Over on HotAir, conservative (but erstwhile republican, since he quit the party) Ed Morrissey finds common ground with the generally disliked on the right Bill Maher who says we shouldn't confuse 74 million Trump voters with the comparatively small group of insurrectionists who took over the Capitol, baying for blood, and came, likely, within literal feet of having captured some lawmakers.
After all, says, Maher, to Ed Morrissey's applause, 'we can't conflate illiberal beliefs with violent action--at least that's what I'm told about Islamic Terrorism.'
Uh . . . Ed? Ed? Are you thinking about this?
Maher also says "you can like something being run by assholes without being an asshole yourself." Does--uh--does this stand up to scrutiny? Let's look.
Trumplamic Terrorism
We have been assured for quite a while--and quite emphatically--that guys like the MAGA-Bomber and the various mass shooters who had Trump's words and themes coming out of their mouths as they pulled the trigger were not in any way indicative of, well, Trumpism. After all, the marching Tiki Nazi in a MAGA hat could've been wearing any hat, right?
If he'd been wearing a Star Trek hat would we have to decide that the United Federation of Planets was a fascist organization?
Strangely? These guys never really seem to wear Star Trek hats. They tend towards MAGA hats. Correlation isn't causation--but The Omnivore thinks there just might be something there.
The Two Best Friends and Accomplices of the Tree of Life Shooter
Now, we can observe that while, yes: there is some kind of correlation between fascist violence and Trump--the link, of which may never be known--
It Be Totally Mysterious
What we can say is that there is certainly a vein of racist violence in the Trump, erm, religion--Isn't Islam a
religion, Bill? Ed? Is that what we're saying? And the rest of the flock isn't exactly
hostile to it, are they?
A Camp Auschwitz T-Shirt Next To A MAGA Hat.
Oh, and the Back of The Death Camp Shirt?
It Apparently Says 'Staff'
What The Omnivore is saying here is that Trumpism, whether or not it's a
religion like Islam, has not only the trappings of white supremacy but also seems really the hell tolerant of it--and this is something the Right universally condemns the Islamic religion for even though no one thinks an Islamic radical would have any luck running for POTUS--but Trump? Trump was the
pick of the GOP. He didn't just declare himself grand Immam of the Republicans. No, he went through a lengthy and contested primary process wherein he was chosen for his attributes--and they liked him.
They still do.
The Kool Aid - They Have Drunk It
The Republicans, whatever they once represented, they are now the Party of Trump. There has been a variety of polling and what it shows is that the worldview of the Republicans is very homogenously Trump and that this worldview is pro-insurrection. See here:
Biden is Illegitimate
A core tenet of Trumpism is that if you lose the election was fraudulent and if you
win it was fraudulent. In 2015 he said this before any vote was taken. In 2016 he said this to explain losing the popular vote. Leading up to the 2020 election he said this and immediately after? Yeah, you know.
There's probably a reason Giuliani's practice in Ukraine was called "
Fraud Guarantee."
They Approve of Trump--Even Now
And They, Like Trump, Take 'No Responsibility' Who did the riots? Antifa! Who is responsible? Democrats!
The upshot here is that if you take the polling as even remotely accurate the Republican party--now the Trumpian party--is the party that believes (a) they should be in power no matter what the election results show, (b) that their being in power would be a virtually unalloyed good thing (despite approaching 400k Americans dead, our economy and foreign policy in the toilet, and so on), and that if bad things happened? Despite all evidence to the contrary?
It's someone else's fault.
Who Says That?
The problem with Bill Maher's formulation (as well as the excuse that not everyone came to raid the capitol--except that was heavily advertised and not a surprise to anyone but the security forces) is that the party--that 74 million voters--despite having seen POTUS call for a raid on the Capitol, it happen, and us barely get lucky that it wasn't a catastrophic tragedy? They still support this and they would support doing it again.
How can The Omnivore say that? Well, the above logic shows that they don't think it was their fault, they do think they should "rightfully" have won the election and be in charge, and they believe that Trump's inciting speech was part of his very good job.
In other words, if you voted for Trump . . . you got what you paid for last Wednesday. Congratulations.
To be fair, Bill Maher’s comment re: assholes appeared to be more poorly-thought-out than a representation of a core belief. At least, that’s the sense I got from his attempt to use it as a rationale for patronizing Chick-fil-A despite the objective awfulness of much of what its executives espouse (and fund!).
ReplyDeleteSo I guess that Maher’s message is that indirectly supporting vile and destructive behavior is ethically permissible as long as the chicken is tasty, or something like that. Or that benefiting assholes is not that big of a deal, provided that said benefit aligns with your own desires.
It was a lot easier to overlook Maher’s thinly-veiled hypocrisy and latent craziness (ask him about antibiotics! Go on, I dare you!) back when he was actually funny. But he got older and/or HBO is no longer paying enough to attract top-tier comedy writers apart from John Oliver’s staff, and now it’s positively agonizing to watch him get outmaneuvered week after week by the likes of Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, ffs.
Eat the damn chicken if you want to, Bill. Just quit pretending you don’t know or care where the money is going.
Phooey!
That’s right, I said “phooey”.
-- Ω
From Grand Old Party to Trump-Owned Property.
ReplyDelete