CSotD: The Persistence of Amnesia
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Joel Pett lays the groundwork for today’s parade of despair, which comes with a side order of a curse on both your houses.
The MAGA crowd is claiming bias and declaring the hearings a witch hunt. That’s without counting the truly delusional group that says Bill Barr and the other Trump staffers are still loyal to him and are falsely testifying as part of an elaborate scheme.
The lunatics who believe that — and that JFK Jr is alive and hiding in the basement of that pizzeria — are a screwball fringe, and our real concern should be with the much larger group in the “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?” category, who genuinely believe that the evidence is being faked and, for that matter, that repeated confirmation of the election’s fairness is a partisan lie to cover massive voter fraud.
As with Moon landing deniers, they don’t just refuse to believe what they don’t want to believe, but are willing to believe in a massive fraud with hundreds of thousands of players none of whom have dropped out and blown the whistle.
Still, let’s not get too cocky about these folks.
A big story the other day said
Almost six out of 10 Americans want former President Donald Trump criminally charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll shows.
But if you click that link, you’ll find that, while the story reports that 60% think the Jan 6 Committee is fair and accurate, the other poll results show that only 34% are following the hearings, and only 9% report following them “very closely.”
So 91% of Democrats think the former president should be charged with a crime, compared to 19% of Republicans, all based on the fact that about two thirds of them have no idea what the hell they’re talking about.
I’m not the only observer who has compared Trump to OJ Simpson or Jeff MacDonald, compelled by psychotic narcissism to believe in their own innocence despite mountains of obvious evidence as well as their own presence and participation in the crime.
What they believe is absolute nonsense, but they are not lying: They genuinely embrace a set of facts that don’t exist.
Similarly, people with a compulsion to believe in Trump also feel compelled to twist themselves into knots in order to accept his version of reality.
While, on the other side, we’ve got people compelled to believe in his guilt without having watched a moment of the testimony against him.
As the Rock Man told Oblio, “You see what you want to see. And you hear what you want to hear.”
But all folly is not alike: If one person believes that dogs can fly and another person believes you can safely drink arsenic, they’re both wrong, but one person’s delusions are considerably more dangerous.
As Ted Littleford graphically demonstrates, the delusional people on the right side of the spectrum seem intent on ending free elections, civil rights and even Social Security and Medicare. The platform of the Texas GOP is not simply conservative but genuinely counter to American principles.
If the insurgents — in Texas and around the nation — get their way in November’s midterms, we won’t need to even bother with voting in 2024, because part of the MAGA effort includes installing secretaries of state who will toss out election returns that don’t reflect their partisan intentions.
As the saying goes, if you’ve ever wondered what you’d have done in Germany in the 1930s, you’re doing it now.
And so are they.
Another thing I’m seeing people say on social media is that they’d like to see the Republicans’ plan to beat inflation and high gas prices.
Michael Ramirez (Creators) is not the only one decrying the Fed’s traditional tool of higher interest rates, and it’s fair commentary to doubt that this alone with bring things down.
But to claim it won’t help flies in the face of basic economics, and it would be nice if doubters would propose solutions that perhaps hit Wall Street as hard as they hit children, poor families and the elderly, because cutting off food, medical care and Social Security is even wider in its damage than the GOP’s bland assumption that slaughtered school kids are the price we pay for freedom.
What else ya got?
Juxtaposition of the Day
In this case, they’re both right, but they’re coming at it from two very different perspectives.
I agree with Molina that we need to switch from petroleum to electricity, but my sympathies are with the poor schnook in Fell’s cartoon who has to deal not with someday but with the here and now.
There is a certain “Let them eat cake” element in expecting everyone to run out and buy a new car. I include myself among retirees and the working poor who struggle simply to gas up what we’ve got and for whom new cars are simply not gonna happen.
And beyond the class issue, there’s the matter of recharging stations, which, even with government aid, are massively expensive to build. Around here, even those with electric cars have hybrids because they can’t count on being able to get from A to B and back again.
My grandkids, of course, will all have electric cars when they are grown up.
Assuming they have paid off their student loans.
And assuming they have someplace to park that car. Chris Britt (Creators) predicts a shift that will put a lot of homeowners underwater, owing more on their mortgages than their houses are worth in the current market.
It’s been a fun ride, but the sellers’ market may well crash, due to rising interest rates and rising building costs, which depress supply, which in turn drives up prices.
The overall economy leaves a lot people unable to run as fast as they can to stay in one place, and, as Kevin Necessary says, looking for someone to blame.
And, just as they have made up their minds about Jan 6 without watching the hearings, they won’t sit through a lecture on economics.
But if you hand out red ballcaps and tell them who to blame, they’ll support you in November.
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