CSotD: Catching Up

How on earth did we get here? Robert Ariail notes the positive messages of past presidents, contrasting them with Trump’s declaration that we’ve become a “garbage can.”

But how many times can you marvel over how, in the past, such-and-such an action would have ended a political career but those rules don’t apply to Donald Trump?

He said himself that he could commit murder in public without suffering any blowback, and the Supreme Court has agreed, as long as he commits the murder in his official capacity.

Which came up at Doonesbury (AMS) yesterday:

Well, not murder, but Trudeau still made the point that Biden is president and therefore all his official acts are legal, and he could lock Trump up for two months without facing any charges for it.

But he won’t because he’s not that thing we shouldn’t say.

Exactly. Morten Morland notes that Trump doesn’t want to be called a fascist and I’ve heard various commentators complain that using the term cheapens it, which I guess means we have to wait until the concentration camps have been built and filled before we unleash that word.

Though yesterday’s remake of the 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden should have been scary enough to make people say something.

Here’s a Threadroll of Aaron Rupar’s play-by-play and the gloves are sure off as openly racist white supremacy gets waves of eager applause.

When Stephen Miller declares that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” you can joke about Indians being the only real Americans, but the cheering people in MSG honestly want to round up all the brown and black people and people with accents and funny names and throw them out of the white man’s country.

Including naturalized citizens, and, even if it doesn’t come to that, you’d better carry your papers so you can prove that you don’t belong behind barbed wire.

But let’s not call anybody a “fascist” because it’s not nice and it just fosters division in our country, which we wouldn’t want.

I wish I could agree with Clay Bennett (CTFP)‘s cartoon, but the Trojan Horse was a trick, and the Republicans aren’t trying to be tricky. They’re openly racist, they’re openly authoritarian and they’re not sneaking into the democracy.

I’d like it better if he’d drawn a battering ram, because there is no subtlety in what is going on.

Steve Brodner lays out a series of charges, but how can anyone keep up? Musk has apparently stopped bribing people to register as Republicans, but he was one of the speakers at last night’s Trump Bund Rally and Brodner could use the evening’s speeches to double this list.

Similarly, Ann Telnaes penned this piece more than a week ago, but the sanewashing continues, as two major papers back off endorsing Kamala Harris and Trump thunders about the Lügenpresse at his rally, though he didn’t use the German term because he’s not a fascist and shame on anyone who says he is, just because he wants to silence any TV networks or newspapers or politicians who speak up against his plans and policies.

As Hannah Arendt wrote, it’s not so much that people believe the lies but that the cascade of lies makes it impossible for people to make moral choices, to sort out what they believe. We’re not used to the idea that popular leaders would straight-out lie in our faces but Trump has been so constantly, categorically dishonest from the start that people can’t find their bearings.

It has been said from the start of the Trump era that if you’ve ever thought about what you would have done in Germany in the 1930s, you’re doing it now.

Despite having disagreed with Clay Bennett about the Trojan Horse, I’m going to agree with him 100% about this one.

Next Tuesday we’re going to find out how smart and decent our fellow citizens are, and if the answer is that we want concentration camps and censorship of the press, I guess that’s what we’ll have, the sad part being that the people who suffer most will not be those who voted for insanity and oppression.

And if we choose, instead, decency and democracy, we’re still going to have to deal with a whole lot of angry people who aren’t fascists or Nazis but sure act like them and think like them and talk like them.

And they’re already primed to assume that a Harris win is a sign that the elections are fixed and phony.

RJ Matson provides an alternate interpretation to the belief expressed at last night’s rally that “they” are trying to kill Trump, and the underlying belief that God has spared his favorite.

Even if you believe in a deity that imposes his will on the Earth, assuming he would step up for a racist adulterer who sexually assaults women and exploits the poor is an impressive piece of blasphemy. Even King David was punished by God for his misdeeds before he could be returned to God’s favor.

But so what? Anyone who could be turned off has long since been turned off.

Those who remain are true believers.

Ivan Ehlers indulges in what is called “kidding on the square,” making us laugh over an absurdity that is actually playing out in the real world. The joke is that nobody phrases it quite so boldly.

Yet.

Stay tuned.

Jonesy, too, does a bit of kidding on the square, because we know that several generals in Trump’s first administration put the brakes on his more outrageous proposals. And we know that those kinds of people will not be in Trump’s next administration, should he have one.

And when those generals spoke out, the same patriots who proudly wrap themselves in the flag turned against them and called them liars for daring to criticize the man who escaped serving our country by lying to his draft board.

Joe Heller suggests that the honest people of our country will turn out next week and impose honesty on our increasingly corrupt political system.

I feel hopeful that they will. Like Anne Frank, I have to believe, despite everything, that people are good at heart.

But I know how her story turned out.

Whatever you’re doing now is what you’d have done for her.