Vogon_Glory
Vogon_Glory's JournalMasks: When I realized why I'd changed my mind.
Let me be up front. I don’t like wearing masks. They’re hot and uncomfortable and even when I speak with my best diction I sound like I’m mumbling. But I wear them anyway.
I don’t know what caused me to change my attitude, that I would comply, even grudgingly. Then I remembered. Several years I took a diving trip to Sipidan. I won’t relate the details about the diving, but it was a long flight back. But what I remembered was that the passenger sitting next to me coughed and sneezed the whole darn flight (Of course I’d forgotten to pack facial tissues or a spare hanky). As a result, I caught the gift that keeps on giving. I came home sick with a cold and feeling ticked off about it. I still blame my seat mate for giving it to me.
I haven’t flown since just after the Pandemic really got going last year. I think I wore a bandana, at least after I took my seat. But for some reason or other, wearing a mask doesn’t bother me too much.
Yep, right-wing and Republican disinformation about COVID-19 will continue
to kill their credulous followers or ruin their followers’ health. The politicians, the propagandists, and their apparatchiks may change their tune as nimbly as the Soviet Union’s Communist Party did several times in the early 1940’s, but their followers will be much longer at changing their thinking—assuming that they ever do.
You know, these righties like to say how much smarter they are than us “Libs.” Surely they heard the story of the little boy who cried “Wolf!” SOMEWHERE before they started wearing trousers?
A decade or so ago I might have cut those guys some slack
if they were politically-clueless white southerners who later moved to Cali. Then and now I have no sympathy for those born outside the former Confederacy found waving the Confederate Battle Flag: it’s not part of their heritage and they have no business displaying it.
Moreover, I’d say that 21st century northerners and Midwesterners waving the CBF are not only disrespecting people of color, but also the men from their states of origin who fought and died to defeat the white-supremacist Confederate States of America.
Which Ex-Republicans to welcome? That's hard to answer
I like to think there’d be room for intelligent, thoughtful former Republicans with ethics and who are solid members of the reality-based community.
On the other hand, I’d be far less welcoming to the opportunistic liars, scammers, and cultists that have run afoul of Orange Julius and seek safer harbors.
Likewise, I don’t think we should welcome former Dixiecrat (turncoats) or their progeny back into our ranks. They not only betrayed us, but their years in the Republican Party have shown what they do when unbound by compromise and feel free to exercise their political and ideological ids to maximum extent. When a man shows you what he is, believe him. And they have shown us what they are.
Let them remain in the political wilderness thrice as long as it took Moses and the Israelites to travel from Egypt to Canaan.!
They don't. It's increasingly clear that these self-appointed champions of
capitalism are mostly economic illiterates.
I admit that this realization was a shock. I remember right-wing chest-thumpers claiming that”lefties” (is anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan) didn’t understand how the markets worked and they knew what they were doing.(And once upon a time I believed them). I honest-to-gosh thought these guys spent as much time studying economics as I thought they did running their businesses (Yeah, I have high standards. I thought these guys lived up to them. My mistake).
I began to be disabused even while Daddy Bush was in office and was completely disabused by the end of the Former Guy’s term of office. These guys are not just illiterates, but they’re ignoramuses unwilling To observe and tidy the real world to see what’s what.
To The Republican Poseurs Planning To Acquit Donald Trump
You are no statesmen, you’re only cos-playing imitations.. When historians recount your role in this affair, and those books will be written and circulated here in the US as well as abroad, you will not be remembered as the men and women who stood up to a would-be autocrat to defend the Constitution of the United States of America and to defend the concept of self-governance for the people and by the people of our republic, but as the spineless, cowardly would-be enablers of dictatorship, cut from the same sorry bolt of cloth as your many counterparts past and present south of the border who stood by and did nothing when oligarchs and caudillos overthrew their nation’s democratic governments and replaced them with dictatorships. This impeachment trial will be remembered as your hour of decision, and your course of action that of cowardice.
Moderate Republicans? Moderate compared to--WHAT???
Today’s corporal’s guard of moderate Republicans are not only a tiny minority of their party’s membership, but the very definition of what constitutes being a Republican moderate has shifted so far to the right that even being Bob Dole Republican is considered to be the next best thing to a practicing Marxist in Pachyderm circles.
Those of us who once sympathized with what was once moderate Republicanism, be it the Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, or even the George HW Bush varieties, have long since learned that there is no place for us besides self-abasing useful-idiot status in the radical-reactionary GOP, and that to maintain any self-respect, we had to leave.
The pitiful show of “strength” by the Republican moderate wing (or is it just a wing-feather?) after the 1/06/21 coup attempt shows what a helpless, weak and ineffectual farce “moderate” Republicanism has become.
The Titanic of moderate Republicanism has not only started sinking, but the hull has split in two and the final feet of the ship’s stern are slipping beneath the icy waters of the North Atlantic.
I think it's likely that the Repuds are stuck with Donnie
His base is still going to be there and Faux, OAN, and NEWSMAX will still be denying his crimes and minimizing the consequences. And it galls me to say this, but they DO vote. They’ll either renominate Trump or some wanna-be because I doubt enough Repud senators—even the guys who are retiring or are safe until 2026–won’t have the stones to vote to impeach him for high crimes and misdemeanors, thus moving him off the 2024 Republican primary contest.
Been in their situation. No empathy for the Trumpies
I not only mourned Hillary’s loss, but the beginning of the end of the American Experiment and the shattering of my misconceptions I’d had about the good judgement and common decency that I’d thought remained among the American electorate.
The belief that our country was indeed a City on the Hill
was not confined to clueless right-wingers. I, too, believed that America was the best hope of the world and it broke my heart to see the lights fade to dark as the electoral votes were tallied in the aftermath of the 2016 elections.
I’m still angry at Trump supporters and I’m particularly angry at the fools who continue to believe his regime horse (excrement) despite half a decade’s worth of evidence to the contrary. I have little pity for them: they had the tools for wising up and refused to use them.
I doubt that these people will ever wise up. Een so, I dearly hope this is a better country than what they and their idol sought to bequeath to us.
Perhaps it's because of my privileged position,
I didn’t think that January 2020 was all that bad. Things didn’t take a sharp right term into the excrement until February. Maybe things in 2021 will begin to get better around mid-year.
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Member since: 2003 before July 6thNumber of posts: 9,117