This Isn't The World I'm From

“Donny is frustrated. The Wall Street Journal reports that at a recent White House meeting, President Trump “launched into a tirade against Iranian leaders, calling them scumbags and lunatics, and unleashing a series of expletives.” He is worried that the war is “consuming his presidency.” He doesn’t understand why those silly mullahs don’t understand that he’s Mr. Art of the Deal.”

“We have here again the old story. States run elections in the United States. This is guaranteed and mandated by the federal Constitution. Congress can set uniform rules for administering elections. The executive branch plays no role at all in setting rules for elections or administering them. The White House’s strategy is to use illegal means (threatened criminal punishment against state officials) to assert power or compel authority the Constitution simply doesn’t allow. This isn’t how anything works. A president cannot legitimately create by force powers that the Constitution specifically denies him.”

The problem is that those who are to defend us against this tyranny are cowards. It's been shown over and over. Doctors letting women die in parking lots rather than risk jail time for an "abortion." Secretaries of State handing over voter rolls rather than incur a criminal charge that likely would be thrown out in court...but too cowardly to challenge authority.

“I hope we see more close calls or more Democratic senators defeated in primaries, though hopefully in cases where the states are blue enough and the challengers strong enough to hold the seats. There are no seats to spare. There’s no margin for losing a couple seats to make a point. But there are also plenty of senators from pure blue states that could be won by almost anyone who’s not truly feral. We just spoke yesterday again about the necessity of Supreme Court reform. And the John Hickenloopers of the Senate are not cut out for that. They won’t get it done. They must either be replaced or convinced by primary close calls to rethink how they approach their jobs. To be clear, Hickenlooper isn’t the worst. I’m sure he’s a nice guy. I’m sure he’s an able leader in other moments. But he’s representative of the get-along-go-along mentality of the Senate Democratic caucus, which is doing the doing the equivalent of debating a new fire alarm system, perhaps even some new fire retardant insulation eve, while the house is literally on fire. You’ll need to end a few of their careers to jolt the remainder into reconsidering their approach.”

“If you’re wondering why they’re working this hard to keep you from voting, the answer slipped out of Todd Blanche’s mouth this spring. Standing on a stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Dallas, the man who’d been Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer and who now runs the Justice Department as acting Attorney General told the crowd, “[E]verybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.” He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done. A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.”

The thought of actually obeying the laws, rules, norms, and the United States Constitution never cross they minds.

“But it gets worse, because that same executive order about mail-in voting also directs the Department of Homeland Security to build its own state-by-state lists of who’s eligible to vote, exactly the kind of national database you’d assemble if your real plan was to pressure states into purging their rolls. If that sounds like paranoia, it’s only because we’ve already forgotten that we lived through it. In 2000, Jeb Bush’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, who also happened to be co-chair of his brother George’s Florida campaign, hired a private firm to scrub the voter rolls using a list of supposed felons that included eight thousand names shipped in from Texas. The matching was deliberately loose, flagging anyone whose last name was an 80 percent match to a felon’s, and the Brennan Center later found that at least 12,000 eligible voters were wrongly purged, 22 times George W. Bush’s 537-vote margin. Black Floridians were 11 percent of the electorate and 41 percent of the people thrown off the rolls. Bush took the presidency by that sliver, and the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount that would have caught the theft was shut down by a Supreme Court whose deciding majority included a justice his own father had put on the bench, Clarence Thomas, whose wife was at that very moment collecting résumés for a Bush administration, and Antonin Scalia, whose sons worked for firms representing Bush, neither of whom saw any reason to step aside. That’s the voter merge-and-purge playbook, and they’re dusting it off on a national scale for this November with new, borrowed-from-Putin tweaks. Or at least they’re trying their hardest to.”

“They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).”

“Whatever the explanation, the bottom line is sobering: The person with the power to sic the Justice Department on perceived political foes; to send masked, heavily armed, and poorly trained troops out among the populace; and to order a nuclear attack is slipping. Maybe fast. And the chance that his Cabinet or his party will do anything about it is zero, which means we’re going to have to survive two and a half more years of this.”

““Fundamentally the problem here with this whole thing is: How is it that you had Karen Bass was in first place, Spencer Pratt was in second place, and then this other woman was in third place. You would expect these mail-in ballots to kind of meet that same basic pattern,” Vance said. “But somehow we find ourselves in a situation where number one—they’re still receiving ballots, not just counting ballots. And number two—the way they’re coming in just so happens to work out such that the Republican is getting kicked out of the final two, so it’s a Democrat-versus-Democrat runoff.”

They know that this is how elections work. They know it. Jerkoff Dumbass Vance knows it. But he is saying it to cast doubt in the public mind on the process. Because they know that the truth doesn’t actually matter. All that matters is that they repeat the lie often enough that it works it’s way into the collective unconscious enough to lay the seeds of doubt. That’s it. That’s why they tell obvious lies over and over again. And the truly, butt-clenchingly annoying part is that this tactic works. It works. The oft repeated lie will become the thing that people think when the topic comes up, and they will stop questioning it (if they ever did). This is what the Republican party has been doing for decades.