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Tuesday, April 2, 2019

It'd been worth him doing it just so I could've caught him doing it

The title is the quote by Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction--he laments that not only did someone key his Malibu--but that he didn't catch the fucker. If he had caught the fucker, well, that'd have made the keying "almost worth it."

What if this is, sort of, the case for the Trump presidency? The story on The Right is that The Democrats are going cray-cray. Driven into derangement by Trump, they are overreaching and contorting themselves into a left-wing pretzel because of their hatred for Trump's tweets.

This, of course, comes as we learn that Trump's White House has cleared like 25 people about whom there were "serious concerns," gave us the longest shutdown in history, and has had the effect of elevating really marginal people like Alex Jones and the QAnon crowd.

To put it simply: the idea that the Trump-regime (and its attendant followers on the right) has a real precedent in American history is absolute bullshit. Even if you ignore the trappings of Trump-mania, the list of really unfortunate "firsts" under Trump is staggering.

So--what if . . . it's worth it?

Trump's ratings with the younger crowd--not to mention with blacks and women--are in the toilet. While it's conceivable that he could turn that around by artful campaigning, we can now see that either he's incapable of it--or just disinterested. It's probably the former: if he could figure out a way to do that and keep his base, he probably would.

But he can't.

The Right, of course, believes that these ratings are due to a hostile media--which, yes, the media is hostile--but the position poses the question: what would a "fair" pro-Trump media look like? The answer, of course, is OANN or Fox New's Hannity--both of which catastrophically fail even a basic sniff-test for "fairness" and, it turns out, the no-man's land between the mainstream media and the right-wing media is essentially non-existent from a factual perspective.

The media certainly doesn't like trump--and wants to see him fail--but, of course, he has worked very hard to earn that dislike with racist policies, ridiculous lies, and organizational incompetence. In other words: the media is fair--that isn't going to change either.

What To Make of 2018?
Of course the test-case for whether or not Trump is solving the problem he's generating (ironically, not a problem he intentionally created this time!) was the 2018 election. Both Democrats and Republicans turned out at historic levels and it was a blue-wave at that point. If that continues? Then The Right is in deep shit.

The problem is that they have "ingested the poison." The MAGA-Crowd is now statistically required for them to win. The guys who just want judges and the wall--and don't like the incompetency and the venal ass-kissing of dictators (or whichever--there's a long list) simply can't win without them.

Like: don't have a chance without them. The problem is that the MAGA crowd is pretty clearly stuff with racists, conspiracy theorists, and other turn-offs for the majority of Americans. There's no way to separate yourself from vocal QAnon supporters (Pence, yesterday, tweeted support for the abortion-movie--the movie's official account is tweeting QAnon slogans). As such, they're tied to it.

Worse: they may not realize it's a problem.

Remember, reader: what you tell yourself ("The right-wing violence isn't so bad--it's a tiny number of people--and antifa is way, way worse!") is just what gets you to bed at night. What other people are seeing ("Antifa who? I saw a that Nazi dick run over a buncha people!") isn't amenable to your self-soothing.

That's not how it works.

But if you have a tight enough echo chamber, you'll think it is.

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