Coop Scoop: The "Eve of Distraction" Edition
Enjoy the circus. Defend and Improve The Institutions
By Marc Cooper
Here’s one way to look at it: At least Don Trump didn’t send Mark Meadows down to Georgia to shove a bleeding horse head into Brad Raffensperger’s bed. The Georgia Secretary of State got off light, at least for the moment. Still, you never know when he might be walking down the street one day when his forehead might catch a stray bullet.
Keeping my composure (easy after four years of continuous outrages), I can affirm that the president’s right-out-of-Mulberry Street phone call Saturday demanding that Raffensperger single-handedly overturn a certified democratic election is the very worst of this crime lord’s offenses and he now guarantees that his legacy will be that of an incompetent mob boss.
To fully grasp what we have been witnessing for the last several weeks since the election and looking at what is being planned for Wednesday on Capitol Hill, you must be able to compartmentalize your thinking into two competing aspects.
One the one hand, Trumpworld has to be the highest concentrations of boobs, screw-ups, morons, and misfits that have ever ascended to state power. They literally can do nothing properly and every project they try to build collapses early.
On the other, the crew constitutes the most immoral, most vicious, most dangerous, most anti-democratic, most corrupt, most greedy and most pernicious lot of thugs to ever govern America. Watching Trump, then, you really don’t know whether to laugh or cry, or just pull you hair out,
The most disturbing part of Trump’s phone call to Georgia was not the call itself (from a reality show perspective it was boffo). The worst part, at least for me, is the hopelessness born from the knowledge that there will be no punishment for it. No consequences.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago here that those who claim our institutions have held are living with their heads stuck in some tight dark places. I now re-emphasize that point.
How can a President of the United States so blithely spend an hour on the phone, with his Chief of Staff no less listening in, browbeating and cajoling a duly elected Secretary of State from his own party, demanding that he magically “find” some 12,000 votes so Trump’s loss can be overturned?
Some say Trump didn’t learn his lesson from getting impeached over the Ukraine phone call. Au contraire. Trump learned the most important lesson of all: he is immune from any institutional oversight. He’s been double-vaccinated. The Democrats sat for the 3 yrs. with their fingers up their noses, afraid to impeach him for his bold-faced and manifold obstructions of justice highlighted in the Mueller report.
And when Pelosi finally got around to pinging him for that area of intense concern for average Americans – Ukraine!—Trump knew his boys in the allied Republican crew, headed by Don McConnell, would cover for him.
I’ll get to the election tomorrow and the burlesque show scheduled for Wednesday in a moment, but I want to underline just what we are looking at when Biden is inaugurated in just over two weeks from now.
He and more importantly, we, are being handed a very sick and battered society whose institutions have been hobbled and deformed to the point where it might take decades to restore – if ever. Most depressing for me, is the failure of this society to exploit the disaster for permanent reforms to the great faults exposed by the plague.
A naïve foreign visitor might mistakenly think that a reformed health system, a reformed day care system, and God Forbid, a reformed social welfare system would have been born out of pure necessity. But no.
Don’t think too hard about it or your head will explode, but everything is upside down and getting worse. The pandemic is officially out of control with Dr. Fauci predicting as many as 150,000 more death in just the next four to six weeks. The majority of the vaccines already shipped are sitting idle in storage freezers while Trump plots sedition and the states wonder where any “plan” is. Less than 20 percent of the promised vaccinations for December actually materialized. Most Americans still don’t know how and when they will told be it is their turn for a shot.
Biden vows to straighten this out. He better damned do it or he also will be toast.
Pulling back the scope, what do we see around us: A Republican Party that is shattering into rubble as Trump continues to force loyalty tests and the GOP lemmings respond in a way that would make Pavlov smile.
You think the institution of congress has worked? When it took eight months to squeeze out a constipated relief bill that is a mere ghost of what it should have been. (Here in the state of Washington, a civilized state, the minimum wage is now just under $14 an hour. The $600 “relief check” is the equivalent of a week’s salary for a teenager working at McDonald’s).
Well, hells bells! That ought to fix up everybody real nice.
For the benefit of those few who still believe that congress has “held,” consider the open act of sedition that scores of Republicans are planning for Wednesday when the electoral college votes are counted.
Maybe a dozen GOP Senators, led by that Man of the People, Ted Cruz, and more than 140 Republican House members led by – who? Bozo The Clown?—plan to disrupt the count by challenging the results from as many as 6 states.
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This floor show might extend the counting process, which usually takes15 minutes, into a two-day dramatic affair with cable news channels creating custom chyron and musical themes for what they will brand the “Showdown on Capitol Hill.”
There are actually liberals and Democrats who are still worried (!) that this circus maneuver is somehow going to be successful. It will not and everybody involved knows it.
Here’s the sickening part of this stunt: It’s only a stunt. I swear to you I would despise but in an odd way I would respect these fools more if they really could pull off an overthrow of the election.
I mean, this stunt, this seditious farce, the cheap side show aimed at the most intellectually stunted portion of the population, will do tremendous damage. It will only accelerate the decay and credibility of our governing institutions, it will make a mockery of democracy and the rule of law, and it will immerse millions of knucklehead Americans even deeper into their alternative fact-free world. And that means the strengthening of the emerging and solidifying authoritarian factions in American politics that Republicans have let into the front door and offered seats at the table.
The Republican lemmings have no interest in overthrowing anything. They are staging this show for one reason and one reason only. So that they next time they run for office they will not be primaried by some loon or Qanon ahole for not having sufficiently inserted themselves deep enough into Don Trump’s bum.
That’s it. Tossing matches at a gasoline spill purely and only to get re-elected. Now, I have never had a very high opinion of most pols but I have recognized there are some, there must be some, who are there for some of the right reasons. There probably still are a few.
It does, however, boggle the imagination on just how many, petty, tiny, little, self-centered, selfish, self-serving twits the Republicans now have in their ranks. After the stunt on Wednesday, both congressional floors should be fumigated.
While my opinions are sharp, I try to stay away from overly polemic language. Calling the Republican Party today a party of open sedition would not be over the top. When the Republican President and a 150 GOP congress members openly agitate to overturn a democratic election that has already been gone over a dozen times, you are dealing with an active subversive group that should be shut down.
The action of Trump and his outfit over this last week has raised the stakes of the immediate future even higher. Once Biden is elected we can hope, but not really hope too hard, that he will can all his malarkey about reaching across the aisle and nuzzling with Mitch and actually make or at least propose some of the radical solutions we now desperately need to just stay afloat.
If we want to preserve our institutions –or what is left of them—we not only have to defend them but also radically improve them. If not, we are only two or at best four years away from another electoral shock. In the last 24 hours, Biden has been too silent on the Trump phone call. He’s been outflanked by Romney(!) on this issue. Don’t believe for a moment that the Democratic Party is in much better shape than the GOP. It is not acting seditiously. More like soporifically.
I know it’s like peeing into a hurricane, but one can hope that the Biden administration – not on its own but rather forced by us—can name a motherfugger AG who will go after Trump for his openly illegal phone call, and who might want to take a peek at some of the procedures currently being employed by his foot soldiers ranging from Mark Meadows to Rudolph Giuliani.
Tomorrow’s vote in Georgia will be decisive (duh). A victory of the Democrats – that now seems plausible—will not create a big enough margin to give carte blanche to Biden. It will be enough, however, to demoralize the congressional Republicans, set McConnell on fire, and might make it possible for the Democrats to do some minor repairs. If we want any major ones, we are going to have to do them ourselves. Hoping these guys are going to do for us is naive. There is nobody else but us. +++