"According to YouGov's poll of 1,000 Americans, nearly half of the country's Republicans -- 43 percent -- would support a military coup under certain conditions. About 20 percent of Democrats can picture themselves backing such an effort."What's sad is that the actual proportion of the populace that believes that sort of idiocy probably hasn't really changed all that much in fifty years. But the willingness of people to SAY so...to admit that they would support a patently un-republican, anti-democratic act by the armed forces...seems to be all of a piece of We the People's willingness to take the Libidinous Visitor and his fellow passengers in the GOP clown car as entertainment and political commonplace rather than an insulting mockery of adult politics.
This'd be almost comical if it wasn't so damn tragic.
Update 9/16: And here's a couple of nice addenda to the whole Trumpism thing.
One of the biggest tells for the complete collapse of the GOP as a "political party" has been the way that Trump has succeeded while completely disregarding the "party's position" on fiscal and economic policy which is, for all purposes, no different than John D. Rockefeller's was back in the original Gilded Age: "The public be damned."
Seriously. The GOP has become, economically, the Party of Plutocracy, in favor of removing any sort of tax that hits wealthy people and/or corporations and "paying for" that (to the extent that they care to bother to pay for the loss of revenue) with reductions in social spending. Aircraft carriers and corporate welfare, fine. Childcare and food stamps, not.
Trump has utterly defied this orthodoxy, because he doesn't need the GOP or its wealthy owners and for all that he's a buffoon he's a buffoon who, like all good grifters, knows the sweet spot in his marks.
And this, in turn, is where the Republicans end up paying the devil his due. Because there aren't enough plutocrats to win elections the GOP has been forced to rely on its orc army of Trump's marks; Christopaths who are all assed-up about queers and uppity wimmen abortin' snowflake babies, old white people who are assed-up about black bucks buying steaks with welfare checks, and assholes in general assed-up about anything the whiffs of anything but God, guns, NASCAR, and Betsy Ross. The sorts of people who donate to prosperity-gospel churches and send away for Ronald Reagan commemorative crockery, the sorts of people who would tell you to get gummint out of their Medicare. People of the earth. You know. Morons.
And these people don't care about tax cuts. Oh, sure, they like not paying taxes, like everyone else and no, they don't understand that taxes are the price of civilization. But a lot of them are on Social Security and Medicare. Many of them are on SSI disability. They also don't like or trust the moneymen who bankroll the party and would be fine with those plutocrats paying more in taxes. So long as Trump is agin the nigras, beaners, and libtards they're just fine with him suggesting that more taxes should get jerked out of hedge fund managers' backsides a nickel at a time.
So the Club for Growth has put its money down against The Donald.
This isn't a bug. As Krugman points out, it's a feature, a feature of the immense cognitive trainwreck that is the modern GOP, the dumpster fire of the vanities that characterizes U.S. "conservatives", an ideology that has lost any semblance of coherent thought in favor of a snakeball of hate, resentment, and fear. Or, in Krugman's words: "Trump isn’t a problem for Republicans; he’s a symptom of the problems Republicans have."
The fascinating collision down the road is going to come when someone has to blink. Either the GOP electorate can be jerked over into the Club for Growth's economic Gilded Age nonsense and The Donald has to toe the Club's plutocratic line...or the orcs rebel in favor of Trump and the Koch Brothers get pulled out of their tower and filleted on the populist scaling table.
It's like watching an airliner crash in slow motion, and if it wasn't such a gawdawful indictment of how thoroughly the GOP has utterly fucked a third of the American electorate it'd just be entertaining.
But the outcome is so potentially awful that it almost makes a military coup look beneficent by comparison. We are, truly, fucked by the navel.
5 comments:
By adult politics, do you mean the years of fear and hate mongering which has created 25% of the world's prison population? Or maybe its those militia groups chasing hot spots while being recorded as being in perpetual armed rebellion on national TV? The politics haven't changed in years.
No, those massive stone columns on the Capitol are not simply decoration, they are branding and foreshadowing. Every year, the Blues and the Reds demand ever more entertaining circuses and most years they are disappointed. This year, the Blue faction is providing what the people demand.
If you think that is a problem, just wait til the bread supply runs low.
"This year, the Blue faction is providing what the people demand"
You mean Red, right?
By "adult politics" I mean an actual process by which humans use a combination of emotion, reason, logic, and sense to try and come up with practical solutions to collective problems. No argument that this has never been particularly common - boneheaded stupidity and blind passion have been as common as not throughout human history - but that the current crop of Reds is perhaps the least rational and thoughtful in the past 40 years of increasingly mendacious and pandering public policy.
As I've said; Donald Fuckedbythenavel is the pure black tar, the sweet rush of completely unhinged Id, that takes this far beyond the previous nibbling-around-the-edges-of-the-truth sorts of lying. It's stuff like this:
"We lose everywhere. We lose militarily. We can't beat ISIS. We can't beat anybody. Our vets are being treated horribly. It will change. We will have so much winning, if I get elected."
So! Much! Winning!
And yet...nobody in the public press laughs when this dildo says stuff like this.
You could be buried up to the ass in WonderBread and it'd still make you cry.
Yes, sorry Chief. I did mean Red.
In Canada, our crazies are the Blue ones.
What I particularly love about Donald is that he doesn't even pretend that his words have any actual meaning. Rather, as you say, he simply lets her rip and invites like minded folks to stand beside him and make loud communal noises.
Of course, that divides the world into "Us" and "Them" and we have long, bitter experience about how *that* inevitably turns out. Still, the emerging dividing lines are not quite the traditional ones and you can see interesting behaviour as some people realize that they are being either painted out (or even painted in).
And here's one of the best assessments of "Trumpism" I've read lately:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trump-and-obama-a-night-to-remember
Goddamnit, that felt good readin'.
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