And on the other side is the remnants of the republican party… violently delusional, concerned only with grievances it invented from conspiracy theories it spun from the darkest threads of human history. Gibbering madness with a microphone, intent on shouting down facts.

In a sane world the lunatics would be doomed to an ignoble demise- leaving one admittedly flawed party to try to govern. Unfortunately, though, the lunatics have one unbalanced advantage… the are unshackled by the rules or by decency- there is no limit to what they will do to seize power.

Those aren’t good odds…

This indicates not only that they have chosen to cultivate this constituency, but have tied their careers to it. Regardless of how they may feel about these people, they actually want them to remain a force in the American political landscape.

I find this appalling.

They are too cowardly and stupid to understand the reality.

Even more important than justice, this is for history. Think of it as a trial in absentia, not just for the accused, but for the jury as well.

The names and political philosophy that countenanced this obscenity and hoped to profit from it must be remembered forever. We need to know who these people are.

Yesterday was Germany’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. Let this be ours.
There are NOT “nice people on both sides”.

All that matters is they can see some group being punished and suffering. If they can feel they are inflicting greater pain on others than they themselves are experiencing then- in their minds- that makes them the ‘winners’.

As one Trump voter put it when feeling betrayed:

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” Minton told Mazzei. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

Its like a boy that has been slapped around by his father, so he goes out and kicks his dog. The trickle-down theory of cruelty. There is no purpose, or reason for it, its just that the least powerful must be the end recipients of the abuse.

For decades the GOP has primarily thrived by finding dogs for its base to kick. Making life worse for their perceived enemies has become far more important than improving everyone’s standard of living.

If you are upset that your wages and benefits are too low, they hold up the poor people asking that the minimum wage be increased as the problem, not the corporate executives getting 100′s of millions in bonuses for poor performance.

If you are worried about losing your job to undocumented workers, they wind you up to go after the poor undocumented worker, racism makes it easy… instead of directing your anger at the billionaires that are getting richer by exploiting the undocumented for slave wages.

They keep their base in a constant state of unthinking anger with invented outrages… The GOP trained their base to violently oppose anything the GOP tells them is ‘socialism’- it helps that the base doesn’t understand the meaning of the word.

As the GOP base is more and more victimized by GOP policy the GOP has to come up with wilder, more delusional, more dangerous fabrications to keep the base from looking at their plight more carefully.

Those liberals trying to give you affordable health care? They really want to kill your grandma with a death panel.

The elected president is actually a muslim terrorist sympathizer born in Kenya (again racism really helps)…

Liberals want to declare war on christmas!! (I am a liberal atheist, and love christmas- aside from the godawful music everywhere- none of my liberal friends of various religious backgrounds have an issue with it either)

School shootings are false flag fabrications designed to steal your guns… not the result of insane policy decisions designed to increase gun manufacturer profits.

And now we have Q-Anon cultists in congress- the whole q-anon conspiracy theory is just a recycled version of the Blood Libel used against the Jews… Liberal elites are killing and abusing children, drinking their blood… and the base, having come this far down the path of insanity had no problem believing it… they have become trained to accept whatever delusions fed to them.

The GOP has intentionally bred the base into a bloodthirsty monster and they have to keep it’s hunger satiated, lest it turn its attention to the GOP itself… they are running out of dogs, and very nearly had to feed the monster with a Pence instead.

The GOP is losing control of their base, and if it decides to turn on the GOP it will not hesitate to tear them limb from limb.

His skill to thoroughly corrupt anyone and everything he comes close to is almost supernatural… especially when those getting drawn in by him must see the countless examples of how it always ends badly for anyone that lets themselves be used by him…

I don’t believe he has some supernatural ability to corrupt people, so that means he gathers around himself extremely corruptible people- either he selects them, or they are drawn to him- or both…

What I can’t understand is how these corruptibles ally themselves to Trump when they MUST know he will inevitably destroy them, throw them under the bus as soon as it is expedient for him to do so…

As for the moral bankruptcy of the GOP…
Disagreements over national policy are fine – partisan bickering over how to allocate limited resources is a GOOD thing and healthy for the nation- Budget allocations reflect the values of a nation.

But at some point, for the GOP, it stopped being about making decisions based on their values- it became a way to express how much, or little, value some of their fellow citizens had in their eyes.

Fundamental to republican thought seems to be the assumption that the affluent and successful people are inherently more valuable – that they are better people that have earned their place- god obviously approves of them. These people -in the eyes of the Republicans- are to be celebrated and rewarded even more…

Conversely, the poor and needy are bad people, freeloaders, takers, victims only of their own bad choices… they don’t deserve ‘hand-outs’

I am just old enough to remember the Reagan years and diatribes against ‘welfare queens’ and labeling of all those receiving public assistance as freeloaders.

I work hard, and its been a struggle to get to where I am now- but I don’t think I ‘deserve’ my comfort more than some single mother working multiple jobs desperately trying to earn enough to cover rent and keep her kids fed.

I have NEVER had to work that hard in that much desperation and fear… no one should HAVE to in our society.

Jeff Bezos could personally pay each of Amazon’s 876,000 employees a one-time $105,000 bonus today and still be as wealthy as he was at the beginning of the pandemic. I would be willing to bet most of his employees have worked harder under more grueling conditions than Bezos did. While risking their health and the health of their family members…

NO HUMAN BEING ALIVE has ‘earned’ that sort of wealth at the expense of others- yet those fortunate few are the same ones the republican policies seem determined reward even further- there is something deeply pathological in that. It becomes truly evil when those same republicans seek to punish the most desperate and to ENSURE they stay desperate- No minimum wage increase, no financial assistance, no health care, no tuition assistance, no rent assistance… but YES to running up the debt to cut the taxes of billionaires…

It is not just, it isn’t moral, it is not sustainable.
It is just mindless greed- and as we have seen, they will happily wreck the nation- our democracy- rather than lose the power to loot it.