And through the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.
It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit; The helmsman steered us through!
A good south wind sprung up behind; The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner's hollow!
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whilst all the night, through fog-smoke-white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.'
God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look'st thou so?'—With my crossbow
I shot the ALBATROSS.
~From the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Over the weekend, there was an incident on Lake Travis, near Austin, TX. A "Trump Boat Parade" went horribly wrong because people can't stop acting like idiots, and the rich people with the big boats that they don't know how to use started going too fast, creating wakes, actively trying to splash or swamp the smaller boats. Mind you, this was a TRUMP boat parade, aren't all these people supposed to be on the same team, united in their bellicose bellowing for their President and wanting to fight the whole rest of the world because we don't agree?
It seems tribal unity in MAGAland might not be all that it's cracked up to be. If they ever don't have the rest of us to hate anymore, they'll turn on each other.
I keep trying to tell people, there's a key division among Republicans. See, the people at the top, they want...or wanted...things a certain way.
Elites, the Professional Conservatives, the Religious Right, the Think-tankers, the wealthy...they all wanted to be Republika Srpska and saw Trump as their Radovan Karadzic, or they wanted to be something like the Estado Novo in Portugal under Antonio Oliviero Salazar, or perhaps like Spain under Francisco Franco. Sure it's ethnic cleansing and fascism, but it has a veneer of respectability and knows how to deal with major powers...and in the case of Portugal and Spain they were shrewd enough to stay out of major conflicts and to punch well above their weight politically by being, on one level or another, part of the world community, landing on the right side of the Cold War, and both having liberalizing revolutions within the same couple of years.
The base? The AR-15, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Pro-wrestling crowd, not so much. They seem to be leaning in the general direction of Gonzo Afghanistan with bigger guns and more drugs, the women treated worse and nobody even pretending to be a freedom fighter or a holy warrior. They just want to break shit and kill people, burn it all down so they can rule the ashes and as far as they're concerned they don't want no revolution, ever, because somehow they think unending malice and constantly creating enemies is a sustainable philosophy that won't eventually get them shot full of bullets, hanged from a gas station canopy and spit on.
Perhaps they can ask Il Duce how fascism worked out in the end. Oh, wait...
And it only gets worse from there because the next stop is the active Third Reich wannabes. You know, the spiritual descendants of those who invaded their own ally when Italian fascism came flying apart after the crushing defeat by the allies in North Africa and the success of Operation Husky, the US-led invasion of Sicily.
I'm not joking when I say that every so often I see somebody on Twitter for whom Trump does not go far enough. They regard him as a failure because he hasn't caused more chaos or killed more people.
As of today I'm seeing that 200,000 Americans are dead from COVID-19.
How many more dead bodies before we say "Enough."
Almost every day of the past four years there's been some bullshit scandal that would have ended any other administration that this country has ever had and led to the impeachment and removal from office...if not the being run out of Washington D.C. on a rail...of damned near any other President.
Trump commits crimes against humanity, and between a quarter and a third of Americans either literally cannot be arsed to care or they actively support this bullshit.
And over the last couple of days I've observed that there's still at least a few liberal purity-cult holdouts who just can't vote for Joe Biden. They just can't.
Listen up, pecker breath, literally the only alternative to Joe Biden is...four more years of Donald Trump.
Bernie fucking Sanders has actively supported Joe Biden. Mayor Pete is already part of his team, Not only is active Democratic support for anybody else basically zero...and I thought getting all the Democrats to agree on anything was pretty much impossible...but lots of Republicans are backing Joe too. Rick Snyder, my own state's piece of garbage Republican former governor has endorsed Biden. There were damned near as many R's speaking at the Democratic National Convention as there were actual D's. Republican political ads...if one can even find them on TV these days...are absolute flaming human shit because all the main Republican ad guys have joined the Lincoln Project and are working toward electing Joe Biden and getting rid of Trump.
They understand, you have to win first.
Trump's campaign has spent a billion dollars and the numbers have barely budged. He's converted a lot of Republican donor money into his personal funds, if I were some people I'd be demanding my money back, and sending in battalions of lawyers to make sure I got it.
This should not be that hard.
Biden is fairly consistently polling at least ten points ahead these days, and has generally had a more than respectable lead, over a period of time that is record-setting by itself. And he's running like he's behind, which is what you're supposed to do. So why isn't he up by twenty points, or thirty?
A narrow Biden win means Republicans try to split the country and start a civil war. Lots of people see the danger here, but too many on both sides think it won't affect them. I find it amusing that the people who couldn't handle COVID shutdowns think they'll be able to hack the deprivation, supply disruptions and requirements for thrift that a wartime economy demands.
And far too many more are excited by the idea of firefights in the streets, tanks shooting it out in Iowa corn fields and watching F-16's duel Su-27's...or F-35's for that matter...in the sky overhead.
Trump is underwater, but there's lots of people, even some on the other team, seem to be looking to throw him a lifeline.
Cut that shit out.
Nothing is going to get better until Republicans are out of power. Period. Read this again until you internalize it.
And this:
We all have to be prepared to vote these fuckers out...and then be ready to fight them off.
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