MAGA Lies About Pelosi Attack Are Cynical Assertions of Power

Pensito Editors

Art by imgflip

Republicans’ and MAGA right-wingers’ lies about and mockery of the attack on Paul Pelosi in the face of contradictory facts are an assertion of power and the first step toward autocracy. So argues Greg Sargent in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post.

It’s a compelling argument:

In 2020, Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud provided a fake pretext to overturn his presidential election loss. Now that has metastasized: Many Republicans in the MAGA vein are employing “big lies” on numerous fronts, but their purpose has taken a dark new turn: It’s as if all the lying is becoming an assertion of power in its own right, a kind of end in itself.

The embrace of political lying as a declaration of power — of the power to say what reality is — has long been studied by academics. Some see it as a harbinger of autocratic political tendencies.

Read the rest in this gift article here.

Trump Didn’t Make the Violence Stop on Jan. 6 and He Won’t Now

Trish

AP StoryIt’s another one of those days. Like Jan. 6, only this time it’s the day that one of Trump’s goon fans took a hammer to Paul Pelosi, husband of the Speaker of the House.

Like Jan. 6, we didn’t see this coming. Also like Jan. 6, those who are waiting for the former president to call for an end to the violence will count the time in years until he does.

Much was made of how Trump never condemned the violence and destruction on Jan. 6, 2021, never asked his supporters to stop it. The members of the Jan. 6 committee have made this point repeatedly, as witnesses described how they begged him to do so.

In Mark Leibovitch’s unparalleled new book, Thank You for Your Servitude, he lists person after person who pleaded with Trump to intervene, from Ivanka Trump to Sean Hannity to Chris Christie to every leader in Congress including Kevin McCarthy. But Trump let it roll right along. He sat and watched it live on TV and said and did nothing to bring the killing and marauding to an end.

And here’s the thing. He still hasn’t. […]

Four Points to Give Democrats Hope

Buck Banks

Political Wire‘s Taegan Goddard notes that though polling and historical midterm trends show Democrats potentially losing their majority in the House and with only a 50:50 chance of maintaining their slim margin in the Senate, there still are some reasons not to succumb to pessimism.

Four things Democrats can point to:

  • The economy isn’t as bad as some polling suggests. It’s true that inflation is at a 40-year high, but the economy is growing and there are still more job openings than people looking for work.
  • Abortion rights will be a motivating factor for many voters — particularly young women. It’s not often that a fundamental right is taken away in this country and we saw Democratic candidates outperform in a series of special elections over the summer. We also saw voters in Kansas come out in extraordinary numbers to make sure abortion stayed legal in their state.
  • The polls could be wrong — maybe even very wrong. In two of the last three election cycles polling proved wildly misleading. Though pollsters insist they have improved their “likely voter” screens, we have seen fewer polls this year from fewer pollsters. That could make even the polling averages unreliable.
  • The number of Americans who vote early continues to rise. It’s extremely hard to gain insights from early voting trends, but overall it is generally viewed as an advantage for Democrats.

    • Rachel Maddow and Jon Favreau Discuss Her New Podcast Series about a 1930s Right-Wing Attempt to Overthrow the US Government

    Jon Ponder

    From Jon Favreau’s series, “Offline,” Rachel Maddow talks about her new podcast series “Ultra” and describes how she learned about the serious, nationwide campaign by pro-Nazi Christian Nationalists to overthrow the U.S. government in the run-up to World War II.

    Listen to “Ultra”: https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-presents-ultra

    Ask Dr. Democrat

    Dr. Democrat

    Dear Dr. Democrat,

    The polls are unreliable. The pundits are unfathomable. What’s going to happen in the midterm elections?

    Worried in Wimauma

    Dear Worried:

    You should be.

    Republicans will take both houses in the midterms, THEN the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act will kick in, prescription drug prices will fall, Biden’s De-frickin-cember releases from the strategic petroleum reserve will bring down gas prices, and things will start to get better. Republicans will take and get all the credit, and we will be there going, “No, it was us! Really it was! Vote for us again!”

    The two botched impeachments, the Mueller report and the way-too-late Jan. 6 Commission will fade like the afternoon sun does without daylight saving time, and new impeachments and investigations, all centered on Democrats, will dominate the news cycles right up to election day 2024…when Ron DeSantis becomes our next president.

    Sorry, no balm of Gilead here.

    Be careful,

    Dr. Democrat

    Trump’s Vaunted Fundraising Machine Is Faltering

    Buck Banks

    Illustration by the Daily Beast

    If it were a business and not politics (I know, it’s a difference without a distinction), Donald Trump would be fired for mismanagement of his oft-touted fundraising prowess. Daily Beat’s Pay Dirt newsletter has a must-read piece on how Trump’s Save America Joint Fundraising Committee is spending a dollar to generate 10 cents of income, according to the latest Election Financing Commission report.

    In fact, the spending was so steep that it ate up around 90 percent of what he raised. So while the committee took in an impressive $24 million, it spent about $22 million to get there. That means the famous dealmaker spent a dollar to make a little more than a dime.

    Compare that trade-off to the previous quarter, where the same committee spent just $9.7 million but pulled in $17 million. That’s a $7 million return. Now, it’s $2 million.

    Read the rest here.

    MAGA Surrender Caucus Signals It Will Support Putin and Defund Ukraine When It Takes Power

    Pensito Editors
    Kevin McCarthy
    Kevin McCarthy

    Yahoo News: “House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Republicans will not hand a ‘blank check’ to Ukraine if his party wins next month’s elections, apparently confirming that bipartisan congressional support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia is wavering.

    “McCarthy, speaking to Punchbowl News, acknowledged the significance of the conflict, but said Americans are dealing with economic problems at home and can’t afford to prioritize helping Ukraine.

    “’I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine,’ McCarthy said. ‘They just won’t do it.’

    […]

    Herschel Walker Is ‘the Perfect Candidate for a Fallen Party’

    Pensito Editors

    Ex-Republican Peter Wehner in The Atlantic: “Donald Trump could not have changed the world without a party with which to do it. The GOP has turned on virtually every noble principle it once claimed to stand for. It has become a freak show, embodied in people like Trump and Walker, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, Ron Johnson and Josh Hawley, Blake Masters and Doug Mastriano, Adam Laxalt and J. D. Vance, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and Mike Lindell, Tucker Carlson and Sebastian Gorka, Eric Metaxas and Paula White. They shape its sensibilities, providing the script for everyone else to follow.

    “To make matters worse, those who surely know better—people like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, and especially Kevin McCarthy—turned out to be hollow men, ‘shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion.’

    “For them and for so many people in their party and the MAGA movement, with exceptions so rare that you can almost count them on a single hand, politics have been stripped of any honor. Politics, for them, is about power in the pursuit of yet more power. Politics is purely performative, nasty and brutish, a way to stoke anger and grievances, a means to exact vengeance. That the most impressive person in the Republican Party, Liz Cheney, is the most despised, says everything.

    “Whatever you thought about the GOP pre-Trump—and it may be that the ugliness was much closer to the surface than I wanted to acknowledge at the time—the Republican Party is today much more conspiracy minded, anti-democratic, and anti-truth. This worries me, because I love my country. And it disheartens me, because I once admired my party. Today, however, because of its diseased state, the most urgent political task is to defeat it in the hopes of eventually rebuilding it.”

    ‘Southpark’ Writer Takes Novel Approach to Political Action

    Buck Banks

    Fake Kari Lake website designed by Toby Morton.

    From the happy mutants at Boing Boing comes this piece about Toby Morton, a former writer for “SouthPark” and “MadTV,” who buys domain names that relate to MAGA and Q figures and uses the resulting websites to undermine them.

    Does Morton’s efforts influence campaigns or policy? Hard to say, but Arizona gubernatorial candidate and monster Kari Lake offered him $150 for the domain he used to build her site. Morton has also given the same business to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.

    Toby Morton, we salute you!

    NYC Sending Migrants TO Florida for Hurricane Cleanup

    Buck Banks

    US President Donald Trump and Florida US Sen. Rick Scott (R) listen to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (L) during a tour of the Edgar Hoover Dike on Lake Okeechobee in Florida, March 29, 2019. (Photo by Nicholas Kamm/AFP)

    Talk about your irony, the New York Post reports that New York City is loading migrants — many of them Venezuelans — into vans and shipping them to Florida to help with hurricane recovery efforts:

    Scores of Venezuelan migrants in New York City are hopping on vans to head down to Florida for Hurricane Ian clean-up, they told The Post.

    The migrants had scant information about whom they would be working for, but they still piled into vans in Queens that they said were headed to the Sunshine State over the weekend.

    “They want us for hurricane cleanup, we’d get paid $15 an hour, overtime and $15 for food daily, I think,” said Javier Moreno, 37, noting that a woman named Camila “from an organization” approached him with a flier.

    “Perla” has been replaced by “Camila,” but printed fliers and vague promises are still involved. We wonder if this presages a sea change in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ feelings about migrants, similar to how he is now FOR federal emergency money for Hurricane Ian, whereas he (and the odious Marco Rubio and creepy Rick Scott) was AGAINST it a decade ago for victims of Hurricane Sandy in New York.