fascist, Mussolini. Obviously, there are differences between them, but Musso certainly was as feckless and hard to pin down as our Beloved President. To me, the main difference seems to be that Mussolini was better at it, and got lucky a few times more.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just cynical and downhearted these days.
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The military in the United States has spent two and a half centuries avoiding getting involved in domestic politics. Trump isn’t going to change that no matter what the paranoid fantasies of both the Left and the Right are. Any strong armed attempt by him to change that would likely end badly for him.
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The 14 signs of Fascism:
Powerful and continuing nationalism
Disdain for human rights
Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
Supremacy of the military
Rampant sexism
Controlled mass media
Obsession with national security
Religion and government intertwined
Corporate power protected
Labour power suppressed
Disdain for intellectuals & the arts
Obsession with crime & punishment
Rampant cronyism & corruption
Fraudulent elections
The USA is perilously close to point 14, having already completed all the others under Trump.
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Trump is a fascist. A failed fascist, but still a fascist. He’s been trying to make fascism work for him, he just hasn’t fully succeeded. He came frighteningly close, but he seems to have failed. If he had another year, I suspect he’d have the military in his pocket, as well. It takes some time to dismantle a democratic republic, and he just didn’t have enough time, given his stupidity and incompetence. Without COVID-19, we’d probably be looking at the fall of the republic.
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I put him in the ‘proto-fascist’ camp meself. I’ve read numerous attempts to compare ‘Trumpism’ to ‘Peronism’, which miss the point–Trumpism is a semi-successful American Boulangism.
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Just finished another MAGA 2020 & Beyond story. It predicted that Trump would bankrupt the New York Times with a three billion dollar defamation lawsuit weeks before the 2020 election, which he’d win with 45 states and 83% of the popular vote. After that, he’d donate his entire second-term salary into research towards hovercars cancer vaccines and other such endeavours.
The plot of the story is… some kids being told this during a school trip. That’s it, that’s the plot.
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Who’s writing these stories? Surely not actual genre authors of respectable ilk?
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Here’s a list:
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?641933
Probably the highest-profile authors are Arlan Andrews and Brad Torgersen.
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Ahhh Brad. Rabid puppies. That explains a lot.
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And Arlen Andrews, who was one of the SF writers who talked Reagan into the SDI program as well as a puppy Hugo finalist. No real surprise there.
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As I said, no genre writers of any respectable status. Serious hacks one and all.
Now listening to: Joel Shepherd’s Qaelea Drop, Book Seven of The Spiral War series
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And L. Jagi Lamplighter, who is the only fiction writer I heared of independently of the Puppy stuff.
From Hines funny enough.
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Didn’t Trump get something like $400,000 a year in salary? Meanwhile current (woefully inaccurate) estimates are that the US government spent $2.5 million at Trump properties* while his political minions spent around $22 million at Trump properties.** That story is definitely fantasy,
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2020/10/27/report-us-government-paid-over-25-million-to-trumps-businesses/?sh=7e5e14441a62
** https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/10/trump-properties-poli-spending-passes-20m/
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A lot of the Trumpites I’ve argued with online nevertheless embrace the idea he’s serving in the Oval Office purely out of selfless regard for America. I’m not sure if they’re trolling, self-deluding or maintaining cognitive dissonance – i.e., they simultaneously respect Trump as a ruthless badass who screws over other people and adore him as a model of Christian charity.
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Trump didn’t take his Presidential salary. But he did parlay his position into the receipt of substantially greater amounts of Federal money.
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Just…wow…
Greater love hath no reader than this, that they read MAGA 2020 so we don’t have to.
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Remember, Doris is an avid consumer of splatterpunk and similar horrors. She’s got a much stronger stomach than the rest of us.
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I don’t think Trump could pull that off if he ran unopposed.
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If Trump got another term maybe that is the sort of thing children in the future would be told. It wouldn’t be true, but that wouldn’t stop them. It obviously wasn’t going to happen when the story was written.
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Well, as long as it’s not any of that #^#&$%$!!!! SJW message fiction!
That book isn’t free, right? I’m trying and completely failing to understand who would possibly want to read a ‘story’ like that, let alone pay money to do so.
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Of course it’s not free. The right wing is always about the grift, particularly against their own. Publishing this is to give them egoboo about “pwning teh libs” (which they’re not).
Plus, most of those “authors” couldn’t get a sale to any of the usual outlets — even the online magazines (ask our @Laura just how many magazines there are online!), and none of the traditional publishers are going to touch them with a 3.05 metre pole. They’re even complaining the once-holy Baen is turning against them. Could it be due to their self-inflicted toxicity?
So this is what they’ve got.
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As we learned Years ago:
1. As long as it is right, it’s never message fiction.
2. To writing story that people want to read is the evil SJW way.
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@michael: I would put money on them not rejecting anything, and the vast majority (if not all) of the typists being specially asked to send anything in, which wasn’t edited or even retyped.
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And that’s from the *good* part of the slush pile. I hate to think about the stuff that they rejected.
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What makes you think that they rejected anything? I’m betting that they had no filters that would make them think anything was fucking shit.
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The Pennsylvania Legislature Republicans staged a half-assed coup today.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/05/politics/pennsylvania-state-senate-gop/index.html
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That was pretty awful and desperate of them
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Meanwhile, Scotland shows guid auld common sense:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2021/jan/05/trump-should-not-travel-to-scotland-golf-says-sturgeon-video
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Watching results from Georgia. Sending positive vibes towards the good people of the state.
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The suspense is killing me. It’s the same as the Nlvember election — mail-in etc getting counted last, so the Repubs look ahead but the NYT keeps assurin me the Dems are favored. Gaaaaaaaaaaaah, where’s that bourbon?
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I don’t want to sound too excited about Georgia, but zoiks! I hope these signs are as good as they look.
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It was a relief that Dems swept the GA senate races. And then yesterday happened.
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…and then yesterday happened, and now it’s even more of a relief that we won Georgia!
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So how do we feel about using the word fascism to describe Trump and his minions now?
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No, not really. This was an old- fashion mob with none of he organised skills that a true fascist undertaking has. It very obviously had no leaders, no planning, no real reason for existing beyond anger and fear of the other. My cats has more intelligence as a group that they did.
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This presumes that fascists are competent. They are not always.
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No true fascist? The Beer Hall Putsch was a shitshow.
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Yes, the beer hall putch wasn’t exactly peak planning and organisation either. Sadly, Hitler wasn’t stopped there for good, just given a few years in a cozy prison fortress to write Mein Kampf.
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I don’t think fascists are all that organized or smart, generally. Otherwise we’d all be speaking (whatever language the first fascist dictator spoke).
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//Otherwise we’d all be speaking (whatever language the first fascist dictator spoke).//
Or we could look at what language we are speaking and infer that the first fascist dictator was Henry the 7th 🙂
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The intelligence and organisationtalent of fascist is a myth and was contrafactional propaganda.
Just look at neo-nazis today. (Or one of the topnazis the owner of the Stürmer was very dumb)
I will agree that Trumps incompetence was good for the world.
But the question is re goals and methods.
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It’s hard not to after the do a re-enactment of Mussolini’s March on Rome
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Seems pretty well organized to me. https://documented.net/2021/01/republican-attorneys-general-dark-money-group-organized-protest-preceding-capitol-mob-attack/
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