Video (2 minutes)
If you think we are safe after surviving the election of 2020 and the attempted coup of 11/4/20 – 1/6/21, please realize what is happening to 40% of our fellow Americans. They are being propagandized to hate our democracy and to hate us.
When this happens to a society, the chasm does not magically go away. We need to educate our fellow Americans as to what the goal of these propagandists in the Russian intelligence services; and Fox News, OAN, NewsMax, and radio shock jocks is: to further divide Americans and to make this country ready for authoritarian rule like Hungary. The former for Putin’s corrupt interests, and the latter American media organizations for a mixture of greed and ideological reasons.
We need to remind them all of what America is supposed to be. We have no choice.
Pay attention, and spread the word: we are not out of the woods. Not even close.
But as a wise friend of mine said yesterday, “ We shall survive if we remain vigilant and reject values that are non-inclusive and not democratic.”
“GOP offers fear, lies and broken promises.” President Biden on 8/4/21
How many have forgotten that the attack on 9/11 was the second attempt to take down the WTC towers? The first attempt failed but the attackers learned from it. Those who attacked the Capitol on 1/6 failed, but the powers behind the attack learned from it. I have no doubt they are planning their second attack in plain sight.
It isn’t clear to me that they failed.
The evidence suggests to me that the January 6 attack was a staged media event, analogous to any of the venerable and frequent WWF ringside “interview” episodes.
The evening’s designated villain comes out to ringside during the “interview” between Vince McMahon (now a Trump loyalist after selling his family business to Donald Trump) and the evening’s designated hero. The villain smashes a chair over the head of the hero and Mr. McMahon, who both fall to the floor. A fracas ensues, with good guys and bad guys coming out from the wings and doing “battle” all over the ring and ringside. The crowd boos and cheers. The staged chaos dies down just in time for the next commercial break. After the event, everybody — heroes and villains alike — goes to the neighborhood bar and socializes with each other.
The purpose of such episodes is to raise ratings, advertising rates, and fire up the audience.
I’m not saying that the Capitol attack wasn’t real and threatening — just as the chairs tossed about at ringside were quite real and so were the falls (check out what happened to Andy Kaufmann when he alleged that they were fake).
I’m saying that the media circus was the intended goal — and it looks to me as though the event was marvelously successful. Donald Trump has raised a staggering amount of money from his base. Of course, NONE of it is going to any of the things he talks about in his fund-raising appeals, but his base doesn’t care.
The nightly MSNBC and CNN broadcasts are all-Trump-all-the-time, breaking only for more hysterical COVID pieces.
Donald Trump and the Seditionist Party (formerly known as the GOP) completely dominate and control the mainstream media narrative, national policy, and both houses of Congress.
By the time 2022 rolls around, it looks to me as though Seditionists will have control of the state legislative bodies they need to reverse any election outcome they don’t like — while Congress and the White House remain absolutely paralyzed, frozen in a paralysis of failed “bipartisanship”.
The Seditionist Party learned from 2020 and from January 6, 2021 how to ensure that a Seditionist takes the White House in 2024.
Representative democracy in America is no more legitimate than any of the wrestling exhibitions broadcast in the entire history of the WWF.
It failed in the sense that Congress reconvened, correctly certified the electoral vote, and two weeks later inaugurated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on schedule.
Given our other discussions I’m surprised you label certain media reporting of COVID hysterical. I actually think they are largely calmer than last year, but you seem to be the one emphasizing how much danger we are still in.
We are still in grave danger from COVID. The relentless media hysteria about it worsens, rather than helps.
We are facing yet another government shutdown because of the debt ceiling, yet there has been ZERO mention of that on any of the prime-time MSNBC or CNN shows. The far west is burning. There is growing evidence that the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) is much closer to collapse than we thought — yet no mention of it on MSNBC or CNN (https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/08/05/change-ocean-collapse-atlantic-meridional/).
We see and hear endless “human interest” pieces about the horrors of somebody-or-other who died from COVID. Similarly endless pieces about somebody-or-other who was traumatized by the January 6 invasion. Endless repetitions of bodycam videos showing the same scenes of the January 6 riot that we’ve already seen a gazillion times.
MSNBC and CNN are filling their primetime space with what amounts to voyeuristic COVID-porn and Trump-porn — little or no new information, just repetitive rubbish that is indistinguishable from what they broadcast the day before, the week before, or the month before.
All intermixed with similarly repetitive commercials, to the tune of 15 minutes per half-hour in the second half of each prime-time hour.
Tens of millions of American voters falsely believe that the new administration is illegitimate. Tens of millions of Americans refuse to accept the COVID vaccine because they believe that it makes keys stick to their necks or something equally insane.
Mitch McConnell said TODAY that the GOP prefers to destroy America’s worldwide financial reputation over fulfilling their duty to govern responsibly (https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2021/08/05/mcconnell-gop-debt-limit-502593)
The strategy of the GOP is to destroy EVERY initiative of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, create as much chaos, destruction, and suffering as possible, and blame the result on the Democrats. Tens of millions of Americans already validate that strategy with their on-going support.
The seditionists are winning a very real war, and we remain absorbed in a collective mental-masturbation circle-jerk.
When the pandemic is over, every town in the South should have a statue of the coronavirus so they don’t forget their history.
I for one am no longer sorry of feel sympathy for anyone who has decided to not get vaccinated and as a result, dies from the infection. I have no obligation to understand their reluctance and be patient with them as they struggle with the decision. When they die, at least that is one less opportunity for the virus to mutate and spread to a point where it may eventually present a real danger to those of us who are vaccinated. Until then, anyone who is not vaccinated is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
This is an example where we enthusiastically agree.
The first question I would ask your Dodge Ram owner from the other thread is “Are you vaccinated?”
I think that any answer other than “yes” should provoke a crisp, courteous, and firm “This conversation is over.”
Even today, as I torture myself to watch Fox, I saw one of the commentators tell their audience “there are so many conflicting reports on the vaccine and the virus, no one knows who to trust”. She went on to say that a friend of hers who has a child in day care was told by her pediatrician to take her child out of day care….but then “found information on the web that conflicted with the doctor”.
Yup, lots of “conflicting reports”…..some from highly qualified, experienced, and peer reviewed scientists and doctors…and some from a mom in Toledo who posted something she read on the Internet.
Just as there is no “conflicting” science on climate change, there is no conflicting science about the Covid vaccines.
The risk of not being vaccinated completely dwarfs the as-yet unidentified risks of the vaccine itself. Various sources report that more than 1.2 BILLION people have been fully vaccinated. There have been a literal handful of adverse reactions, all readily handled in any vaccine location in America in August of 2021.
If people trust their very lives to misinformation they hear from Fox, then no conversation will make any difference. At. All.
The question I have started to wonder about regarding vaccine misinformation is “Qui bono?” My imagination is failing me regarding who benefits from people not getting vaccinated. As far as I can tell following the money doesn’t lead anywhere in this context.
Joe Biden has made getting the pandemic under control his first and most important issue.
As night follows day, the GOP — personified by Mitch McConnell, but they’re all the same — therefore concludes that having the pandemic rage out of control is a defeat for Joe Biden. Assuring that defeat is job number one for today’s GOP.
While millions of unvaccinated Americans sicken and die, the GOP message will be “Joe Biden screwed up the vaccination efforts and caused you and your loved ones to suffer”.
It differs only in degree from the party line from 2010 onwards that “ObamaCare” was evil and needed to be repealed. The facts were, even at the time, that the ACA was rescuing HUGE numbers of Red state Americans from the catastrophic consequences of their various disorders.
Don’t forget the apocryphal quotes attributed to red state Republican voters — “Repeal ObamaCare, get rid of socialized medicine, but don’t you dare touch my Medicare”.
Facts do not matter to the GOP, they haven’t mattered in decades. If facts mattered then the GOP would have collapsed in irrelevance generations ago.
The money trail that counts, in this context, is the pipeline of dirty Russian mob money that ends up in GOP coffers.
I’m fascinated by the sudden end to the reporting of the several DoJ investigations of Lev Parnas, Dmitry Firtash, Igor Frumin, and others that was so prominently reported until somebody shut it off. Rachel Maddow was on that case for years, she wrote at least one book about it. Has anybody asked her what happened? Did all that evidence just disappear?
I don’t think so. I think there are HUGE sums of money at stake, and huge implications for democracy.
What sort of constitutional crisis unfolds if and when the DoJ, NSA, CIA, and others reveal that Vladimir Putin successfully turned a major American party — a party that has controlled the levers of American governance for at least a decade — into a Russian asset?
What happens to the legitimacy of the Supreme Court when it is demonstrated that the FBI suppressed damaging evidence against Brett Kavanaugh under the explicit direction of the White House — at a time when both the White House and the DoJ were Russian assets advancing the interests of Vladimir Putin?
The assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK devastated American politics for at least a generation. Many historians suggest that the reverberations of those events were significantly influential in the rise of Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and then Ronald Reagan.
We have only just begun to learn how deeply the 2016 election outcome wounded America. That wound may well still prove to be mortal.
Given Governors Abbott and DeSantis how in the world can the Republicans accuse Biden of being the one to screw up the pandemic and be believed? Also, do you have evidence of Russian mob money benefiting the Republican Party? There are strict campaign finance laws and I remember Clinton getting raked over the coals for letting Chinese lobbyists stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. Only US citizens can donate to parties and campaigns and all sources must be truthfully reported. It seems if what you say is true this would me a massive scandal which we would hear about day in and day out on the news. I guess I was looking for a very direct profit motive for people not being vaccinated.
Who benefits from pushing back on a successful campaign by the federal government to save the lives of American citizens? The quick answer is: Big Pharma, Private Health Insurers, Private Hospitals.
If the government mandates a vaccine and the vaccine is free and in doing so, we’re all better off, why not take this approach with all medical needs? Why indeed!
If the federal government subsidizes the research and development of the vaccine (or in the case of Pfizer, the German government), why don’t we just have the government fund the research and development of all qualified prescription drugs on the condition that the results be open sourced? Why indeed?
There is HUGE money in health care. I can recall watching Trump promoting all the private companies involved in his administration’s approach to the pandemic…even promoting the My Pillow Guy.
We all watched as Trump refused to fully implement the Defense Production Act that was described by Republicans as “A cure worse than the disease”. In other words, taking healthcare out of the control of the private sector and turning it over to the Federal Government and saving lives was seen as worse than hurting the DOW and the flow of money in rents to the 1%.
While I am at it, make no mistake about the media’s role in this as well. If Big Pharma and Big Medical get hurt, the revenue stream of advertising dollars to Big Media slows to a trickle.
Indeed — what on EARTH will CNN and MSNBC fill their prime time broadcasts with if not endless commercials for exorbitantly expensive drugs? I guess we’ll see more stupid iguanas, emus, and revolting dogs eating revolting dogfood.
As soon as you see the happy smiling families frolicking about in slow motion, you KNOW it’s going to be some interminable commercial for some useless drug.
Pharmaceutical companies are responsible for the vaccines. Seems to me in this case they benefit from people using their products. I assume that even though the vaccines are free to the vaccinated they are making a pretty penny courtesy of Uncle Sam. Plus they probably are accruing quite the reservoir of good will from the public.
It isn’t necessarily about the money. There are people who believe sleeping with crystals under their pillows will prevent disease. There are people who wear socks infused with copper to cure arthritis. There are people who believe the government would experiment on unwitting citizens by studying, not curing their syphillus or giving them LSD to see what happens, oh wait..
But there are people who don’t truly believe that nonsense, but are pushing it anyway. Take Tucker Carlson for example. He is vaccinated which I believe is required by Fox. He’s doing just fine, but rails against vaccines. How does his life improve if people are not vaccinated or how does he suffer if they are?
People who sleep with crystals under their pillows or wear socks infused with copper do not put anybody else at risk.
I agree, though, that it isn’t about the money. It is, instead, about unscrupulous, viciously cynical and ghoulish politicians like Ron DeSantis literally killing people in order to advance his creds with the white supremacist crowd. “Anything that hurts Joe Biden helps me” is the theme.
Florida leads the nation in infection rates today. The health care system in Florida is collapsing under the burden of its completely unnecessary COVID load. Tens of thousands of Florida school children will spread the pandemic to their communities in a few short weeks.
This disaster is real, is the direct result of lies from elected officials, and has nothing to do with crystals and copper.
Covidiots are like pantsless people crapping all over the floor and asking, ” If pants and toilets work, why are we sliding around in all this s…?”
Are you criticizing this behavior or demonstrating it with your repetitive, nonsensical posts?
Just proving there’s nothing more frightening that ignorance in action. 🙂 Have a nice day
“Vote to re-elect me Governor because our state has the highest infection rates which I’m doing nothing to alleviate (and banning others from acting)” sounds like an odd political strategy. Don’t voters usually send their leaders packing when things aren’t going well? Does DeSantis really think voters will forgive him and jump right to blaming Biden despite this issue being state-specific? This may play well for the hardcore base, but FL overall isn’t deep read and I say he’s playing with fire in a general election context.
While it’s not about the money for the people who sleep with crystals under their pillows or wear socks infused with copper, the level of inaction on the part of out legislators tells me a different story.
As much as Sandy Hook was the best argument for sensible gun control, the Covid Pandemic is the best argument for Universal Healthcare, and yet I fail to see anyone in congress pointing to that simple reality.
And then there are considerations about future behavior. The “regular” flue comes around every year. There are yearly vaccines. If a relative dies from the regular flue is your government responsible because they didn’t “require” the shot for everyone, and didn’t mandate masks? What is the acceptable loss before it is a pandemic? Uncle Jim is still dead, covid or regular.
I got my shots, wear a mask in certain situations even when not required, didn’t go to Lollapalooza, only eat at familiar restaurants. I take common sense precautions and associate with others who did also. But I still could get hit by a bus crossing the street.
Amen to that!