Tag: Republicans Are Fascist

Wargaming The Coming Trump Whistleblower Clusterfuck

This is America.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Some observations.

This news broke the night before the first serious impeachment vote. This gives all House Republicans more than enough cover to vote against it.

Republicans may have learned the wrong lesson from the Mueller Report. They think this will drain support for impeachment. They think everything will go back to normal and Trump will be politically pardoned AGAIN so he can turn around and to exactly the same shit by Friday afternoon. While this is — I guess – at least a possibility, it seems at least from what I can tell that the impeachment train has, in fact, left the station.

There’s a real danger Trump is both so stupid and so craven that he will tweet out a 21 Century version of, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” He will “accidently” dox the poor guy and he ends up dead. The Republican talking points will be three fold. Trump was “joking,” he can’t be held responsible for the actions of a mentally ill person, and we have to end the impeachment process because people are starting to die.

This may work with The New York Times‘ Maggie Haberman for about 24 hours. But I suspect that this won’t hold much water with the average person who is isn’t on Twitter and is too busy paying their mortgage to care about impeachment. Should there be any type of impeachment-related violence then guess who most people will hold responsible — it’s not going to be Nancy Pelosi. Though you know that’s exactly what every Republican is going to scream at the top of their lungs. I guess it might work? But I have at least a modicum of faith in my fellow Americans not to fall for that bullshit.

But, really, the battle lines are now drawn. Either you are so partisan that you think it’s “game over” for impeachment because the whistleblower worked with Joe Biden and Susan Rice as part of his job, or you don’t. Either you believe in the rule of law, or your a Republican MAGA fascist.

We’re entering the political equivalent of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Two Tribes video. This is now a political war for the ages. I still suspect that Trump is going to completely lose his fucking mind in a rather spectacular fashion before all of this is over. But I could be wrong.

Buckle up.

The Tragedy Of Trump’s Impeachment

Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Trump’s impeachment is a tragedy. But not in the way that the insane fascists who continue to defend him would have you believe. It’s a tragedy because what should happen, won’t happen and yet Trump has to be impeached for history’s sake, if nothing else. In other words, Trump — at least as of right now — is going to get acquitted by the Senate because political tribalism in America has reached the point where there are two political worlds at cross purposes in America.

There’s the 35% MAGA electorate who feels so disenfranchised that willfully accept a government of grifters who run the nation like a smash-and-grab operation simply because they enjoy drinking liberal tears. Meanwhile, everyone else is astonished at the level of systemic criminality in the Trump Administration and struggle to understand why MAGA is willing to burn everything to the ground to protect a very lucky moron.

At this point, anyone who argues against impeachment either has some sort of vested interest in House Trump or they’re not working in good faith. Given that Trump is accused specifically of election meddling, the idea that we should “let the people decide” Trump’s fate is completely irrational. It doesn’t matter how long it takes (within reason) Trump has to be given due Constitutional process and convicted. If he’s not, he will be politically pardoned AGAIN and will grow even more brazen. Are we supposed to just sit back and let Trump bribe individual electors then pardon them? I mean, strictly speaking, in the eyes of fascist Republicans, such behavior would not be impeachable because “abuse of power is not illegal.”

So we’re going to have hearings. Both sides will make their case. Trump will be caught dead-to-rights for an array of “high crimes” that should remove him from office…and nothing will happen. Republicans will stand fast, babble about “letting the people decide” and then cackle in the darkness as Trump lurches towards full-blown Putin autocracy. That’s the point, that’s what they want. A Constitutional Convention will be called at some point in Trump’s second term and American Carnage will be codified. The ICE Camps will be weaponized and thousands of political prisoners will die in them.

And, so, really, impeachment is more about how we want history to remember us as a Republic. Did we submit to tyranny, or did we go down fighting?

Republicans Are Fascists

Not well.
Shelton Bumgarner

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Sometimes macro political trends are not obvious until after they’re complete. But the current impeach process has sped up some significant macro trends in American political life to the point that one thing is definitely clear: Republicans are fascists.

What I mean by this is they no longer believe in liberal democracy or civil society. Really, the only thing that has to happen at this point is a car bomb go off in Times Square and a MAGA person claim credit for it. Once Republicans go on TV to say that the impeachment process has to end because of the violence, they’re fascist. If their first reaction isn’t “Holy shit, what have we done,” but “People dying means a political victory for us” then, well, that’s all she wrote.

It doesn’t have to be a car bomb. Trump could dox the whistleblower on Twitter and tell MAGA to “teach him a lesson.” The list goes on.

The most unsettling issue of all of this is that it’s an institutional thing. There’s no going back. Republicans are prepared to defend Der Fuhrer for any legal transgression. When you reach that point of political devotion, there are going to be massive consequences no matter what the ultimate endgame of impeachment.

In other words, we all have to take a deep breath and take what’s happening seriously. Republicans are hell bent on an institutional level to turn America into nothing more than a Putin-style “manage democracy.” They will lie. They will cheat. They will encourage and embrace violence. Republicans want a nation where plutocrats pay not taxes, there’s no middle class and pretty big chunks of the Constitution are a dead letter.

The more I think about it, the more I believe Trump’s big second term goal is a Constitutional Convention. He will want to codify American Carnage into the Constitution to prep the way for Kris Kobach, or Tom Cotton or Don Jr to finish the job he started.

I have no hope that there’s anything we can do to prevent this from happening. In the short term, maybe, just maybe, Republicans will overreach and we MIGHT get one sold presidential cycle where we can all breath a sigh of relief. But that’s very, very iffy. More likely, Trump will be acquitted, he will far more brazen about everything and the ICE camps will be weaponized. A rouge Constitutional Convention will completely revamp the document.

There might be a little bit of a death rattle here and there. But the center-Left is simply too unorganized and divided to do anything, in real terms, about what is about to happen.

Goodnight, and good luck.