The Democrats who cried ‘Wolf!’

I have said this many times before, and no matter how much my liberal friends may squirm, I’m right: crying wolf was a bad strategy when Reagan and Romney, and the Bushes were around.

Charlie Sykes wrote this in his column this morning, quoting Carl Cannon of Real Clear Politics:

By 2000, calling George W. Bush a racist was the liberals’ standard operating procedure, a tactic used against Romney as well. . . . If Reagan and George W. Bush are routinely portrayed as warmongers, if both Bushes (and Reagan and Romney) are painted as bigots . . . how do we expect rank-and-file conservatives or grassroots independents to respond when Trump is dubbed by the media as an existential threat to democracy?

It was a classic case of “the boy who cried wolf.” The next time liberal Democrats want to know why Donald Trump gets away with behavior that would have made him an electoral pariah not so long ago, and why it’s impossible to hold him accountable for anything, they have only to look in the mirror. They have only themselves to blame. Now the racist, the authoritarian, the existential threat to democracy and American values has come- and nobody is listening anymore when they point it out.

The GOP moves to enable the spread of COVID-19

In a move of moral perversity ignoring the logic of every public health effort ever undertaken, Republicans nationally are pushing legislation granting protection against discrimination to- wait for it- unvaccinated Americans.

Yes, that’s right. Republicans are on record as supporting the granting of special rights to potential carriers of the COVID-19 virus, and effectively adding sociopathy to race, religion, sex, national origin, and sexual orientation as legally protected characteristics meriting special status under civil rights legislation. It continues to become clearer and clearer that the GOP believes that there is a constitutional right for ethically depraved narcissists to selfishly risk spreading a deadly virus among the rest of us.

Well, no. I should retract that. The logic of the general Republican position would not discriminate. It would grant legal protection to all viruses. Logically, it would mean that people who might be infected with smallpox could freely mingle with the rest of us, and their movements could not be consistently restricted. Folks potentially exposed to Ebola could jostle us in the subway, and there wouldn’t be a thing the government could do about it. Ain’t freedom wonderful?

How do people become so preoccupied with their own supposedly unbounded and unlimited “rights” that they fail to see that for a person who might be a carrier of a potentially deadly and highly contagious disease to mix freely with the rest of the population deprives everyone else of their right to remain healthy and alive? I guess that’s what happens once we elect a narcissist president. All of a sudden, a movement arises to make narcissism our national ethos forevermore.

You can’t make this stuff up. It can’t be emphasized strongly enough that this is not a debatable matter about which reasonable people might disagree, any more than Republican efforts to disenfranchise minority voters (well, except for sociopaths and the willfully ignorant, whom they apparently want to make protected categories). This simply nuts. The position that sees lockdowns, masks, and strong incentives to be vaccinated as somehow violations of individual liberty is pure, unadulterated moral and intellectual perversity, and if we let the sociopathy from which it springs prevail (which I’m confident that we won’t), we all deserve the consequences natural selection will inflict upon us.

As well it may. At this very moment, a new flare-up of the Delta variant is occuring in the states with the lowest vaccination rates. What we’re experiencing now is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” If the consequences were restricted to them, one could argue that they would simply be the result of decisions the newly-infected had made for themselves. But some people are becoming infected because for one practical reason or another they can’t be vaccinated. And as long as Missouri, Mississippi, and the other hotbeds of resistence to vaccination remain, the virus will have a chance to mutate in their midst and produce new variants- variants against which the vaccines may no longer be effective. It is not an exaggeration to say that those who willfully refuse to be vaccinated are responsible for keeping the pandemic going not only in their own midst, but potentially elsewhere. They are putting us in danger of losing a golden opportunity to put COVID-19 behind us. They are not only endangering the lives of those in their midst who cannot be vaccinated. They are potentially also endangering the lives of those of us who have, but who can’t assume that Missouri and Mississippi and the other vaccine-resistent states will not be statewide Petrie dishes, breeding variants of COVID-19 against which the vaccines will be useless.

The rhetoric to the contrary, nobody is advocating compulsory vaccination. But it seems only reasonable to treat vaccination against COVID the same way we’ve historically treated vaccination against smallpox, polio, and other diseases. It’s not simply reasonable that unvaccinated people be prevented from participating in activities through which they might potentially spread the disease to others. “Vaccine passports” stand firmly in the mainstream of the way in which ours and other democratic societies have always dealt with situations like this.

It’s not merely the entire history of Western political theory and of constitutional law that tells us that one’s right to swing one’s fist ends at the point of the next guy’s nose. It’s common sense. But common sense seems to have entirely vanished from a conservative movement increasingly dominated by the fruitcakes these days, and there seems no limit to the absurdities it can unabashedly embrace.

“Because it’s true!”

Seems that Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, had a bit of a run-in with The Man a while back.

Barr describes Trump’s ongoing whine about last year’s election having been stolen from him as “bullshit.”

According to a book by ABC Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl entitled Betrayal and scheduled to be published in November, Barr says that his attitude toward Trump’s claims amounted to “put up or shut up time.” That, he says, is why he gave prosecutors the OK to investigate the claims and opened his own investigation.

“If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it,” Barr told Karl. “But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”

Trump claims that voting machines all over the country were somehow rigged to switch votes from himself to the man who defeated him, President Joe Biden.

“We realized from the beginning it was just bullshit,” Barr told Karl.

“It’s a counting machine, and they save everything that was counted. So you just reconcile the two. There had been no discrepancy reported anywhere, and I’m still not aware of any discrepancy,” Barr added. And he’s exactly right. Trump and his followers to the contrary, the bottom line is that the technology to do what Trump claims was done with voting machines all over the country simply doesn’t exist, and even if it did, using it would have been absolutely impossible to conceal and incredibly easy to document. Yet Trump and his supporters have never been able to produce a single bit of evidence to substantiate his claims, and literally every court case he brought- even before judges Trump himself appointed- has been laughed out of court.

Barr also told Karl that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urged him to speak out on Trump’s claims because they could hurt the Republican Party in the upcoming Senate runoff elections in Georgia and said that they were “bad” for both the party and the country. Karl says that McConnell confirmed the conversation when he asked him about it. McConnell apparently thought that maintaining the personal goodwill of Donald Trump was a higher priority than either the Republican Party’s prospect in Georgia or the welfare of the nation.

The way in which the nation’s Republican politicians, with rare exceptions, tremble before the wrath of the psychlogically unsound former president is an amazing thing. Apparently they are conscious of the degree to which the Republican rank and file buys into the Trump line no matter how outrageously he lies or how complete is the lack of evidence to support his claims.

Barr, who isn’t seeking elective office, faced no such constraints. But McConnell apparently believed that Trump’s support was vital in Georgia despite the damaging character of his bizarre claims about the election.

Apparently he found himself on the horns of a dilemma.“Look,” he told Barr, “we need the president in Georgia. And so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now. But you’re in a better position to inject some reality into this situation. You are really the only one who can do it.”

“I understand that,” Barr replied, according to Karl. “And I’m going to do it at the appropriate time.”

When Trump heard about Barr’s statement that there was no evidence of fraud, the Former Guy demanded to know why Barr had said it. ,“How the f— could you do this to me?,” Trump demanded. “Why did you say it?”

Barr answered, “Because it’s true.”

Interestingly, Trump didn’t dispute the statement. Instead, referring to himself in the third person, he responded, “You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump.”

The disconnect between reality and the radical right where Donald Trump is concerned is one of the things that puzzles me the most about them. I’ve cited and documented evidence that Donald Trump was unfit to be President since before the Orange One was even nominated in 2016, and routinely had it ignored by his supporters and dismissed with the accusation, “You just hate Trump.” Statements of the simple, documented and established truth continue to be dismissed as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” And the sheer terror he strikes into the hearts of Republican politicians seems to have robbed them of any sense of duty to confront even lies they concede are hurting the country.

There can be no question but that Trump’s lies about the election have undermined his successor, damaged the country’s reputation abroad, and undermined the confidence of the American people in the integrity of our elections and of our most basic institutions. One wonders how long it will be before people like McConnell and other Republicans have enough, and put the welfare of the country ahead of their fear of an unstable demagogue.

They fear that if they do, they’ll be replaced by others who will have no compunctions about putting their loyalty to Trump ahead of their loyalty to the country. Perhaps. But one has to wonder how much worse off we would be in that case than we are now.