Folie à Millions-- Nearly Half The Voters Looked At The Last 4 Years And Decided They Want More Of The Same

 

The Sound Of Music Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

As Charlies Pierce noted in his Esquire column on Wednesday, "He Got More Votes Than Last Time. Almost half of the country looked at the way Donald Trump has functioned as president since 2017 and said, definitively, that they wanted four more years of it. Yesterday, while writing about Kushner and other predatory landlords working towards evicting hundreds of families in the middle of a pandemic, I stumbled across a horrifying pattern of statistics: Trump's support had grown over the last 4 years, at least in the 13 states with the worst COVID caseloads per capita.

This morning I decided to see if that was holding up in other states as well. Obviously, as the vote counting continues, there will be changes, especially since many of the votes coming in are absentee ballots that are overwhelmingly Democratic. Maybe we'll have to look at this again in a couple of weeks when the dust has settled. But here's what we have so far just as Biden is about to be named president-elect. (I'm only including states where at least three-quarters of the vote-- 75%-- is already counted, so no Alaska, Maryland or New Jersey).

• Alabama- 62.3%, down from 62.8%
• Arizona- 48.5%, down 48.7%
• Arkansas- 62.7%, up from 60.6%
• California- 33.0%, up from 31.6%
• Colorado- 42.2%, down from 43.2%
• Delaware- 39.8%, down from 41.7%
• Florida- 51.2%, up from 49.0%
• Georgia- 49.4%, down from 50.8%
• Hawaii- 34.3%, up from 30.0%
• Idaho- 63.7%, up from 59.3%
• Illinois- 43.0%, up from 38.8%
• Indiana- 57.0%, up from 56.8%
• Iowa- 53.1%, up from 51.1%
• Kansas- 56.7%, up from 56.6%
• Kentucky- 62.7%, up from 62.5%
• Louisiana- 58.5%, up from 58.1%
• Maine- 43.3%, down from 44.9%
• Massachusetts- 32.4%, down from 32.8%
• Michigan- 47.9%, up from 47.5%
• Minnesota- 45.4%, down from 44.9%
• Mississippi- 59.7%, up from 57.9%
• Missouri- 56.9%, up from 56.8%
• Montana- 56.7%, up from 56.2%
• Nebraska- 58.7%, same as 2016
• Nevada- 48.5%, up from 45.5%
• New Hampshire- 45.4%, down from 46.6%
• New Mexico- 43.6%, up from 40.0%
• New York- 40.4%, up from 36.5%
• North Carolina- 50.0%, up from 49.8%
• North Dakota- 65.0% up from 63.0%)
• Ohio- 53.3%, up from 51.7%
• Oklahoma- 65.4%, up from 65.3%
• Oregon- 40.3%, up from 39.1%
• Pennsylvania- 49.3%, up from 48.2%
• Rhode Island- 39.2%, up from 38.9%
• South Carolina- 55.1%, up from 54.9%
• South Dakota- 61.8%, up from 61.5%
• Tennessee- 60.7%, same as 2016
• Texas- 52.2%, same as 2016
• Utah- 58.5%, up from 45.5%
• Vermont- 31.7%, up from 30.3%
• Virginia- 44.5%, up from 44.4%
• Washington- 38.0%, up from 36.8%
• West Virginia- 68.6%, up from 68.5%
• Wisconsin- 48.8%, up from 47.2%
• Wyoming- 70.0%, up from 67.4%

Only 9 states saw Trump's proportion of the vote go down: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New Hampshire. This is generally a function of less interest this year in third party candidates. But, look at Texas (where 97% of the votes are counted). Trump got 5,876,777 votes do far. His total in 2016 was 4,685,047. Or take Vermont, where 95% of the vote is counted. In 2016 Trump got 95,369 votes. This year he got 111,131 votes. Read 'em and weep.

Yesterday, John Pavlovitz spoke for many people when he wrote, "The fact that it was even close, the fact that more people voted for him a second time, the fact that a higher number of white women inexplicably affirmed him-- it is all confirmation that whether we remove the very visible, unsightly symptom or not, the pervasive disease is still horribly afflicting us... I was certain we were better than him, but we are not."

Numbed by a cocktail of optimism and ignorance, many of us imagined this was a sick, momentary aberration; a temporary glitch in the system that would surely be remedied: after so much ugliness, such open disregard for people of color, such inhumanity toward migrant children, such a sickening failure in the face of this pandemic-- sanity would surely come to the rescue.

We were certain that we would collectively course-correct; that the pendulum that had so wildly swung toward inhumanity would come roaring back to decency in these days; that we would presently be basking in the glory of a radiant dawn referendum on all this bloated bigotry.

We thought we would be dancing on the grave of fascism.

We thought, of course the good people of this nation would come to their collective senses, leaving behind political affiliations and superficial preferences and ceremonial ties, to rescue us from a malevolence that had proven itself unworthy of its position and toxic to its people.

We were certain there would be a mass repudiation of the racism that this man has revealed and the violence he’s nurtured, because for all its flaws we really believed America was better than this.

We were wrong.

...We believed the best about this nation and we were mistaken.

To many oppressed and vulnerable communities, to people who have long known the depth of America’s sickness because they have experienced it in traffic stops and workplace mistreatment and opportunity inequity and the bitter words of strangers-- this may be less shocking news than it is to those of us with greater privilege and more buffers to adversity and the luxury of naiveté.

But this is the sober spot in which we stand now: realizing that our optimism about the whole of this nation was misplaced,
our prayers for the better angels of so many white Christians were unanswered, our childish illusions that people were indeed basically good and decent, seared away in their reaffirmation of something that the rest of the watching world finds reprehensible.

Brandy X Lee is an author and psychiatrist working at Yale, a specialist in violence prevention. Yesterday, writing for Raw Story, she predicted that "The coming weeks and months will be the most dangerous period of this presidency" and noted that there's a sickness in America that goes beyond just Trump. "'What is wrong with 68 million Americans?' is a question many are asking the day after the election. Why should the race even be close? Why did 48% of voting adults choose to remain with a president who leaves a trail of hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, the nation bankrupt, children in cages, and our natural habitat under existential threat? It makes no rational sense-- unless we correctly identify the problem. For almost four years, mental health professionals have been urging the nation to bring a mental health perspective to a mental health problem, instead of assuming that everything is political. All substitute approachess have failed, just as the best pandemic control comes from infectious disease specialists, not from a radiologist or economists. We have also anticipated the current situation as a product of having mental pathology in power for a prolonged period.

In mental pathology, where higher functions are impaired, an individual taps more easily into “the primitive brain,” which is irrational but very powerful, as it is survival-driven. Illegitimate power is like oxygen to the narcissistically- or sociopathically-disordered mind, and such a person would be driven to do anything-- including annihilate himself and the world-- for his psychic survival. Losing an election would, therefore, not at all be like a healthy person’s experience of defeat. In fact, we know how much Donald Trump fears it through his readiness to call others “losers” and “suckers”, in order to separate himself and to disavow qualities he cannot tolerate.

Many of his followers will equally experience his downfall as a life-or-death matter, since he has conditioned this into them. Their bond is pathological to start, based on developmental wounds or regression to an earlier stage of development under stress, which led them to seeking a parental figure. They are thus vulnerable to someone manipulative and exploitative enough to say he will take care of them and protect them in unrealistic ways that defy reality. And once they do,  they often give up their agency and rationality. Recent footage of his followers chanting, “Fire Fauci!” is disturbing in its depiction of their conformity, loss of personality, and alignment with Donald Trump’s thinking-- to suggest proactively that he remove the reminder of his unwanted reality: the pandemic. Delusions, paranoia, and violence-proneness are among the most contagious symptoms, and we see all these tendencies in his followers.

Under these emotional bonds, his followers will likely experience any threat to his position as an existential threat to themselves, which is why negative facts about him only activate defensive denial and disavowal, rather than abandonment. Abused children rather blame themselves than the parent as a survival impulse, for the parent is their lifeline, and it is easier to believe that he or she could never do wrong-- and the more untrue this belief, the more insistently they cling to it.

“Shared psychosis” or “folie à millions” (madness by the millions) has been well-documented by renowned mental health experts such as Carl Jung and Erich Fromm. This contagion of symptoms dissipates when exposure to the primary person is reduced, which is why Donald Trump holds rallies as if his life depended on them-- psychically, it does. It is also the reason why he cannot leave the presidency-- in addition to the possibility of prosecution.

This Is The Most Important Week Of Your Life-- Just Like Every Other Week Has Been And Will Continue To Be

 

Asterisked-- The Worst President In History by Nancy Ohanian

Satan's doorway into American Christianity has always been through the hucksters, charlatans and cranks who make up the leadership of the evangelical movement. And then came Trump... and the next step. Washington Post reporter Sarah Bailey wrote about the rise of so-called Patriot Churches last week. Today they are "praying for a Trump landslide [and that] 'communism and socialism and transgenderism and homosexuality and abortion will not have their way in this land.'... While most White conservative Christian churches might only touch on politics around election time and otherwise choose to keep the focus during worship on God, politics and religion are inseparable here. The Tennessee congregation is one of three Patriot Churches that formed in September. The other two are near Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia., and in Spokane, Washington [see Matt Shea], and [Pastor Ken] Peters says he is talking with several more pastors of existing churches who want to join them... Peters’s flock is not affiliated with a specific denomination, but it does have a distinct identity. The Patriot Churches belong to what religion experts describe as a loosely organized Christian nationalist movement that has flourished under President Trump. In just four years, he has helped reshape the landscape of American Christianity by elevating Christians once considered fringe, including Messianic Jews, preachers of the prosperity gospel and self-styled prophets. At times, this made for some strange bedfellows, but the common thread among them is a sense of being under siege and a belief that America has been and should remain a Christian nation."

They call masks "face diapers" and their perceived enemies are, government-mandated vaccines, Planned Parenthood, anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter. When one woman at a service said she wished there was some social distancing, another crackpot told her "Oh, trust the Lord with your health." People are encouraged to not wear masks. Newt Gingrich's sister, always an even crazier version of him, is a prominent member of the congregation in Tennessee. "Christians are being persecuted. That’s why we’re raising up people right now. We’ve had it with being second-class citizens," she said. "Even if Trump wins, the fight isn’t over."

Way on the other side of the Christianity spectrum are the Jesus followers, who are also very concerned with politics-- although in a very different way than Ken Peters, Susan Gingrich and Matt Shea (did you check him out?). Take John Pavlovitz, whose recent post, The Most Important Tuesday of Your Life has been on fire in woke evangelical precincts. He wrote that Americans' minds and hearts are solely fixed on Tuesday. But they shouldn't be.

"Regardless of what happens on Tuesday," he wrote, "whatever propels you into the voting booth needs to push you to your feet when the sun comes up in the morning. Because no matter the outcome and whether you feel vindicated or crestfallen-- many things will still be the same: You’ll still be surrounded by systemic ills and relational fracture and national discord. You’ll still have seen every grotesque reality that’s been uncovered over the past four years. You’ll still be walking shoulder to shoulder with weary, wounded human beings who will be looking for compassionate people to see their suffering and to move toward them. You’ll still have a specific front row seat to a place filled with terrors and traumas, and you’ll be the only one with your unprecedented ability to be what that world needs. This isn’t just about an election." 

I’d like to think that we are moved by something far greater than a date on the calendar or an election result or a candidate’s victory; that our collective elation or devastation do not reside in those things.

And ultimately, this isn’t just about the current President either.

If he were to disappear tomorrow, we would still be left with the fallout of everything he revealed: every bit of exposed ugliness, every cruel word uttered toward strangers, every disconnection we’ve endured from people we love.





We’ll still be who we are, surrounded by people being who they are, in the nation we’ve become-- and in the resulting tumult we’ll need to navigate the turbulence around us and bridge the expanses between us.

So where will hope be if it all hits the fan on that Tuesday?

It will be you, finding whatever it is that is that pulls you out of the crippling funk of grief and sadness and disbelief you’ll want to stay in-- and back into the fray of living. 
It will be found in your faith convictions and your personal burdens; in your activism and your advocacy and in the stuff you’ll still believe in.

It will be found in you deciding what matters most in this life, and whether or not it still matters enough to defend and protect it even if the threats seem greater than they are now.

Hope will be in the sunrise and how you decide to meet it.

In that way, Wednesday is actually pretty important, too.

On that day, there will still be hungry people needing to be fed, strangers seeking refuge, outsiders needing welcome, hurting people looking for the healers.

No matter what happens, win or lose-- you and I will need to place our energies and fix our gaze on the ways that we can choose gentleness and peace and generosity, far away from the ballot box.

On November 3rd, we’ll experience one of the pivotal, unprecedented moments in our lifetime. 
We’ll have a chance to allow our voices to be heard and to transform the very planet we’re standing on-- as well as the one we leave to people who will follow us.

We’ll get to leave an inheritance to those we love, and a legacy for those we’ll never know.

This particular Tuesday, we’ll get to let our lives impact the lives of countless human beings with one simple, yet profound act that we participate in. It will be our sacred opportunity to speak precisely from our deepest convictions, to let our hearts clearly resound into the world, and to know that we can be the difference in the day. In the face of a deafening fear that would gladly overwhelm us, we’ll get the chance to let love have the last, loudest word.

This is beautiful news, but the even better news is that we have that opportunity well before Tuesday and we’ll have it long after it as well.

As you read these very words, you have it.

Every single moment we’re here, you and I get to be agents of equity and justice. We don’t have to wait for an event to choose such things, and we can’t be fooled into believing they have an expiration date either.

The gravity of this moment isn’t just about changing Presidents and Senate seats and flipping districts and political victories (though it is certainly is about all those things.) Yes, legislatively there is so much hanging in the balance this particular Tuesday-- but the stakes are always similarly stratospheric, even if they are less noticeable.

The really critical act, is remembering that leveraging your life on behalf of others isn’t an event, it’s your ever-present calling. It’s about you and your daily ability to make this place more compassionate and generous and kind than when you found it. You get to be helper and healer and listener; to be an ally and an advocate and an activist.

There will be no way you can lose that.

As you move toward this Tuesday, don’t miss the countless opportunities you have, with every seemingly infinitesimal decision to elect hope, well before you ever step into a voting booth, and long after you walk out into the day.

So yes, please vote-- but regardless of the results of the election, remember that you always have that choice.

Yes, Tuesday is important.

Wednesday, too.

Today is just as critical.

This week is the most important week of your life.

It always is.

Jesus saves; Trump spreads COVID.

Republican "Christianity" Is Entirely Pre-Jesus-- If Not Anti-Jesus-- Theirs Is A God Who Is Judgmental And Punitive

 

Keith Mannes, giving his final sermon in East Saugatuck one week ago

On Saturday evening, the Washington Post's Hannah Knowles did some Trump reporting from the front lines of one of his super-spreader events, this one in Muskegon, Michigan. He told supporters there was "something very beautiful" about "watching everybody get pushed around" in Minneapolis as National Guard troops responded violently to the peaceful protests after George Floyd’s murder. "Wasn’t that beautiful? In Minneapolis‚ they came in, these soldiers … And they had their tear gas, and they had their pepper spray, which the other side doesn’t want you to use, because it’s not nice. They can throw cans at you. They can throw rocks and stones and hurt your police, but you’re not allowed to guard yourself with tear gas, pepper spray." The forces "marched forward," said the would-be Hitler, "and the whole thing was over" as his fascist followers cheered. "There’s something about that when you’re watching everybody getting pushed around, there’s something very beautiful about it."

Muskegon is a 50-50 county on the shores of Lake Michigan. Hillary actually edged Trump there is 2016-- 36,640 (47.5%) to 35,962 (46.6%). Interestingly, Muskegon was Bernie Country that year. He didn't just beat Hillary in the Democratic primary, he beat Cruz, who won the Republican primary and had far more votes than Trump:

• Bernie- 10,062
• Hillary- 8,220
• Cruz- 6,478
• Trumpanzee- 5,757
• Kasich- 3,706
• Rubio- 1,875

In 2018, Muskegon voters turned out for Debbie Stabenow in the Senate race (52.3% to 44.8%) and for Gretchen Whitmer in the gubernatorial race (50.3% to 40.3%). In the congressional race, it was the only Democratic-performing county in MI-02. Since then, 2,790 county residents have been infected by COVID-19 and 78 have died.

Saugatuck is a small township in Allegan County 47 miles south of Muskegon. No doubt there were residents who drove the 50 minutes to see Trump Saturday. In 2016, Trump won Allegan County with 61% and two years later Stabenow and Whitmer each lost the county. It's part of MI-06, where progressive Democrat state Rep. Jon Hoadley is taking on long-time incumbent, conservative Republican Fred Upton. In 2018, Allegan was one of Upton's top bases of support-- performing for him at an R+22 level.

If you're a regular here at DWT you know I was one of the earliest supporters of what turned out to be an anti-Trump evangelical group called Vote Common Good. The pastor of the Christian Reformed Church in East Saugatuck, Keith Mannes, is part of that group as well. He's been the pastor for over 3 decades-- until last Sunday, when he gave his last sermon and walked away from his ministry in the midst of "increasing political tension and divisiveness." His parishioners are overwhelmingly MAGA supporters.

While Mannes loves the congregation he served at East Saugatuck CRC for the past four years, he says the church as a whole has “abandoned its role” as the conscience of the state in support of Trump, leading Mannes to step away.

“There’s a quote from Martin Luther King where he said, ‘The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state,’” Mannes said. “That just hit me hard because I think, broadly, the white evangelical community in our country has abandoned that role.

“The question of the church largely and how it’s functioned in this moment has been really disturbing. That’s been troubling enough that I need to lay it all down.”

A divide within the faith

Mannes is not the only Christian feeling the strain. He said he knows several other pastors who are feeling the same things.

Additionally, polls show that while white Christians still favor Trump, that support has decreased.

In a poll conducted by Pew Research Center from Sept. 30 to Oct. 5, Christian support for Trump had dipped since August.

In the poll, published Oct. 13, 78 percent of white evangelical Protestants said they would vote for or lean toward voting for Trump if the election were held that day. That’s down from 83 percent in August.

White non-evangelical Protestants supported Trump 53 percent of the time in the latest poll, while white Catholics sat at 52 percent, down 6 and 7 percentage points since August, respectively.

According to Pew, 44 percent of registered voters are white Christians, making it a key voting demographic.

Why the strain on the faithful?

George Lundskow, a sociology professor at Grand Valley State University who studies the sociology of religion, said support from the religious community is tied to how people view God.

Lundskow said that while some of the president’s actions may not align with Christian values, he has aligned himself with conservative Christians by acting similar to how they see God-- judgmental and punitive.

″(His actions) don’t seem very Christian, much less conservative Christian,” Lundskow said. “I don’t think it’s about that. It’s something else about religion-- whether you see God as punitive and judgmental or the loving, forgiving version of God. That definitely shapes political views as well.”

Lundskow said this divide between conservative and progressive Christians based on their view of God is a point of division within the faith in terms of political support.

The professor explained that those who see God as punitive tend to support Trump, saying they see him as strong-willed for the way he attacks opponents and “punishes” people for being poor. Lundskow added that Christians who view God as loving and forgiving tend to be more liberal and progressive, welcoming immigrants and “seeking social justice” for the poor.

Years in the making

Mannes has been feeling a disconnect between the teachings of the church and the actions of the political candidate it largely supports for years. It started when Trump announced his campaign in June 2015 while descending down an escalator at Trump Tower.

“From the time he came down the escalator,” Mannes said of when he began to feel an internal struggle. “It’s only been building ever since. From the beginning I thought there’s something about this man and the instrument that he is for a lot of things that are just very not Jesus.”

He said the congregation at his church has “saved (his) faith in many ways,” but what he’s seen from Christians nationally has challenged it.

That includes when white supremacists gathered for a rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 which led to three deaths and dozens of injuries, after which Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.”

Mannes was part of a group of pastors that walked 130 miles from Charlottesville to Washington, D.C., in August, hearing the stories of people there during the 2017 events.

He called Trump’s photo holding a Bible in front of St. John’s Church in Washington in June, following the use of tear gas and riot control to clear protesters from the area, a “tremendous violation of something deep and holy,” and said it was a key moment in his views.

“It just floors me how church-going people who read the Bible and sing the hymns can show up at a (Trump) rally and just do that deep bellow like an angry mob supporting these horrible things that come out of his heart and his mind. It just began to trouble me so much that I am a pastor in this big enterprise.”

While some, like Mannes, may be turned off by Trump’s actions, Lundskow said many look past them because they believe Trump was sent to be a representative of God.

“If I’m somebody who sees Donald Trump as God’s chosen representative, the leader God has chosen to bring the country back to the right direction, I’m willing to overlook his personal failings,” Lundskow explained. ”(Christians think) if he’s good enough to be God’s representative, he’s good enough to be president.”

The decision to leave

As the tension in his heart and the world around him continued to grow, Mannes said his feelings began to show in his sermons, causing discomfort for some parishioners.

Trying to keep his thoughts internalized became more and more difficult as time went on.

“What it was really doing was tearing me up,” he said. “I’ve had to be very careful to not speak about these things directly with members of the church.

“It’s not only me, but quite a number of pastors I know are just like, ‘This is it? All this preaching we did about Jesus and there’s this big of a disconnect?’ I think that’s a real burden on a lot of pastors’ hearts. I love these people, I love God, I love Jesus, I love the church, but there’s something happening here.”

Mannes sat down with the elders of his church in September to express the tensions he had been feeling. After a long and emotional meeting, they agreed it was time to part ways.

“We got down on our knees, many of us wept. It was a really hard decision,” Mannes said. “It was time for me to lovingly and with great peace and loss separate from the church. It was really crushing because I’ve given my life to the church, and thankfully so.”

‘Be the conscience’

Mannes says he understands many Christians will vote for Trump, and he will still love those who do, but implores them to think about what it means to be a Christian before making their choice.

“I would just implore anybody who claims Christ to just look very seriously at the core things Jesus called us to do and be,” he said. “Do some serious soul searching about who you’re serving and how you’re trying to accomplish that purpose in the world.”

He calls on his fellow Christians to be the conscience of the president, whoever it is, and force them to be better than the division that has become common.

“We’re supposed to be the conscience of the president and we have refused to do that,” Mannes said. “I don’t know that a church who believes in Jesus as we do, can abandon its conscience and not say, ‘Mr. President we’re calling you to better than that and you need to call our nation to better than that.’”

A few weeks prior to his last sermon, Mannes spoke with a member of the church, who asked him to reconsider his decision. The person asked him about his plans once he walked away, with no guarantee that the issue will even persist after Election Day.

“He said, ‘What are you going to do? What are you going to have?’” Mannes recalled. “Well, at least my conscience.”

These days, John Pavlovitz's evangelical ministry is online. His blog, Stuff That Needs To Be Said is stuff that needs to be read. Today he wrote one aimed squarely at Trump supporters: No, I Won’t Agree To Disagree. You’re Just Wrong. "At this point, with the past four years as a resume," he wrote, "your alignment with this president means that we are fundamentally disconnected on what is morally acceptable-- and I’ve simply seen too much to explain that away or rationalize your intentions or give you the benefit of the doubt any longer. I know what your reaffirmation of him is telling me about your disregard for the lives of people of color, about your opinion of women, about your attitude toward Science, about the faith you so loudly profess, and about your elemental disrespect for bedrock truth. I now can see how pliable your morality is, the kinds of compromises you’re willing to make, the ever-descending bottom you’re following into, in order to feel victorious in a war you don’t even know why you’re fighting. That’s why I need you to understand that isn’t just a schism on one issue or a single piece of legislation, as those things would be manageable. This isn’t a matter of politics or preference. This is a pervasive, sprawling, saturating separation about the way we see the world and what we value and how we want to move through this life."

And he was just getting started, perhaps with Keith Mannes' struggle in the back of his mind.

Agreeing to disagree with you in these matters, would mean silencing myself and more importantly, betraying the people who bear the burdens of your political affiliations-- and this is not something I’m willing to do. Our relationship matters greatly to me, but if it has to be the collateral damage of standing with them, I’ll have to see that as acceptable.

• Your devaluing of black lives is not an opinion.
• Your acceptance of falsehoods is not an opinion.
• Your defiance of facts in a pandemic is not an opinion.
• Your hostility toward immigrants is not an opinion.

• These are fundamental heart issues.

I’m telling you this so that when the chair is empty this Thanksgiving, or the calls don’t come, or you meet with radio silence, or you begin to notice the slow fade of our exchanges, I want you to know why: it’s because I have learned how morally incompatible we are. It doesn’t mean I don’t respect you or even love you, but it means proximity to you isn’t going to be healthy.

I’ve been disagreeing with people all my life. That isn’t the issue here.

Were we talking about anything less than the lives of other human beings, I’d be more than willing to disagree with you and, but since we are talking about the lives of other human beings-- I can’t.

I believe you’re wrong in the ways that are harming people.

You’re wrong to deny the humanity of other human beings.

You’re wrong to justify your affiliation with this violence.

You’re wrong to embrace a movement built on the worst parts of who we are.

I simply can’t agree to that.

Now, give yourself a Sunday treat and allow the Resistance Revival Chorus to show you what Mannes' courage to speak truth to power sounds like in song:

We All Have All The Information We Need To Decide Who To Not Vote For In November

In a "sermon" a couple of years ago, God Has Nothing to Do With Trump Being President, John Pavlovitz reached out directly to evangelicals to remind them that spiritualizing the Trump presidency is "sinful, blasphemous, lousy evangelism and just plain asinine. The hypocrisy on display is historic: after spending the past 8 years straining to find infinitesimal specks in Barack Obama’s eye that they could condemn as deal breakers-- Evangelicals are now perfectly fine with Trump’s rotted forest of Redwoods. In fact, in the most dizzying display of theological spin doctoring, it is now precisely his ever-growing trail of personal toxic discharge that supposedly proves evidence of God’s hand in it all. So Trump’s multiple marriages, his porn star affairs, his mountain of sexual assault claims, his verbal obscenities, his disregard for rule of law, his compulsive lying, his clear racism, his unrelenting attacks on marginalized communities (things these Christians would have figuratively and almost literally crucified Obama for) are now unmistakable signs that God is using this President. This is nonsense of Biblical proportions; to try and draw some line between Jesus of Nazareth and Donald of New York, is about as farcical as you can get without actually spontaneously combusting from the cognitive dissonance... We really should stop pretending God is responsible for this fast food dumpster fire, when it’s clear whose hand is in it all. This reality is the rotten fruit of misogyny, racism, Nationalism, fear, xenophobia, and bigotry-- all released by people who want God to consent to it all so they don’t have to deal with their own culpability or face their own repentance."

Fast forward to... tomorrow. Michael Cohen's book will be officially out and available... a longer and more detailed and less religiously-oriented version of Pavlovitz's 2018 sermon: Disloyal: A Memoir. I have a feeling this may be the most talked about-- if not read-- book out of the dozens of Trump exposés by people once close to him that have come out in the last 4 years. Cohen makes the case that Trump is a criminal, a mentally ill sex psycho and an obsessed racist.

Washington Post reporters Ashley Parker and Rosalind Helderman got their hands on an advance copy and wrote up a preview over the weekend, noting that Cohen "Trump’s longtime lawyer and personal fixer... alleges in a new book that Trump made 'overt and covert attempts to get Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.' ... Cohen lays out an alarming portrait of the constellation of characters orbiting around Trump, likening the arrangement to the mafia and calling himself 'one of Trump’s bad guys.' He describes the president, meanwhile, as 'a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.' The memoir also describes episodes of Trump’s alleged racism and his 'hatred and contempt' of his predecessor, Barack Obama, the nation’s only African American president." I hate the way Parker and Helderman use the world "alleged" to describe characteristics that have been proven beyond any reasonable double over and over and over for decades and decades and decades.

On Russia, Cohen writes that the cause behind Trump’s admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin is simpler than many of his critics assume. Above all, he writes, Trump loves money-- and he wrongly identified Putin as “the richest man in the world by a multiple.”

Trump loved Putin, Cohen wrote, because the Russian leader had the ability “to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company-- like the Trump Organization, in fact.”

Cohen also reveals new alleged details about the convoluted effort behind a National Enquirer report smearing Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). Cohen says that Trump signed off on the baseless report to damage Cruz, one of his rivals in the 2016 Republican primary.

“It’s not real, right?” Trump allegedly asked after being shown a photograph, which the magazine would claim depicted Cruz’s father with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

“Looks real to me!” Cohen responded, according to the book, prompting Trump to laugh as he demanded that the story be run on the tabloid’s front page.

“To say it would be a low blow would be an insult to low blows; can you think of another politician, ever, who would stoop this low?” Cohen writes.

...According to Cohen, Trump’s sycophantic praise of the Russian leader during the 2016 campaign began as a way to suck up and ensure access to the oligarch’s money after he lost the election. But he claims Trump came to understand that Putin’s hatred of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, dating to her support for the 2011 protest movement in Russia, could also help Trump amass more power in the United States.

“What appeared to be collusion was really a confluence of shared interests in harming Hillary Clinton in any way possible, up to and including interfering in the American election-- a subject that caused Trump precisely zero unease,” Cohen writes.

Cohen’s book, however, does not reveal much in the way of new details surrounding the investigations by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and others into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

...Cohen asserts that another reason that Trump consistently praised Putin was to fulfill his long-held desire to slap his name on a proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow.

Cohen says the Trump Tower plans called for a 120-story building in Red Square, including 30 floors devoted to a five-star hotel with an Ivanka Trump-branded spa and Trump restaurants, and 230 high-end condominiums for Russian oligarchs and leaders.

The plan, Cohen adds, was to give the penthouse apartment to the Russian president for free, in part “as a way to suck up to Putin.”

“The whole idea of patriotism and treason became irrelevant in his mind,” Cohen writes. “Trump was using the campaign to make money for himself: of course he was.”

Trump would later publicly insist that he had no business dealings with Russia. But Cohen writes extensively of his own efforts beginning in the fall of 2015-- several months after Trump had declared his candidacy-- to make the Moscow project a reality.

The project fell to Cohen, he writes, because Trump’s children all disliked Felix Sater, the colorful Russian American developer who served as the Trump Organization’s liaison with Russians interested in the project.

Nevertheless, Cohen says the whole family was aware of the project, even as candidate Trump publicly said he had no ties to Russia. Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, who is now a senior White House adviser, even selected the proposed tower’s high-end finishes, Cohen writes.

Ivanka and her lawyers have previously described her involvement in the Russia project as minimal, noting that she never visited the prospective site.

Cohen also describes in detail the partnership between Trump and David Pecker, the chief executive of National Enquirer parent company American Media and a longtime Trump friend, which included Pecker allegedly sharing the Cruz attack with Trump ahead of publication.

While many of Trump’s critics would obsess over the possibility of Russian interference, Cohen writes, it was a purposeful “disinformation campaign” run by American citizens such as Pecker that was “by far the more insidious and dangerous development of the last cycle-- and the most threatening for 2020.”

Cohen notes that the grocery-store tabloid targeted each of Trump’s 2016 primary opponents in turn. He includes a document in the book, for instance, purporting to lay out the magazine’s plan to take down Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). [I hope it was all about Rubio's period as a gay prostitute.]

The National Enquirer came through for Trump again later in 2016, agreeing to pay former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal, who claimed she had an affair with Trump, for her life story and then never running the story. Trump agreed to repay Pecker for the $150,000 fee but never did, Cohen writes.

In the case of Daniels, Cohen writes that after Trump agreed to pay her $130,000 for her silence, he strategized with Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg on how she could be paid without attracting notice.

Weisselberg suggested finding a Trump friend to put up the money, in the guise of paying for a membership to a Trump golf course or the club Mar-a-Lago, according to the book. When Cohen countered that perhaps Weisselberg should lay out the money himself, “Weisselberg went white as a sheet-- like he’d seen a ghost,” he writes.

Ultimately, Cohen made the hush payment himself, taking out a personal home equity loan to come up with the cash, all the while assuming Trump would probably fail to repay him as agreed.

“Stuck with the tab for Trump’s sex romp in a hotel room in Utah a decade ago,” Cohen writes. “This was the job I loved?”

Ultimately, however, Trump did repay Cohen-- agreeing to reimburse him in $35,000 monthly installments after he had entered the White House as president, hiding the payments as fees for legal services and naming Cohen his personal attorney. Cohen asserts that Trump would get a tax break and legal services along with the money-- meaning he would actually come out financially ahead for paying off the adult-film star.

The Trump Organization did not immediately respond for comment Saturday.

In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the Trump Moscow project, as well as to violating campaign finance laws by paying Daniels to remain silent. Cohen told the court that he had been directed to make the payment to Daniels-- and later reimbursed for the money-- by Trump. He also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and lying to a financial institution, crimes that were unrelated to his work for Trump.

He was sentenced to three years in prison, which he had been serving at a federal facility in Otisville, N.Y., until he was allowed to leave prison and serve his sentence at home because of the coronavirus pandemic. Before he entered prison, he delivered dramatic public testimony to Congress, in which he apologized for his past lies and called Trump a “racist,” “a con man” and “a cheat.” Republicans mocked his self-professed turn to honesty, noting that he had previously defended Trump with similar gusto.

Beyond Russia’s role in the 2016 elections and the Daniels payment, Cohen seeds the rest of his book with snippets of gossip from his time in Trump’s orbit-- some of it new, some of it well-known and much of it familiar.

He describes Trump insulting and dismissing some of his children, including Donald Trump Jr., his eldest son, and Tiffany, his youngest daughter.

Cohen writes that during the 2016 campaign, Trump was dismissive of minorities, describing them as “not my people.” “I will never get the Hispanic vote,” Cohen recounts Trump claiming. “Like the blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump.”

Cohen describes Trump’s obsessive hatred of Obama, including claiming that the only reason the former president got into Columbia University and Harvard Law School was because of “fucking affirmative action.” He also recounts Trump’s “low opinion of all black folks.” claiming that Trump once said while ranting about Obama, “Tell me one country run by a black person that isn’t a shithole. They are all complete fucking toilets.”

After South African President Nelson Mandela died in 2013, Trump said he did not think Mandela “was a real leader-- not the kind he respected,” Cohen writes.

Instead, Cohen writes that Trump praised the country’s apartheid-era White rule, saying: “Mandela fucked the whole country up. Now it’s a shithole. Fuck Mandela. He was no leader.”

Cohen writes that before winning the presidency, Trump held a meeting at Trump Tower with prominent evangelical leaders, where they laid their hands on him in prayer. Afterward, Trump allegedly said: “Can you believe that bullshit? Can you believe people believe that bullshit?”

“The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swathe of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being,” Cohen writes. “The truth was that he couldn’t care less.”

Cohen also depicts Trump as being crude toward women, including inadvertently commenting on Cohen’s then-15-year-old daughter as she finished up a tennis lesson: “Look at that piece of ass,” Trump said, according to Cohen. “I would love some of that.”

Cohen details a tawdry 2013 visit to a Las Vegas club, the Act, with Trump and Aras and Emin Agalarov-- a Russian father-and-son oligarch duo. Cohen asserts that the group watched a debauched strip show that included one performer who simulated urinating on another performer, who pretended to drink it.

Trump’s reaction to the show, Cohen writes, was “disbelief and delight.”

Cohen’s book ends with something of a plea-- though one that requires the reader to trust Cohen’s account of his time in the Trump orbit.

“You now have all the information you need to decide for yourself in November,” Cohen concludes.

So Far, Trump-Stoked Chaos And Anomie Are Not Helping Him With Voters

Rev. John Pavlovitz was frustrated when he woke up yesterday-- very frustrated. He wrote that he felt "done being represented by a needy, belligerent, barely literate mobster, done with unrepentant racists and anti-science religious zealots, done with confederate flags and Fox News and MAGA cultism, done with a grotesque Frankenstein Christianity wildly stumbling around without Jesus’ tender heart, done living in a nation, nearly half of which wants it to be more white, less diverse, and less kind." On second thought, he noted that dwelling on that frustration isn't what he needed to do as much as the fact that America is "he place we’re going to shout down the bigots, the place we’re going to outnumber the close-minded, the place we’re going to demand equity, the place we’re going to tear down the flags and the statues and mindsets that perpetuate white supremacy, the place we’re going to expand so that every hungry, exhausted, hurting soul finds rest, and the place we’re going to lock arms and dig in our heels and push back the terrified bullies trying to drag us backward."

Pavlovitz concluded that "The racists are growing desperate. I think their violence is going to get worse. I think they feel the head winds of History blowing fiercely against them and they are going to make one more frantic, brutal, ugly assault on diversity and decency-- and we’ll have to be here to be the line that will not be moved." He's ready "to be here to be the line that will not be moved... We have to make a stand."

Trump made a deranged and extremely worrisome appearance on Fox News with one of his worst media enablers, Laura Ingraham. You should watch this and see if you can count the lies (hint-- more than one every 20 seconds). Try to remember that almost a third of Americans-- many of them armed to the teeth-- believe whatever this sociopath says:





That was Monday. On Tuesday, on his way to stir up trouble in Kenosha, he was still carrying on about how "an entire plane" was "filled with looters, the anarchists, rioters, people looking for trouble. When reporters, trying not to laugh in his orange face, asked him to speak to a witness who TRump claimed was made to feel "uncomfortable" on the plane filled with looters and rioters and thugs, he told the reporters he will try to put them in touch with the person. "Maybe," he said, "they will speak to you, maybe they won’t."

Has Trump lost his mind-- or is he just gaslighting and feeding his low-IQ base the red meat they thrive on? Even Ingraham noted that some of this crazy off-the-top-of-his-head nonsense she was getting out of him was conspiracy theory stuff.

NBC News reporter Ben Collins explained where Trump got it. He wrote that the conspiracy theory that Señor Trumpanzee was pushing Monday about the plane almost completely loaded with thugs in "dark uniforms, black uniforms" ready to disrupt the Republican National Convention "was almost identical to a rumor that went viral on Facebook three months ago... There is no evidence of any such flight. When Ingraham asked for more information about the flight, the president said, 'I'll tell you sometime.' He then alleged the people had been headed to Washington to disrupt the RNC. Before mentioning the uniformed men who allegedly boarded the plane, Trump claimed that there are 'people that are in the dark shadows' and 'people that you haven’t heard of' controlling Democratic nominee Joe Biden." He also claimed "they control the streets" and are being paid by rich people and corporations.

Ingraham pressed the president for more details and said it sounded like he was alleging a conspiracy.

“They’re people that are on the streets. They’re people that are controlling the streets,” Trump said.

The claim about the flight matches a viral Facebook post from June 1 that falsely claimed, “At least a dozen males got off the plane in Boise from Seattle, dressed head to toe in black.” The post, by an Emmett, Idaho, man, warned residents to “Be ready for attacks downtown and residential areas,” and claimed one passenger had “a tattoo that said Antifa America on his arm.”

That post was shared over 3,000 times on Facebook, and other pages from Idaho quickly added their own spin to it, like the Idaho branch of the far-right militia group 3 Percenters.

One post claimed that “Antifa has sent a plane load of their people” and that the Payette County Sheriff’s Office confirmed it. Within days, that version of the rumor picked up enough steam in Idaho Facebook groups that the Payette County Sheriff’s Office had to release a statement insisting that the viral rumor was “false information.”

Rumors of marauding bands of Antifa supporters have plagued local Facebook groups, chain emails and forwarded text messages since mid-May. One of the most viral rumors on an Antifa invasion into the suburbs was taken down after Twitter said it was created by a troll account with ties to white nationalists.

Some armed Americans took to town squares in several towns to fight off fictitious busloads of Antifa in June, spurred by false rumors on Facebook pages. Seven days after the original Idaho rumor went viral on Facebook, armed men stood guard over protests in Missoula, Montana, worried about the planeloads of Antifa supporters.

In his Washington Post column about Trump's flawed election strategy August 20th, David Byler pointed out that not only is "Trump's suburban pitch... off-key in an election dominated by the coronavirus," but that "Playing the race card is more likely to backfire now than in any time in a generation. In 2019, the libertarian Cato Institute found that 52% of Americans who live in the suburbs favor 'building more houses, condos and apartments' in their community while 46% oppose the idea. According to YouGov, 50% of suburbanites think Biden would be better at handling race relations than Trump, and only 28% prefer Trump to Biden... These communities are no longer all-White bastions where fathers work and mothers stay home with the children. These neighborhoods are racially diverse: According to a 2018 study, only 68% of suburbanites were White, 14% were Hispanic and 11% were Black. And no matter where they live, Pew Research Center found that the share of mothers who stay home with children declined from 49% in 1967 to 27% in 2016. The audience Trump believes he’s targeting-- White stay-at-home suburban moms-- may be smaller than he thinks.

Trump's bullshit about "saving Kenosha" is not being bought by voters, who are finally recognizing how Trump lies and manipulates to push his personal agenda. Even with support for Black Lives Matter sliding in Wisconsin, voters are still backing Biden, not Trump.

Yesterday, Chuck Todd's team at NBC News speculated that playing the race card "is-- at best-- break-even for Trump. And at worst, it’s another liability for him. According to our August NBC News/WSJ poll (conducted before the violence in Kenosha), Trump held a 4-point advantage over Biden when it comes to which candidate better handles crime, with 43 percent picking Trump and 39 percent Biden. But on uniting the country, Biden’s edge over Trump was 23 points, 49 percent to 26 percent. And on race relations, Biden’s lead over Trump is 24 points, 53 percent to 29 percent. So despite the conventional wisdom, it’s not clear at all this issue is a winner for Trump.

The new poll from Morning Consult that was released yesterday-- so post-conventions-- shows Biden ahead 51 to 43% nationally. 55% of voters view Trump negatively while just 46% view Biden negatively. But it's the swing states where the campaigns are in full gear that are most interesting. According to this set of polling, Trump is losing every swing state but Ohio and Texas. But what about that normal convention bounce? Well, there was some. Biden increased his support after the 2 conventions in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Texas and Wisconsin-- stayed the same in North Carolina, Ohio, Minnesota and Colorado-- and lost one point each in Pennsylvania and Florida, each of which he is still leading in. Trump, on the other hand, had a bounce down in Michigan, Georgia and Arizona, stayed the same in Wisconsin and Colorado, and increased his positions slightly in Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Minnesota-- in each of which he's still losing-- and in Ohio and Texas.

Do Police Have The "Right" To Brutalize-- And Execute-- Citizens? Republicans Tend To Think So

If the election is a referendum on Trump, get ready for President Biden. If it's about Trump's handling of the pandemic, expect an landslide that will see Republicans at every level of government losing their offices. The Republicans know that, of course, and they are working make the election about anything else. They've settled on a bogus "law and order" narrative. Bogus because Trump is the most criminal president in history, presiding over the most criminal regime in American history. This may not be that big a deal compared to Trump's major, daily criminality but last February he pardoned the female Darrell Issa, Angela Stanton-King, who had served 2 years of her sentence for running a car theft ring. A few weeks after Trump pardoned her, she launched an election campaign against John Lewis in Atlanta's 5th congressional district, one of the bluest districts in the country (D+34), where Trump only drew 11% of the vote. With Lewis' death Stanton-King is now running in an open seat (against state Senator Nikema Williams). A gay-bashing, anti-Choice Q-Anon nut case with a flare for getting attention, Stanton-King has no chance of being elected to Congress but every TV appearance and every newspaper article or social media mention brings money into her coffers. She's very much like her hero, Señor Trumpanzee.

"Law and order" is not part of today's Republican Party-- except inasmuch as it can be used to oppress poor people. The Republican campaign theme this cycle is all about painting a picture of Democrat-run cities being overrun by angry mobs and looters. Trump in New Hampshire Friday: "Today's Democratic Party is filled with hate. Just look at Joe Biden supporters on the street screaming and shouting at bystanders with unhinged manic rage... They are not protesters. They are anarchists, they are agitators, they are rioters, they are looters." And actual Trump supporter Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two protesters and wounded a third in Kenosha.

The protests in Kenosha were all about the police shooting Jacob Blake in the back-- 7 times-- last Sunday. Blake lived but is now paralyzed from the waist down. The police responded to protesters by gassing them. Some of the protesters, angry and provoked-- possibly by Trumpist agents provocateurs-- burned businesses. There is a legitimate sense that police are not accountable for their criminal activity and the fascist impulses they act out against citizens.

"I support the protestors, so I am against the police. That’s the lie I hear every single day in America," wrote John Pavlovitz yesterday. "It’s a myth perpetuated by this President and his party and by people like them: white people who don’t want to address the systemic racism embedded in law enforcement or the persistent brutality against people of color on display-- and who attempt to push people to the very opposite of poles in order to avoid talking about it: 'Choose Black Lives or Blue Lives.' they say. 'Those are the options.' This choice is not only unnecessary, it is rooted in a fundamental falsehood: the existence of Blue Lives. There is no such thing as a 'Blue Life.'"

Law enforcement officers are not a race and they are not a monolith, either. They come from every disparate part of this nation; out of many families of origin, religious traditions, sexual orientations, and political affiliations, when they choose this work. It is among the most dangerous and stressful and volatile work on the planet-- but they do choose it.

And when they do, they take an oath to protect and serve humanity in its fullness. That is the job description. It is the very heart of the calling. It is the singular purpose they exist: defense of all life under the Law, a Law they represent and embody.

There are expectations we have for those choosing to put on that badge and that uniform:

• They are expected to defuse combustible situations, not exacerbate them.
• They are expected to use wisdom and restraint instead of emotionally exerting force.
• They are expected to withstand provocation without responding in kind.
• They are expected to be beyond prejudice and above biases that would deny another human being’s inherent worth.
• They are expected to uphold the civil rights of every person in their path equally, without caveat or condition or excuse.
• They are paid by American citizens (including citizens of color) to do this chosen work on behalf of the public who they are accountable to.

And when they are off-duty, members of this diverse community can remove the badge and uniform and they can escape the hazards and the threats of their jobs, and live fully into their other “non-Blue identities”-- that is, except for the black and brown police officers.

They like (all people of color) can’t take off their skin to avoid the taunts that come with it, they can’t be undercover or off-duty or take a break from the demands of their difficult reality. They can’t step out of their pigmentation in order to sidestep the violence it brings every moment of every day. They are not black or brown at some portions of the day or some days of the week or when they clock in, which is why the supposed #BlueLivesMatter movement isn’t an equivalent advocacy of life in response to the call for people of color to be treated with dignity, it is an insult. It is a white excuse to avoid confronting discrimination against people of color, to distract from the difficult conversations, to deny the systemic sickness, and to stop all conversation.

This is something far beyond citizen on citizen violence, this is violence initiated by those with both the power of the Law and weaponry in their hands. That means they are subject to even greater scrutiny because the stakes are higher and the impact on communities is profound.

It is not an attack on law enforcement to name and to condemn police brutality, or to demand that those who comprise its ranks are of the highest standard as human beings-- it is a reiteration of its value as an entity.

And it is not anti-American, but the essence of patriotism to responsibly police the police; to ensure that they are living into their oath with regard to all citizens, because every human life literally depends on them doing so: at traffic stops and in city streets and in public parks and in their homes.

And as citizens of this country, we don’t have to apologize for our standards and our expectations of public servants. That’s part of the gig. Law-abiding, tax-paying Americans are not accountable to violent police officers-- violent police officers are accountable to law-abiding, tax-paying Americans. It is not incumbent on us to avoid criticizing them, it is incumbent on them to listen and to respond to valid criticism.

It’s not asking too much to insist that officers not only protect people of color as passionately as they protect white Americans, but that they not actively harm them.

It’s not unreasonable to expect them not to kneel on a man’s neck for over eight minutes until he expires, not to shoot a man seven times in the back, not break into a woman’s bedroom and murder her, not to beat peaceful protestors, not to knock unarmed old men to the ground, not to allow a young white man with an AR-15 to run past them while being alerted to his murderous presence.

Being furious when police officers do these things is not an act of hatred against law enforcement as an entity-- but against the acts of hateful cowardice committed by some that pervert it and cheapen them all.

I am not for Blue Lives, I am for human lives, and the human lives that continually find themselves brutalized by those entrusted to protect them are black and brown-- and Americans need to name and confront and own this because until we do, we will continue to conflate outrage at inequity, with attacks on the perpetrators of this inequity.

The good people of this country fighting against brutality will not be defined by the calculated lie that to be for Black Lives is to be against the police.

We simply demand that the police be for Black Lives without exception-- or we demand they no longer be police.

Strong People Can Vote Against Trump Without Forcing Themselves To Wear Blinders About Who Joe Biden Is

Slimeball by Nancy Ohanian

In the early days of DWT, Paul Lakasiak occasionally graced this blog with guest posts. They were always among my favorite contributions. Paul was back yesterday with a response to a post-- Is The Tent So Big That The Party Has Become Meaningless As Anything MoreThan A Vehicle To Save The Country From Trump?. "The answer to your question is 'yes'," he wrote in the comment section. "And the Democratic Party is getting worse, not better."

Watching the convention over the first three days, I was actually working up some enthusiasm for helping the Dems win big in November. Then I saw the news that Pelosi had endorsed Joey With the Good Hair over reliable, principled progressive (and INCUMBENT) Ed Markey. And now I'm outraged.

I'll still crawl through broken glass laced with tetanus laden rusty tacks and fire ants to vote against Donald Trump in November. But don't ask me to tell anyone that things will get better with Democrats like Nancy Pelosi in charge of the House -- because all I can say is that, under Biden, things won't be as bad as under Trump.

And I suspect that this viewpoint will be shared extensively among real progressives. They know that the democratic party is completely corrupt-- and that Pelosi is thoroughly worthless. And we're most likely to see repeat of 2010 in another two years, as Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer betray the American people in favor of their corporate sponsors.

Biden's acceptance speech Thursday night was excellent. Whoever wrote it with him deserves a lot of praise. Biden delivered it very, very well too. I'm a big admirer of John Pavlovitz and share his thoughts here at DWT frequently. I've never disagreed with him-- until his post yesterday: Joe Biden Is Not The Lesser of Two Evils. Obviously, anyone could agree with his observation that "The only people still defending [Trump] are brainwashed Evangelicals, looney conspiracy theorists, and abject racists. The raking light of history is recording all of it, whether these people like it or not. The human rights violations and the assaults on our Constitution and the attacks on our institutions and the rampant criminality cannot be denied or explained away or buried in fake Fox News headlines." It's his next line, though, that merits some debate: "Joe Biden is not the lesser of two evils, because he is not evil by any measure."

For someone like myself, who doesn't vote for evil, whether it is lesser or not, that's an important assertion, and one I entirely disagree with. Politically-speaking, Biden is profoundly evil. Unlike Paul Lukasiac, let alone John Pavlovitz, I'm not even going to vote for him. On a relative basis of evil, he pales next to Trump. Trump's evil isn't normal political evil... Trump's evil comes from the bowels of hell and I pray that selfless and courageous Secret Service agents spend time meditating on a Satwant Singh and Beant Singh solution to what plagues our country and is bringing it to its knees.




I respect people who look at Trump and Biden and conclude that Trump is so much worse that they will... "crawl through broken glass laced with tetanus laden rusty tacks and fire ants to vote" against Trump in November. I haven interest in trying to persuade anyone to not vote against Trump and do what I can to remind everyone I know-- and readers of this blog-- that Satan has a servant in the White House.

But that doesn't change how I see the Joe Biden I've gotten to know since the mid-1970s, when he only had one issue he ran on as a newly-minted Democrat: racism. His campaign was based on dog-whistles vowing to protect white suburban voters from the horrors of integration. And once he got to the Senate, he was in a constant battle for the position of that body's worst Democrat, consciously-- no, literally, consciously-- fighting to present himself as a conservative. Like I said, I'm not trying to dissuade anyone from voting against Trump and I spent the last year talking about Biden's shortcomings. That said, this kind of drivel is not something I'm buying into, no matter the source:

He is a profoundly decent man: a man of faith, a man of compassion; a man who is willing to listen to different viewpoints, capable of evolving, and able to admit his mistakes. He is a man who loves deeply, mourns greatly, and gives fully. He is a man with actual meaningful, healthy relationships with other human beings. He is a humble man who sees others as more important than himself.

Biden is a corrupt conservative and he will head a corrupt conservative administration. Mainstream Republicans love him and they will love him more. He may even achieve their biggest goal-- and his own-- wrecking Social Security with some kind of bogus Grand Compromise he's been working on for his whole miserable career. Is he still better than Trump. Of course. One would be hard-pressed to see Trump as anything less than demonic. Biden is, admittedly, a "flawed human," as Pavlovitz put it. The Democratic Party is also very flawed, very, very, very flawed. There are no Republicans in Congress worth re-electing, not even one. The Democrats have many decent members of Congress-- certainly not a majority-- most congressional Democrats should be defeated-- but there are dozens and dozens of good ones too. Something to build on. The GOP? Needs to start over from scratch.

Pavlovitz is no dummy and only an imbecile would dismiss his thoughts. "It’s one thing to be a good-hearted but flawed human being who sometimes says something stupid or occasionally has an error in judgment or simply gets it wrong," he wrote. "Most of us fall under that category. We’re not any kind of evil, we’re just imperfect , emotional people, and so we fail and fall-- sometimes slightly and sometimes spectacularly. That’s who Joe Biden is. He is one of us. He is human. We need more human these days." How can anyone disagree with that? Especially when he offers the contrast: "It’s something else entirely to be an inherently malevolent creature: to be incapable of empathy, defiantly unwilling to admit mistakes; to wake up every day intending to do harm and feeling no remorse for it. If the word evil can apply to anyone, it’s the current President. He lacks a single noble impulse. Even his supporters know that."

Pavlovitz says he "would much rather be led by a well-intentioned human who sometimes misses the mark, than a purposefully cruel sociopath who has no concern for other people’s pain. False equivalencies are irresponsible here. These are fundamentally different people in every important way one can measure such things."

He should vote for Biden. He's going to. Most voters are going to. Nearly everyone I know and respect is going to. All my relatives-- except one seriously deranged one-- are voting for Biden. All my friends are voting for Biden. I am fairly certain that even my partners at Blue America are voting for Biden. I hope that on November 4th, I'll be thanking God for having defeated Satan the day before. And when Biden starts being Biden, I'll be interested to see how long it takes Pavlovitz to rethink his thoughts on relativity. For example, is Austerity evil? Not as evil as Trumpism, but... well, maybe I'm wrong and that nearly 50 years of Bidenism is suddenly going to change. But I doubt it.

One man pulls us toward unity, the other stokes division. 
One man speaks to our collective better angels, the other to the worst of who we are.
One man is burdened to inspire, the other compelled to engender fear.
One man is continually turned outward and the other is fully self-absorbed.
One man expresses his love for America, the other vilifies over half of it.

Stop telling me the choice isn’t clear.

I’m not voting for Joe Biden begrudgingly.

I’m not holding my nose or halfheartedly standing behind his campaign, and I’m not supporting him simply because he’s opposing Donald Trump.
I'm voting for Joe Biden because I know that he won’t deny the existence of a pandemic.
He won’t blame viruses on Republicans.
He won’t silence medical experts.
He won’t reject Science.
He won’t allow tens of thousands of Americans to die in order to protect his ego.
He won’t tweet demeaning nicknames for his opponents.
He won’t validate nonsensical conspiracies.
He won’t shout over female reporters.
He won’t shut down social media apps when teenagers hurt his feelings.
He won’t dismantle the Postal Service in order to deny Americans their essential liberties.
He won’t make fun of people with disabilities.
He won’t call racists fine people.
And on and on and on.

Republicans for Biden feel a lot like Pavlovitz. Below, on the Bulwark podcast-- a #NeverTrump outlet for conservatives-- two staunch conservative Republicans, Charlie Sykes and Tim Miller, had a discussion of the Democratic Convention. Tim Miller, a former RNC spokesman and Jeb Bush Communications Director, said "I wanted to share one thing that we discussed after the show was over. Both of us we were caught off guard by how emotionally attached we were last night to this candidacy. We had sort of expected to feel this reluctant, begrudging support for the Democratic nominee, to have been left in a tough spot between one normal bad choice and one existentially bad one. But that isn’t what happened. Joe Biden has me energized. And frankly, that he has both Charlie and I reflecting on whether maybe in the past we were just…in the wrong…"


In his wrap-up of the Democratic Convention for Politico yesterday, Ryan Lizza wrote that "Much of the week was spent by Democrats balancing praising Biden for his empathy and character and attacking Trump for-- well, just about everything. What was missing from the big speeches-- with the notable exception of Bernie Sanders-- was a clear articulation of the specific policies Biden would pursue to combat the pandemic and recession. Biden filled in those gaps clearly. He discussed, with some specificity, infrastructure, education, health care, climate change, and tax policy. He gave a detailed list of actions he would take to stop the spread of Covid-19. Overall this was a nimble speech that responded to the dramatically changed circumstances of the last few months, when Biden transformed from being the leader of a faction within his party to the leader of the most diverse electoral coalition in modern politics. In that span, the pre-existing crises he knew he would face as president-- climate change, the diminished standing of America in the world-- were shoved aside by three additional and equally urgent crises."

This morning, a trusted progressive leader in Congress suggested that if I could try to "take it easy on Joe until after the election that would be great-- have to beat the Nazis before we can worry about USSR (to torture an imperfect analogy)." I get it... and believe it or not, I have been "taking it easy" on Joe... relatively speaking.