Prickly City by Scott Stantis for November 30, 2020

Never seen that expression on Carmen before.

Who’s talking coup? In Sudan, maybe.

The pandemic is raging? Anyone else annoyed by all of the snarky comments made by people traveling via air about packed flights and the other air travelers who aren’t following preventative measures? What part of “stay at home do they not understand”?

We are tired of winning, just like promised, right?

Are we Great Again yet? (270,000 covid deaths)

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#TraitorTrump

#DiaperDon

The only group thing I’d like to do is Biden’s inauguration. Probably won’t, but wish these were more normal times, so I could. Something tells me President Biden will ask people to stay home instead.

As for Christmas, the look is there. Towns have their decorations up, the neighbors are putting theirs up. As for everything else, the smart people will forgo normal. The stupid people may still be too busy with funerals after their big Thanksgiving gatherings.

Trump Christmas has always been Halloweenish… somehow this just fits in with that.

Let’s have pity on the doctors, nurses, & emts; if not the weak & vulnerable. Please.

The Trump administration’s current strategy is to go to court to try and get votes for Biden ruled illegitimate, and that strategy explicitly rests on Trump’s appointees honoring a debt the administration, at least, believes they owe.

One of his legal advisers said, “We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court — of which the President has nominated three justices — to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through.”

If that fails, and it will, Mark Levin, one of the nation’s most popular conservative radio hosts, is explicitly calling on Republican legislatures to reject the election results and seat Donald Trump as president anyway.

After Twitter tagged the tweet as contested, Trump’s press secretary weighed in furiously on Levin’s behalf.

That this coup probably will not work — that it is being carried out farcically, erratically, ineffectively — does not mean it is not happening, or that it will not have consequences.

Millions will believe Trump, will see the election as stolen. The Trump family’s Twitter feeds, and those of associated outlets and allies, are filled with allegations of fraud and lies about the process (reporter Isaac Saul has been doing yeoman’s work tracking these arguments, and his thread is worth reading).

It’s the construction of a confusing, but immersive, alternative reality in which the election has been stolen from Trump and weak-kneed Republicans are letting the thieves escape.

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“Democracy works only when losers recognize that they have lost,” writes political scientist Henry Farrell. That will not happen here.

(Hence the “We’re a Republic, not a Democracy” idiocy…)

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https://www.vox.com/2020-presidential-election/2020/11/7/21554114/trump-election-2020-voter-fraud-challenge-recount-biden

A Coup Is a Coup

It’s still an illegitimate power grab, even if Republican operatives are only doing it to protect Trump’s fragile ego.

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But, apparently believing it would be too cruel to cut Trump off from his institutional support base completely, conservatives decided to arrange for him a sort of Make-a-Wish Foundation version of Bush v. Gore.

Before he is out of his misery, everyone will expend a lot of energy creating the appearance of challenging the results of the election in order to appease the president.

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Lying for the president’s sake also requires lying to everyone else in the nation.

It is easy, especially for political journalists, to become inured to the way in which certain government officials treat their jobs as analogous to those of the cast and crew of The Truman Show, and to forget that the United States is more than just a collection of people in government.

It is an actual country with people in it. Many of those people cannot discern that all of this talk of illegal votes and Trump’s paths to victory is merely being done to help Trump come to terms with his loss.

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To sum up the current situation, the U.S. is experiencing a fake self-coup that requires the administration to do exactly the things a regime would do if it were attempting to stage an actual self-coup, with millions of people sincerely believing the stated justifications for the strongman’s consolidation of power and with the regime’s legislative allies playing along, under the apparent belief that eventually the courts, which are stocked with unqualified loyalists, will soon say the game is done.

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https://newrepublic.com/article/160187/trump-coup-2020-election-republican-power-grab

A video purportedly showing election officials “stuffing ballots” in Flint, Mich., a Democratic-leaning city of 95,000 people, wasn’t taken at a Flint polling site at all.

It appears to show an election in Russia.

The video, posted on Facebook, shows election workers depositing ballots into a collection box. It uses shading to spotlight the box, suggesting that the entry of those ballots was improper. The caption reads: “Here we have staffers stuffing ballots in flint mi.”

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https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/nov/05/facebook-posts/video-ballot-stuffing-filmed-russia-not-flint-mich/

Well, Carmen, you just have to leave the right-wing populists, but that would require you break away from your controller. I know it would be hard.

Fortunately, we still have Hanukkah! Havah nagilah, havah nagilah…

Another coup attempt? That will make it what…three so far in the last four years?

Trump has fired senior Pentagon officials — something that makes no sense if he isn’t planning to stay more than two months.

He (or his group) is also trying to change electors in Pennsylvania as well as elsewhere.

Does he really think either will work? Probably not, but at this point he’s got nothing to lose.

Actually, THE ORANGE IDIOT hopes to entice his newly created SUPREME KANGAROO COURT to declare him the whiner, er winner.

Christmas,1989 in Romania, perhaps.

A coupe or a sedan? Just personal preference.

Why does a Hen-house have two doors?

If it had four, it’d be a Hen-sedan.