Updating Phil Ochs’ target:
Here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of
Trumpy traitors, find yourself another country to be part of
The scary thing is the period between the election (the real election, conducted by the Electoral College) and the inauguration. Assuming arguendo a Biden win, it appears that if someone manages to take out all three of Biden, Harris and Pelosi, then Chuck Grassley becomes president.
Another risk is a Biden assassination between Tuesday and the meetings of the electors. Basically, the constitutional solution for that is “let the Electoral College figure it out.” State laws differ on what happens. Some electors will be required to vote for the dead Biden, some for Harris, some become free agents, and the election is thrown into the House because neither the dead Biden, nor Harris, nor Trump will have a majority. The House, with one-state-one-vote, would carry Trump in a landslide - Wyoming and Alaska and would each have one vote, same as California. A majority of states have majority-Republican delegations, balanced under ordinary circumstances by the much greater number of representatives from states such as California, New York and Illinois, but that balance is removed when the House deliberates on a Presidential election.
Trump stands on the bank of the Rubicon.
It’s getting harder and harder to see a scenario in which the succession isn’t decided by bloodshed. (The two most common methods of picking a leader throughout history have been bloodlines and bloodshed, so this is nothing new.)
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Yeah, I know some Republican leadership is saying a lot of things they don’t actually believe themselves, in an attempt to convince Republican voters. They’re doing more and more of it, too, as it seems to be working. Some of them seem to be buying into their own propaganda, to some degree, too.
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If you try to shoot someone who looks like the person who you wanted to kill, what is that called? How did they know he or she wasn’t on board?
Yet nobody fears for the lives of Trump or Pence. Odd, eh?
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more interestingly, why was no LEO vehicle assigned as escort
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If the implication is that they didn’t know who was on the bus, fine. How do you know they weren’t just attacking anything with “Biden” on it? I mean, that’s the pattern. They attack signs, voters, cars, buildings - anything with Biden on it. From that perspective, it’s just dumb luck that this bus really was associated with the Biden campaign.
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This was an organised ambush. They knew this motorcade would be on that highway at that time. Which means they chose their target deliberately and it isn’t a case of roaming trump convoys happening upon a bus that said Biden on the outside.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they had received the info about the bus’s route from Texas law enforcement.
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Which means at least somebody involved in the decision-making chain knew neither Biden or Harris were even in the state. Not that these chuckleheads would have hesitated to attack the bus if either was in it. But I assume that both have a protection detail that would have taken very serious action against aforementioned chuckleheads. If they haven’t, they do now.
I’m generally against violence, but I’m picturing the next time a “Trump Train” tries to roll up on a Biden bus, that two 50 cal turrets pop up from the roof and start putting holes in engine blocks, at the very least.
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May I be the first to coin the slogan (for when we need it, as we might): “Bloodshed Not Bloodlines”
Biden gets Secret Service protection. I’m not sure he’s allowed to decline it once the Congress has requested it (which it did, back in March). And of course the Secret Service chain of command eventually leads to Trump. I hope his private security has them outmanned and outgunned. The Secret Service has made arrests relating to death threats to Biden and Harris, so they at least are giving the general impression that they are protecting him. Probably The Donald isn’t aware of that, or he’d surely order them to stand back and stand by.
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I can relate to this - in reverse though.
I live in WA which is very red outside of the Seattle area. The only reason the state goes blue is because it’s the most heavily populated area (and goodness for that). Outside of here it’s very much Trump Town in a lot of the state.
Despite repeatedly explaining this to my Fox News loving FIL it never stopped him from continually grousing about “all the damn liberals in Washington State”.
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Eh, with the virtue signalling from the right, we are just one bad day from having “leftists” storm the gates of the White House. Remember how Trump “toured” the bunker?
Yes, I know, it is Schrodinger’s Left. They are both weak girly men, and also dangerous radicals and thugs.
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That’s the pattern throughout the country. Blue cities, red rural areas. VA is blue because of NOVA and the larger cities. The rural reas (like where I live) are deep, deep red. Its just a question of the rural/urban ratio that determines red vs blue states.
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Trump now says “our people were protecting his bus yesterday.”
Which begs the obvious question “who were they protecting his bus FROM if not Trump supporters?”
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They aren’t stealing this election secretly. Republicans are calling for it openly on national television? Trumpists I know would proudly and openly tear up Democrat votes, since they believe Democrats are evil and wrong. They would read your linked article and applaud, and I think the majority of Republican voters would as well.
Money is the only thing they understand. It’s why otherwise Obama-blue states will go red again this time. Republicans run on the scare tactic of “If Democrats win, you’ll lose your job and your children will starve!” The perception that hatefulness brings economic prosperity has to be broken.
I guess we’ll see how everyone feels about this over the next four years. If Biden wins, and I am afraid it is a much bigger if than anyone thinks, we still have the threat of President Cotton or President Carlson to deal with in 2024. I think the situation is grave, easily grave enough to warrant punitive economic action on the state and county level. It may already be too late even for that.
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I think most of us would agree that the situation is grave and that money is a language the bad people understand. Where you lose me is when you talk about punishing an entire state. That’s effectively 73% innocent people, if you assume Trump’s 27% white supremecist base is evenly distributed in states.
The way you fix this is things like helping get Mitch McConnell voted out of his seat, or working to get gerrymandering banned. Voting against Trump is, of course, a given. The people of a state are not to blame for their politicians if the democracy of that state is not representative.
The old saying used to go “we get the government we deserve”. That suggests this a representative democracy, but it has not been that for a long time. 73% of the people in every part of the country are innocent victims. Punishing them economically or otherwise is not going to help, and will further divide a country that’s on a slow slide to civil war as it is.
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Voting still works in this country. The alternative is war. Please vote and don’t give up working within the system to help fix it. Yes it’s hard, but you know what definitely doesn’t work? Giving up.
You sound like you’re in need of comfort, and I get it. We’re all pretty ragged. One thing that helps me is reading more US history. Believe it or not, nothing happening now is unprecedented. The word “unprecedented” is a hyperbolic myth that the press loves to throw around. This country has survived some truly epic constitutional crises, some incredibly corrupt institutions, and yes, even worse presidents than Trump. It recovered from those, and will from this as well.
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They also need a gateway drug and an enabler. My father, a lifelong Democrat and labor organizer for the Teamsters in the 80s and 90s, divorced my mom and married a right wing hellbot who insists they watch Fox news and listen to Rush. She raves on Facebook at family and friends about socialism and every other scare word in the right wing hate machine lexicon.
That’s the enabler piece. She’s the enabler. The gateway drug is my father’s racism has been turned up full blast. In this case, it’s THE MEXICANS. “They’re taking our jobs. They’re overrunning our cities.” They’re this. They’re that. Somehow, my dad got this notion that Mexicans are the root of everything wrong, responsible for all the ills of society. It’s like his former labor-focused world had gone out the window, flipped on its head, twisted, and turned into this beliefs-defying credo of hatred towards our fellows in the struggle against corporate greed and oppression. “THE MEXICANS,” he said with that racist, angry, contorted white man’s face, like you see in the mob in To Kill a Mockingbird.
My grandfather, before he died, thought that his own son was off the deep end. I’ll never forget the conversation three years ago. It was just the three of us in my grandpa’s living room. My dad went OFF on Mexicans and why he voted for Trump. My grandpa said, “Are you all caught up?” We both stopped and turned to him. I said, “What?” He repeated, speaking to my dad, “Are you all caught up on your sermon on immigration?”
Indicating a few things, chief among them: that he thought my dad was unreasonable and this raving lunatic conversation was not worth continuing. And that there was no real conversation to be had about this because he knew, as I know, that you simply cannot argue with Trump Zombies, and my dad had been bitten by the disease. My grandfather was dismissing him, as a father can do to a son. Basically, “You’re wrong. Conversation over.”
Enablers and a gateway, and then the constant feeding via Fox, Hannity, Rush.
I’m really struggling with my dad. His sisters think he’s crazy. I do too, obviously. His other kids all do.
Maybe his personal beliefs were never that strong in the first place?
I look at my hispanic friends and family and think, “How could I ever be against you?”. I don’t get this racism and xenophobia. It’s not in my mental landscape. And if someone suggests that maybe I SHOULD be against them, my response is, “go fuck yourself. They are my friends and family. YOU go back where you came from, not THEM.”
Similar to homophobia. I look at my non-hetero family and think, “how could I ever be against them?” If someone suggests I should rethink that, I react, “No, YOU get the fuck outta my face.” My beliefs in right and wrong are strong. So strong the ties that bind me to my family and friends, and therefore to pluralism and acceptance of differences. I extrapolate my feelings to strangers.
Yet, not bound as strongly to my own father - it’s just so obvious to me how wrong he is.
But what about those people like my dad who some decades are liberal voices of progressivism and other decades have slipped backwards to racism and xenophobia? What? They cannot extrapolate? Or is their affliction something else? It is SO hard to compute this.
But again, I insist it has to do with enablers, a gateway and then the constant IV drip feed of hate propaganda and misinformation.
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when rich white people commit crimes, we’re always told we have to read their minds and prove “intent”
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