Coop Scoop Dec. 11: The Black Xmas Edition

The Coop Scoop: The Black Xmas Edition

December 10-11, 2020
Issue #50


This is not easy to write. My anger and frustration with this current moment, compounded by the stress that the pandemic puts on us older folks, leads me to mistrust my own judgments.

I am unsure as I have colleagues and friends who are much more serene, who claim that Donald Trump will surely and slowly fade and recede, and that the “boring” steady hand that Joe Biden supposedly heralds will be sufficient to restore some sense of normalcy.

Sorry. I am on the other end, perhaps the other extreme. I tend to agree with Never Trumper strategist Steve Schmidt when he says we now stand merely one election away from the death of democracy.

At best Democrats will have a 50-50 standing in the Senate. More likely 49-50 to the GOP. And the House majority is now down to 2 or 3 seats. If history is any guide, that will be lost in 2022 and the Republicans will have a total lock on Congress. A Republican Party that has become insurrectionary.

The damage that Donald J. Trump has wrought on the republic just since his election defeat has been, and continues to be, no less than catastrophic. His post-election propaganda and disinformation, amplified by an army of stooges and lackeys, constitutes the greatest and most damaging lie in American history and has only stoked the greatest health, economic and political crisis in modern American history.

Make no mistake. Trumps’ activities since November 3rd clearly constitute and extra-legal coup attempt. Because everything he touches turns to shit, it should be no surprise that this attempted auto-putsch came off as one more incompetently led bad joke. But that this was the first real coup attempt in American history should not be ignored.

It failed, But the after-effects still threaten us.

The latest polls, as recently as today, reveal that an astounding 77% of Republicans believe that Biden was elected fraudulently. That might help explain why “civil war” was the top trend on Twitter yesterday. We now know that only ten percent of Republican Senators and even a smaller number in the House recognize Trump’s defeat and Biden’s win.

Just in the past few days we have seen Trump’s high profile right-wing lawyer, Joe DiGenova, publicly call for the execution of Republican whistle-blower Chris Krebs.

We hear from some local Republican officials that they fear not complying with Trump’s delusional propaganda will make them subject to house bombings or shootings.

There was the armed Michigan militia with their black rifles also threatening the secretary of state.

The Arizona Republican Party challenged its members to die for Donald Trump.

And then there was that terrifying footage of armed cops – with guns drawn and pointed—barging into the house of the Florida state COVID whistleblower to arrest her and seize all her devices.

We’ve seen a motley crew of morons, assholes and armed fascists across the country rally to protest the simple act of putting on a mask. On the same day, Wednesday, just as the daily pandemic death toll hit a record of 3103, we find the newest incarnation of American Brown Shirts menacingly protesting on the front lawns of Idaho health commissioners, successfully putting a halt to a meeting that was going to consider a mask mandate.

These growing incidents are but just a few degrees short of an American Kristallnacht.

Indeed, there are still 12 states, all of them under Republican control, that refuse mask mandates even though anybody with a room temp IQ should know that masks are the first line of defense against COVID. Nobody in charge in those places seems to give a damn that yesterday’s death toll was greater than 9/11, or Pearl Harbor, and that rivals the body count of the bloodiest battle of America’s first civil war in Antietam in 1862.

Expert predictions project about 400,000 cumulative deaths by Inauguration Day – the same American death toll as WWII--as our current infection rate runs at SIX MILLION per month and climbing.

Yes, the FDA, got a step closer to approving the Pfizer vaccine yesterday and in the next couple of days it will start dribbling out. And I do mean dribbling, as we found out a few days ago that the sociopath in the White House fucked up and did not order enough when he had the chance – on several occasions. If that were not bad enough, you can bet your KN95 mask that the vaccine is about to be heavily politicized, just as masks have been.

In short, after an eight-month run-up, the Republican Party in the last 40 days has become a subversive, I would say, seditious, organization that has set its sights on fully undermining American democracy in exchange for the simple goal of staying in power.

Our social and moral contract, already tattered by election day, has since been torn and shredded. Have no doubt that there are now 50 million or more Americans who have effectively seceded from the union, if not from the earth. It’s a lumpy, angry, ill-informed, deluded and authoritarian mass that officially feels zero responsibility to others, that has soundly rejected rational thought (if not the Enlightenment itself), that has discarded all public morality, and that is a smoking powder keg at which Trump and his crew continue throwing lit matches. It’s just plain gob-smacking and if the Republic survives, it will take decades to fully understand and digest.

I want to be very clear: I have a deep-seated visceral reluctance to ever blame voters and I prefer to chastise their leadership for any dumb-ass position they take. This time I am making an exception as we are now in an unprecedented position where this knuckle-headed constituency seems to enjoy their posture of pronouncing death sentences on the rest of the population.

Sure, they are being misled, But god-damn how they enjoy it. And how frickin” easy it has been to stoke them, manipulate them, and tease out all of their most backward, if not savage, instincts.

This symbiotic relationship between a corrupt, cynical and reckless Republican leadership and its increasingly ignorant and deluded base, only quickens and escalates our social disintegration.

A whole lot of Republican officials, seventeen Attorneys Generals, along with Trump, are now making their final “legal” ploy to overturn the election. It matters to no Republican, apparently, that the clown leading this dead-end effort, is the corrupt Tea Party Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton. This guy is currently under indictment for tax fraud and several of his assistants accuse him of “bribery, abuse of office,” and other illegalities. So what?

The suit itself, that Trump claims falsely will be taken up by “his” Supreme Court, has been termed a ridiculous joke by just about every objective legal observer.

Yet, the substance of the suit should make you cry even as it goes nowhere fast. Unlike his fortysomething other failed post-election lawsuits, this hummer makes no accusation of fraud. Oh no… Instead, it claims that ten million votes in four other states (not including Texas) should simply be annulled. The “logic” here is that because these four states changed their voting rules by allowing mail-in votes (during a killer pandemic!), these already cast and counted and certified ballots should simply be thrown out because they make fraud impossible to detect.

Again, we have some historical firsts. The first time a mainstream political party wants to void a certified national election, and all states were certified earlier this week. And it’s the first time in history that one state, Texas, thinks it has the right to dictate and even overturn election processes for any other state or states…in this case Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia.

Of course, there is no way that Ken Paxton –or for that matter the other sixteen Republican AG’s -- believe any of the crapola in their suit. Nor do they really believe it stands a ghost’s chance of even getting to the Supremes, let alone prevailing.

This suit, no matter the damage it does to the greater body politic, is intended only by the plaintiffs to buy ongoing favor with Donald J. Trump, generalissimo and lider maximo of the Republican Party going forward. In Paxton’s case, he clearly wants to win himself one of those presidential pardons that Trump is supposedly going to be handing out like Tim Leary did with acid at some Love-ins.

What do you call people like this? Traitors? Subversives? Scumbags? Nihilists? I don’t even know anymore.

Add to that list of human detritus one Mitch McConnell along with his Senate confederates. He announced today that there will be no new COVID relief package. I’m sorry but words escape me. There won’t be one because the seditious Republican Party demands there be NO new aid given to states, precisely at a time when they have been charged with distributing the vaccine – for which Mitch and Trump have given no federal guidance or support. And Mitch is also sulking because Democrats will not accept his demand that any new package include liability protection lawsuits by American workers against employers based on negligence in handling workplace COVID cases.

In short, Mitch to the diseased and broke American people: Go fuck yourselves.

The fear I have is that a part of this crazed Trump constituency will soon be led to enact what the FBI calls a “forced ending.” While elected Republicans are just playing along with Trump because they know that the first question that will be asked of any 2022 and 2024 GOP candidate to any level of will be to prove their pro-Trump bona fides, millions of their grassroots followers actually believe, even today, that the Supremes will intervene and Trump will rightfully be sworn in again on January 20th.

Come that day, and they see Biden with his hand on the bible, just exactly what will the more agitated among that constituency do? I very seriously doubt they will fade into the woodwork and, to continue in this rather apocalyptic vein, just how many of them does it take to blow up another Federal Building or assassinate a local secretary of state here or there? Even if that sort of violence does not materialize, we will still be confronted with this amoral secessionist mass intent on blocking and disrupting everything in their reach, while being ever more integrated into this insurrectionary Republican Party.

I have to laugh when some of my progressive friends actually believe we are on the verge of radical change or – even socialism! Talk about secession from reality! They boast that the Democratic Socialists of America now have about 80,000 members and is still growing (is it?).

The bad news is that there are also more than 100,000 armed white supremacist and declaredly neo-Nazi militia members among us. While these militias in the past were decidedly anti-government no matter who was in power, they have politically shifted and morphed into an armed vanguard of Trumpism.

To join DSA you have to send in a few bucks and fill out an online form and that’s it. Maybe buy yourself a pink T-shirt and then include your pronouns on your emails.

To join a militia, you have to own and know how to use an AR-15, come to all “drills” in uniform and preferably be ex or even current law enforcement or military.

Adding this detail might be significant: Gun sales are through the roof. And so much ammo has been bought up that simple handgun rounds have spiked 400% or more in the last six months.

Who is your money on?