Red Scared (Bottomless IV.)

Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us. ... Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.

Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Mr. McCarthy, I will not discuss this further with you. You have sat within six feet of me and could have asked me about Fred Fisher. You have seen fit to bring it out. And if there is a God in Heaven it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it further. I will not ask Mr. Cohn any more witnesses. You, Mr. Chairman, may, if you will, call the next witness. 

~Joseph N. Welch, Lawyer, Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954

Last night, I saw this. Part of a series of screencaps by Rick Wilson of Tucker Carlson's Fox News show.

Tucker Carlson, Uber-"Conservative" who basically did about everything but suck Viktor Orban's cock live on national TV, clearly taking the side of Vladimir Putin, again, live on TV in front of the world.

Vladimir Putin, onetime-Colonel of the Soviet KGB, Sword and Shield of the Communist Party, yo/ There was a time when conservatives would speak about someone like Vladimir Putin as if speaking his very name could conjure demons...and perhaps in their minds it could have.

Nowadays, though, "Conservatives" love themselves some Vladimir Putin, and some of them basically all but refer to him as Tsar Vladimir The Great.

Lots of these fucking people have such a raging hard-on to bow down before a dictator or a king, that he ain't even got to be an American.

We have actual Americans nowadays...people with money, that you'd think would want to pursue the American dream...who tried to overthrow our government and then sought asylum in Belarus, of all fucking places. As if living in a dirty, dictatorial Soviet LARPing shithole is preferable to America.

See if you can wrap your mind around that shit, I'll wait.

And if you think that's bad...well here we have Tucker Carlson actively taking the side of a country that's actively trying to go back to the days of the old Soviet Union. Just without anything that helps the common person.

I can remember when the default Conservative viewpoint concerning the Soviet Union was "Nuke 'em 'til they glow and use they asses for runway lights."

I don't get it, an American wanting to live in a place like Belarus makes about as much sense as American movement Conservatives fluffing KGB guy and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. From the viewpoint of anything these people ever said before, it simply doesn't make sense. There's no deeper meaning to find. For at least some people, it always was all a lie...and those are the people in charge of Conservatism now. It strongly suggests that everything they've ever said before was all crap. 

We're just lucky that we never had a President that reflected these people's desires until Trump and we're damned lucky that Trump was an incompetent boob who didn't keep anybody around that had even a modicum of intelligence.

We need to get...and keep...these dumb, racist fascists out of power because we might not be so lucky the next time.

Because the evidence strongly suggests that anything these people say now is also all crap. These people don't want to govern, or run the country, they want to grab attention and power by acting like obnoxious Youtube creators in the hope that the roaring idiot mob will keep them around for their debased entertainment value, and not much else. The country, indeed the world could go to shit and these people wouldn't care, so long as they "get to troll the liberals."

As if, being a legislator, a member of Congress, they have no other purpose than to rack up cheap internet fame on the taxpayer's dime.

Ya know, sooner or later in real life that sort of shit gets a person punched in the face. A hell of a lot of the rest of us are tired of this kind of moronic bullshit. Make Republicans Act Like Grown-ass Adults Again.

You ask me, Blowbert never should've been elected...never should have been considered a viable candidate...to start with. I'm so old that I can remember when I respected Republicans, even people like Antonin Scalia that I didn't like very much...because they were respectable. They had identifiable principles even if I...for part of that time being on the same side...didn't always agree with them.

Conservatism used to be a continuum, a spectrum of ideas fused together by a few basic principles. Modern Republicans are explicitly and loudly rejecting that set of ideals that fused the conservative movement together all the way from Ike Eisenhower to Mitt Romney, they've set everything else they ever claimed to believe in on fire and left it in the middle of the road to burn.

For Donald Trump and half-baked Fascism.

At this point if you're not an active traitor to America, an internet troll or a murderous asshole who is a fellator of dictators and filled with cowardice and greed, Republicans don't want you.

If you want to have a better country, you have to be a better citizen. And this ain't it.

If you can't stand up against this kind of anti-American garbage, you're part of the damned problem. I mean, what the hell are you afraid of? These people themselves have decided that the best they can do is people like Donald Trump and Lauren Boebert and Tucker Carlson.

Defeating them should be easy, but you can't do it sitting on your ass.

You have to stand up. I mean, what the hell are you afraid of?

These cowardly shits would gladly sell us out to our nation's enemies, for no better reason or rationalizations than they hate LGBT folk, liberals and people of color..

I don't know about you, but that makes me see red and makes me angry, not scared.

I'm tired of this shit. Why aren't you?

Do something, Democrats. Do something.

Part III

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan