I see where you might be confused. The 40% of the eligible citizenry who don’t normally vote are not fence-sitters trying to decide between two parties/candidates; rather, they’re apathetic citizens who think neither party offers them anything worth their showing up at the polls. They’re not only conservatives or “centrists”, but also a lot of progressives who are completely uninspired by candidates like Biden.
Conway wasn’t appealing to those non-participants, but rather to the moneyCons and neocons who normally vote GOP (and who did so in 2016 and before) but who might stay home this time around if The Lincoln Project and sheer exhaustion convinces them that the party’s rightward shift has gone too far. Conway is trying to scare them into giving her boss one more chance to solve the bogus problem of predominantly progressive violence by enabling the helicopter-and-unmarked-van crowd of “very fine people”.
Fence-sitting “independent” voters, as I noted earlier:
I simply don’t see how calling something out by lying advances anything.
And your position makes no sense: she’s saying people who are happy that protestors are being killed will vote Trump to stop protestors from being killed?
I don’t think this is is accurate. If the group of nonvoters was anywhere near as one-dimensional as you describe, then “turn out the base” strategies would be pointless. There are lots of reasons someone might not vote, and some of those reasons come very close to reasons why someone might be an undecided voter. (Not directly relevant here, but some people end up in the nonvoter category because of aggressive voter suppression; they might take particular exception to your description of them as apathetic.)
I do think you’ve accurately captured a significant subgroup of the voters Conway was targeting in your description of reliable Republican voters who think the rightward (or Trumpward) shift has gone too far, but I wouldn’t restrict that group to moneyCons and neocons. They’re Republican leaning voters who are disappointed in or have distaste for Trump, but haven’t reached the point of finding him completely beyond the pale. Right now they may be sitting on the fence, perhaps thinking about not voting, or about voting for Biden; they aren’t (yet) easy to label as nonvoters or undecided voters. I doubt that she wants those people thinking about helicopters and unmarked vans; that seems like it would be part of the rightward shift going too far for a lot of them. She does want to hook them by their reactions of fear, disgust, and outrage, enough to either overcome their qualms about voting for Trump or convince them to let go of the idea of voting for Biden because he’s feckless.
It’s not “lying” - this is exactly what she’s saying.
The ‘heroic spree killer’ narrative appeared after she made this statement, after it was clear the shooter had been front row at a Trump rally, and it could no longer be implied that the shooter was a protester. Yet “the violence” (specifically the shooting) is still being blamed on the protesters. And no, it doesn’t make any sense - but these are the same people putting the blame on Biden for the unrest, rather than Trump. Sense doesn’t remotely come into it.
I think there’s a very portion of that 40% that figures their state/district always votes for the D or R, by high enough margins that there’s not really any chance it could swing the other way, so they do not have a feeling that their vote could make any difference.
Plus the fact they cannot get out of work to go to the poles without a high risk of getting fired, or (if they have a lenient boss) unless they take the day off (without pay), or they have no easy way of getting to the polling place. A lot of workers have a rough commute (hours each way) which makes it impossible to show up at their local polling place on a Tuesday.
Others have the sort of job where they to travel to various client sites, or construction sites, and can’t book the travel months in advance to get the proof required to get an absentee ballot (either because their employer won’t let them book travel that far ahead, or because they don’t know that far ahead where they will be going)
I’ve been in that situation, traveling for work, but not being allowed to book the flight more than a couple weeks out, or only finding out I’m traveling somewhere a week before (or occasionally, the day before the the flight) In my state, that meant I could not get an absentee ballot, because I could not show my hotel/flight confirmations a month in advance.
Election day needs to be made a Holiday, where most businesses close and people can expect to be able to stay near home and have the time to go to the polling place, or require all states have multiple days you can go vote (some states do, but the rest need to get on board with that)
Agreed with everything you say here. As my comment history here shows, I think that it’s shameful and embarrassing that a country touting itself as the “world’s greatest democracy” makes it so difficult for citizens to vote (and not just because of disenfranchisement efforts). I should have included those citizens in that 40% (who, again, aren’t “fence sitters” but non-participants).
What I’m not going to do is worry about are the supposed “mischaracterisation” of what are clearly the regime’s FUD-based efforts to convince the regular participants in the system who normally vote GOP (the vast bulk of whom are rubes and fantasists) to give Biff one more chance this year; I’ll leave that to hand-wringing “centrists”.
So the way we know what she meant is based on things that hadn’t happened yet and things she didn’t know yet? Essentially, she’s clairvoyant and we’re just catching up?
It’s not about giving the benefit of the doubt. It’s about accurately identifying the thing you object to. It may be more fun to say “What they really mean is X” (see also “when you say MAGA, you are really saying make America white again”) and there may be a place for such rhetoric (see previous parenthetical) but when people assert that this is literally what was being said they lose credibility. The people Conway is talking about look outside and see their city on fire and people in masks attacking business owners and people getting shot. Republicans say “We see the violence and we’ll do something about it” and Democrats (or progressives more generally) say “What violence? All I see are peaceful protests. She must be talking about causing some.” It’s unproductive.
You can disagree that Republicans have the answer without pretending that they’re asking a different question.
You seem confused. To reiterate: the “heroic mass shooter” narrative came after her statement; at that point the conservative talking point was that the “violence” (including, specifically, the shooting) was the fault of “the left” (even though they knew the shooter was targeting protesters). That was the context in which she made her statement. That was the violence being talked about. (In fact, other conservatives explicitly spelled it out.) We can’t “identify” what she’s saying by ignoring that context, because fuck, why stop there? Language, what does it actually mean, anyways? Maybe by “violence” she actually meant “hugs.”
And even now that there’s this “heroic mass shooter” narrative, even as right-wing violence against protesters is on the upswing (see: Portland, where multiple trucks full ofTrump supporters maced and shot at protesters with paintball guns and then drove through red lights into crowds), there’s still this idea being promulgated by conservatives that the unrest is helping Trump.
At this point Trump is liking/retweeting statements lauding the killer and advocating for more violence. They’re engaging in open fascism at this point, so pretending they’re not saying what they’re explicitly saying is pretty fucking perverse.
I object to racism and authoritarianism and the people who promote it, like Conway and this entire administration. Even if they’re not out and out saying that want to see violence against the protesters (and for that matter, anyone who disagrees with them or gets in their way), but they are very much hinting around that by their language. We know this, in part, because the racist right wing is becoming even more violent than it has been for the past 20 or 30 years.
And here’s where we are now: after the right was convinced that “Antifa” was going to come to their rural towns to start shit, arming themselves for a confrontation that never happened, they’ve decided they’re going to go to cities to start some shit, egged on by conservative media and the Republican politicians, including the president:
the whole flying flags from vehicles thing is a thing I wish would just stop and go away and never come back I’m so fucking tired of it and the bullshit posturing that comes with it
Also, it’s a fucking joke on so many levels to photoshop Trump as Rambo-
Not only has the orange slimeball dodged the draft multiple times with fake excuses that are well proven and documented, but he’s fucked over and mocked actual war veterans like McCain and a gold star family’s dead son.
He’s also the kind of bullshit shitheel authoritarian that Rambo directly fought against- and everything Trump stands for, encapsulated in the officer in that movie.
He also is the fattest, pudgiest, slimiest piece of trash that not once ever had that kind of physique, and ran like a little coward from the opportunity to ever become one. He’s directly mocked and belittled and insulted captured war heros that were imprisoned fighting for America- exactly like Rambo- with McCain.
I don’t like John McCain, but he still did something at one point for this country.
These flags characterizing Trump as Rambo are beyond a joke, I’d love to puke directly down the mouth of whatever clueless fuckwad even created this disgusting clueless insulting dreck.
The people Conway is talking to don’t live in the cities. That’s where all the people they hate live. They’re eager to see the cities burn. And a number of them (buggering-loo boys for example) are driving 100’s of miles just to set some fires.
John McCain was mostly (but not entirely) just another Republican asshole bullshitting politician. That said, he still did his assigned job in the military is probably the more correct phrase. It didn’t do much for the US except make the military industrial complex richer and kill 50,000 Americans that mostly didn’t want to be involved in a pointless war against ‘Godless Communism’.
He gets accolades from people because he was willing to speak up against Trump but in the end he has a long record of what he did that undercuts any good he ever did. I have no knowledge of anything he ever did “good” either.
Fact remains, though not doing good, he was still a war prisoner by the same people Rambo fictionally was.
Which makes the thing above I mentioned even more of a sick joke.
