Prickly City by Scott Stantis for December 16, 2020

The trumpcultists are going over the edge. Willing to go to jail for their dear cult leader.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-houston-police-captain-paid-230215098.html

Well, it ended for certain for 300,000+.

But, not to worry — when the weather warms up in April, it’ll go away.

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Also, it is, you know, what it is.

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#TraitorTrump

We’re turning the corner…. as Trump turns on Mitch McConnell. No honor among thieves.

Don’t often get warm fuzzies from Wsj, maybe never before. This headline, ‘Personnel Is Policy’: Four Themes Emerge as Biden Selects Team, made me remember what what it’s like and look forward to quiet, intelligent, competence.

Thomas B. Edsall: America, We Have a Problem — The rise of ‘political sectarianism’ is putting us all in danger. Sectarianism, Jacobson continued in an email, feeds on itself. Shanto Iyengar, a political scientist at Stanford and another of the paper’s authors, emailed to say: I would single out the profound transformations in the American media system over the past 50 years. Basically, we’ve moved from an “information commons” in which Americans of all political stripes and walks of life encountered the same news coverage from well-regarded journalists. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/opinion/trump-political-sectarianism.html

Bizarre fantasy… but dangerous.

President Trump has, thoroughly and completely, lost the 2020 election. Now who’s going to tell the Republican base?

Or more to the point, who’s going to tell them they’re being scammed?

The message of the scam is this: Trump can still win — but only if you stay angry enough, keep tuning in to our network and keep sending those donations. He’s counting on you!

All the people making this pitch — Trump himself, his White House staff, his campaign, Republican elected officials, party leaders and conservative media figures — know that it’s a lie. But it’s also the basis of their business model.

And every once in a while, the mask slips, which is what produced an utterly fascinating exchange Monday night between Fox Business host Lou Dobbs and White House policy adviser Stephen Miller. Give these two minutes a watch:

The background here is that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) offered to argue the Trump campaign’s case before the Supreme Court; this is an obvious play for attention on Cruz’s part, but for some reason Dobbs seems to think it’s a stunning development that will transform the entire conflict and give Trump an excellent chance of being declared the winner of the election.

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In case you don’t know (which you probably don’t, unless you’re one of the few dozen people who watches his show), Dobbs’s program has attained a level of sycophancy toward Trump that would put North Korean state television to shame. He makes Sean Hannity look like Edward R. Murrow.

And Dobbs is so committed to Trump that he forgot that it’s all just a con. You don’t challenge the White House on why they aren’t doing more to keep up the fight, because that might show that the White House knows perfectly well that the fight is lost.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/08/whos-going-tell-gop-base-that-theyre-being-scammed/

@John Adam 69, you just described the last 4 years. Are you finally waking up that you have been conned. How much have you given to trump’s latest scam?

To his die-hard fans, President Donald Trump is a hero for creating the coronavirus vaccines. But that doesn’t mean they want the vaccine — or think others should take it.

They just want Trump to get credit.

Across the far-right, and especially in the conspiratorial corners of MAGA world, Trump’s supporters are finding novel ways to both lavish the president with praise for speeding a Covid vaccine, while arguing against taking the vaccine itself.

Some explanations focus on limiting vaccinations — only high-risk individuals and health care workers should get it, while the rest should simply resume our pre-pandemic lives. Others are reflexively anti-establishment — a vaccine is needed, but the government shouldn’t dictate what we put in our bodies. Others are fantastical — the vaccine is somehow part of an elitist conspiracy to control the world.

And increasingly, the loudest anti-vaccine advocates are high-profile MAGA supporters.

Emerald Robinson, White House correspondent for the pro-Trump television network Newsmax, tweeted this month that people don’t need vaccines, but “the politicians want it for control.”

The Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump news organization that has prompted untrue conspiracy theories, called the prospect of widespread immunizations “creepy.”

Senate Republicans allowed a Covid vaccine skeptic to testify last week, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson called the possibility of mandatory Covid vaccination — even though no such dictate is on the table — “a legitimate crisis.”

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https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/16/maga-coronavirus-vaccine-446022

It’s frustrating for worried Americans to read things about how Republicans have become anti-democracy; Republicans are vitiating norms; the efforts to keep them in line won’t work. I assure you, it also frustrates to write them.

Statements like these are more often than not followed by common-sense questions like: Why does this keep happening? Why are Republicans waging a war on democracy allowed to get away with it? Why aren’t they facing consequences?

The answer is obvious, but not simple: There are no incentives, at the federal or local level, for Republicans who want power to act any differently.

Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann noticed back in 2006 that House Republicans lacked “institutional patriotism” — that is, a sense that their own work as lawmakers contributed meaningfully to democracy as a collective; they had been gerrymandered into office and the only significant political pressure they faced was a risk that they would be shamed for not betting on the hot horse of the moment, which was inevitably a divisive cultural issue.

Since they faced no competition in elections, they were completely insulated from the consequence of their actions.

The decline of local news, as an industry, and as a check and balance, has played a role here. There are far fewer political reporters around to keep up with congressional shenanigans.

And because of the stranglehold that the perception of political bias has on editorial decisions, egregiously undemocratic actions aren’t covered close to the point of representation.

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The lesson is that subverting democracy is really dangerous. These members — all 126 of them — should be asked, as often as possible, why they participated. Why did they consent to throw out tens of millions of votes? Why did they think that aligning with Trump was a better move than choosing to nobly accept his loss and move on?

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https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/republicans-are-waging-war-democracy-why-are-they-allowed-get-n1251058

The Skunk in Chief will leave the biggest stink that America has ever suffered with. Stay well my friends.

Except you don’t any more. Some people will still listen to you but without the power and prestige of the Presidency behind you nobody has to.

Truer words have not been spoken. Trump and company want COViD19 to infect everyone in this country to make the survivors “herd immune”.

DJT is like genital herpes.