In the last blog Jay H. Ell argued that the GOP had morphed into a Racist, Amoral, Selfish Hypocritical, (RASH), cult. In the past fortnight the process has escalated exponentially as Trump and his intellectually and morally bereft followers have upped the ante as it looks more and more that they could never regain power in a free and fair election. The three key planks in their approach, which Republicans are expected to accept and not deviate in the slightest are: that Trump was robbed of the Presidency and Biden’s legitimacy must be fought with a view to introducing legislation that ensures Trump will be elected in 2024: that Biden’s Covid thrust must fail and abortion under any circumstances must be banned.
It is irrelevant that in all three issues that Biden has broad public support in addition to his efforts at narrowing the massive wealth inequity. The central theory of the cult is that by further manipulating the voting system, that already favors them, that they can easily regain power with a significant minority of votes. With the current state of parties the legislature is easily within reach in the 2022 midterm elections.
The factors exacerbating the cult’s panic are multiple. They include the outcome of the recall election of the Californian Governor election; the pathetic nation wide response for the Trump backed "Justice for J6" rallies held throughout the country - a hundred and fifty participants in Washington, fifteen in Seattle, and twenty in Charlotte for example; the devastating revelations contained in Robert Woodward’s latest expose which inter alia questions Trump’s mental stability and lets him know in no uncertain terms that the military is not behind him; the defendants in the post January 6 insurrection trials all pleading in mitigation of sentence that they were either inspired by Trump or did it for him and most importantly the Republican Governors failure to mitigate Covid as the deaths mount up. The cult Governors are in effect arguing that Biden is hindering their support of the right to allow citizens to die and kill others in the process while overwhelming the health care system thereby hampering the management of normal medical emergencies.
Trump and the GOP cult’s cause is further being hindered by the few vocal non believing Republican legislators and Trump’s desire to rid the party, aka cult, of anyone not a hundred percent supportive of him, including notably Mitch McConnell and those seventeen Republican legislators that voted to impeach him. McConnell is a cult member who just has some reservations about its leader.
KEY CULT WOES: COVID CRISIS AND CALIFORNIAN DEMOCRATIC GOVERNOR’S OVERWHELMING ENDORSEMENT FROM THE ELECTORATE.
The overwhelming Republican albatross at the moment, is the Covid crisis where the cult has slavishly followed Trump’s criminal neglect and sabotage of scientific management. Their hope however is that the USA's overall poor performance will reflect rather on Biden than them even though they are causing it. The outcome of the Governor’s recall race in California where the two central issues were “Do we want another Trump” and Governor Newsom’s strong support of Covid control however must give them pause for thought.. Significantly Newson expanded his attack on his main rival Trump’s alter ego Larry Elder to the two most powerful Republican Governors, possible 2024 cult Presidential contenders, Florida’s De Sanctis and Texas’s Abbott who also are Trumpists to the hilt and Covid mitigation deniers.
On the face of it Governor Newsom faced an uphill battle albeit in the bluest of blue states. The way the recall was set up is if the incumbent doesn’t receive fifty percent of the votes, the leading opponent, ie, Elder, could win with as little of twenty - five percent. Inevitably in these affairs the opponents are far more motivated to go to the polls than the incumbents. Newsom had some cardinal handicaps. First of all he was a card carrying member of the elite. His children attended private schools when the public schools were under Covid lockdown. In addition at the height of the indoor mask recommendations he was photographed, maskless, in a cordon bleu French Restaurant. All this was mounted on top of the uncontrollable fires, never ending droughts and economic woes California was experiencing. A month before the election the odds were even that Newsom would be recalled.
Newson went into top gear and it was all about Covid and Trump. Added support to his full court press were Biden, VP Harris, Elizabeth Warren and messages from Obama and Bernie Sanders. The Democrats were turning this into a National race. This is not normally their approach but the stakes were high. The effort paid off Elder in effect got a vote total of twenty - three percent and the Democrat sixty - seven.
WHAT DID THE CALIFORNIAN RACE MEAN?
Elections in America are usually characterized by being a referendum on the incumbent with the opposers being more motivated than the defenders. The reverse occurred in the Californian encounter. While California isn’t Texas the Trump coalition is made up by the same constituencies everywhere.. Most significantly none of the crossover vote such as Republican women and Independents gave Elder the nod. On the face of it there couldn’t even have been a full Republican turn out.
The Republicans have no where to go other than following the cult’s mantra - the Big Lie that Trump really won the Presidency and organizing ersatz “recounts” in the key states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That will all come to a row of beans but will keep their electorate minority involved. They are then banking on redistricting, voter suppression legislation, that Biden and company are communists and more importantly fighting for “your freedom” not to have a drug forced into your arm against your will. As the Democratic Majority in the House is only six and the Senate deadlocked with Vice President being the tie breaker this is still a very feasible objective.
Notwithstanding the low bar the Republicans face to regain the Legislatures they could face a backlash from their Covid policy that is nothing short of evil which for whatever reasons they are hanging on to for dear life. In addition Trump mixing in to close races with only one objective to seek revenge on deviators and to nominate his own sycophants in Primary Races where Trumpists have less chance of winning in 2022 legislature races, might kibosh their plans.
COVID TRUMP AND THE REPUBLICAN CULT
More Americans, six hundred and seventy five thousand have died from Covid than the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918. While the country vaccination rates are sixty - four percent with at least one shot and fifty - five percent fully covered the Republican States are responsible for pulling these rates down from the seventies as their figures hover in the forty percentage. Death rates are four times higher from Covid in the Republican States.
Thus in spite of the higher overall American vaccination rate the USA still have the highest death per 100,000 population, in the OECD countries - 0.6 versus’s for example Germany’s 0.1.
These statistics are reflected in the chaos of the Health Care systems of the Republican States. Idaho, for example, where the percentage of those receiving two shots is only forty percent, the hospitals are over a hundred percent full and there are no ICU beds available because of unvaccinated Covid patients. Most critical patients are being flown out to contiguous states, particularly Washington. The latter have stated that Idaho must get its act together because they are overwhelming their system. The Idaho Hospitals Organization states that they will have to ration care. Two other Republican States, Montana and Alaska, have also declared they too have to decide who and who not to admit to Hospital and the ICU. Democratic Washington is on the verge of crisis due to pressure on beds from Idaho transfers.
However true to form the State of Idaho have signaled that they will sue the Biden Administration to abandon one of the aspects of its vaccine mandates for companies with more than a hundred workers. All indications point to twenty three other Cult controlled states to join them.
The Great State of Mississippi, if it was a small nation, would have the second highest death rate in the world. However there is no way that the Governor is going to usurp the freedom of his electorate. He blamed Biden for not giving him enough monoclonal antibodies. “These decisions must be discussed with your doctor,” he opined. (To think Mississippi have as many senators as California). The Governor of New Hampshire declined moneys from the Federal Government to make their vaccination effort more efficient.
However the center pieces of the RASH cult’s desire to thwart the Biden Administration’s desire to rid the country of Covid, are the key states of Texas, (Governor Abbott) and Florida, (Governor DeSantis). Both these Governors, will be the cult’s key presidential contenders should The Man himself not stand. Both are trying to outdo one another so as to allow their respective dominions to have their “freedoms”. Both have banned school districts from mandating masks. Florida has gone one better in that it has court injunctions to enforce their madness and threatening to remove pay from school officers enforcing a mask mandate. Also in Texas and Florida you can go into bars and restaurants maskless, All this lunacy in the wake of the fact that the two Republican states for an extended period of time were responsible for one third of the country’s new Covid cases. Both Governors asked for outside help as their plague raged. Florida asked for portable morgues and ventilators from the Federal Government while Texas asked for out of State Health personnel.
While DeSantis has the lead on Covid evil in Florida, Abbott has outdone him on abortion by legislating against all abortions past six weeks with no exceptions for rape or incest. When challenged about this outcome of the legislation he claimed Texas would get rid of every rapist. To indicate what an utter hypocritical lie that was he has full knowledge that there over five thousand rape kits hanging around not having being analyzed for years. One story related to the kits - when one of the backlog was finally analyzed and the perpetrator identified, he could not be prosecuted as the statute of limitations had run out. Not to worry he was in prison anyway having been found guilty of raping two other women afterwards.
Bottom line of the Covid story is that from the get go Trump spun it regardless of the toll on lives it was taking. He added kerosene to the flames of quack remedies, held and is still holding Covid spreading events and lied and lied about about anything and everything related to mitigation of the pandemic. He even really couldn’t take any credit about his “Operation Warp Speed” because the cult are ambivalent, to say the least, about vaccinations. He hypocritically hid the fact that he had been inoculated for a long while. His appointed head of the Covid response Dr. Deborah Birx, who shut up for as long as she could, sadly reflected on “Sixty Minutes” that had his leadership been different hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved. The Republican controlled states are just more of the same - a continuation of evil for supposed political ends.
THE BIG LIE AND WOODWARD AND COSTA’S BLOCKBUSTER “PERIL”
John F. Kennedy is reported to have answered the question as to what was his biggest shock upon entering the WhiteHouse, “That things were as bad as he had said they were”. The lengthy tome with Woodward’s impeccable imprimatur shows that “things” on January 6 and the events leading up to it were even worse than we already knew. If the Speaker of the House and the Trump appointed Chief of Staff Milley agree that “Trump was crazy” and Milley dramatically responded with actions that would prevent a coup or a nuclear war, when the Vice President is continuously and aggressively pressured to commit treason and two of the Trump’s most conservative Senate supporters believe that the plan to overturn a legitimate election is bunkum you know that in spite of whatever was out already in the public square, American Constitutional Democracy had hung by a thread.
The problem is the Big Lie is still being perpetuated and has become reality. Nearly eighty percent of what is left of the Republican Party believe that Joe Biden is an illegitimate President. Republican States have initiated nearly three hundred voter suppression laws that may well ensure that thirty - five percent of the electorate elect the next administration. And the former President and his RASH cult don’t care. Their tactics are coupled with threats and recounts of State elections that would make a Gilbert and Sullivan satire look plausible. Much the same as the Covid evil the Big Lie has become enshrined into legislation in the Republican controlled states. When the results of the bizarre Trump supported “independent” audit of the Arizona vote becomes public the MAGA crowd will once again be reinvigorated whatever the outcome.
AT THE END OF THE DAY
The Republican Party that has morphed into a cult with only white power as the objective is abandoning any pretense at being democratic. Their game plan lacks public support, for example, - a recent poll showed that seventy percent of the participants backed vaccine mandates and masks. The cult are reliant on gerrymandering and voter suppression to regain legislative power with a minority. The latter is a distinct possibility with the Democratic majorities being so thin.
The Democrats need to get their act together otherwise they will have no act to get together.
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Jay H. Ell wonders what it will take for the penny to drop for Senators Manchin and Sinema that the Republicans are not interested in bipartisanship. Former Republican Treasury Secretaries Mnuchin and Paulson literally begged McConnell to co operate on the debt ceiling because of the dire consequences it could have on the nation’s economy, but he refused. What hope has good old Joe the Smoe got? Cults just don’t compromise they drink Kool Aid,
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