Thoughts On ‘The Only Good Republican Is a Dead Republican’
“We’re coming to a place where I’ve come to the conclusion that the only good Republican is a dead Republican.”
Switch out the word “Republican” with the word “Democrat” and you have a quote from the lead-in of a video shared by the President with his 80+ million fans on Twitter.
Are you as upset with the President amplifying that message as you are with me writing an angry headline in response to it?
Did you ever stop to think maybe all the faux right wing outrage appearing online (even as the President decries “censorship”) has a purpose? Read on...
Context matters, and Couy Griffin, owner of the “Cowboys for Trump” video where the quote originated does go on...
...I don’t say that in a physical sense --and I can already see the videos getting added where it said “I wanna go murder a Democrat-- I say that in a political sense because the Democrat agenda and policy is anti-American…
Yeah, right. Griffin covered his ass legally, but any fool can tell by the tone of his remarks (here and elsewhere) he isn’t thinking about his candidate getting the most votes come November.
Now Cowboys for Trump is merely the Twitter account of a man who’s spent most of recent weeks traveling around staging events aimed at giving a voice to the notion that the nation’s Governors didn’t have the authority to shut down anything in the face of a global pandemic.
Here’s another choice comment on Twitter from the man:
This might be a lead up to a civil war & maybe one of the uniforms are going to have mask on & the other ones won't.
But we'll tell you this, we are going to live free or fight until the end.
He is a useful idiot for the so-called “reopen movement,” an astroturfed notion whose real purposes include distracting attention away from the administration’s failures with COVID-19 and getting far-right shock troops ready to disrupt the 2020 elections.
Griffin heard the call and responded, in the historically incorrect assumption of what Paul Revere did during the U.S. revolutionary era.
Astroturfed you say?
Back in mid April, numerous website registrations were filed just hours after President Trump sent a series of all-caps tweets urging citizens to “liberate” themselves from new gun control measures and state leaders who’ve enacted strict social distancing restrictions in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
More than 50 reopen domains were registered within an hour of each other on April 17, according to Krebsonsecurity.com — between 3:25 p.m. ET and 4:43 ET.
Some of the concept reopen domains — including reopenoureconomy.com (registered Apr. 15) and reopensociety.com (Apr. 16) — trace back to FreedomWorks, a conservative group that the Associated Press says has been holding weekly virtual town halls with members of Congress, “igniting an activist base of thousands of supporters across the nation to back up the effort.”
Reopenoc.com — which advocates for lifting social restrictions in Orange County, Calif. — links to a Facebook page for Orange County Republicans, and has been chronicling the street protests there. The messaging on Reopensc.com — urging visitors to digitally sign a reopen petition to the state governor — is identical to the message on the Facebook page of the Horry County, SC Conservative Republicans.
Reopenmississippi.com was registered on April 16 to In Pursuit of LLC, an Arlington, Va.-based conservative group with a number of former employees who currently work at the White House or in cabinet agencies. A 2016 story from USA Today says In Pursuit Of LLC is a for-profit communications agency launched by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch.
All this hubbub is about shaping the narrative to energize the Trump base.
Suddenly, it’s patriotic for the usual gang of deplorables to wave their middle finger at every level of government and academia except the White House.
Another crucial part of this effort is the efforts of the administration and its allies to promote conspiracies about vote-by-mail fraud.
Here’s Edward Luce at the Financial Times:
But Mr Trump’s most pressing theme — on social media and off — is that his opponents are trying to steal the November election. This deserves some scrutiny. I cannot find an example in any country, including the US, where an elected head of government has claimed their own system is rigged against them.
To be sure, Mr Trump made that allegation as an outsider in 2016 because he was expecting to lose. After taking office, he set up an investigation of his claim that millions of illegal immigrants had voted against him. The inquiry was disbanded in 2018 having found nothing.
It is almost as hard to find instances of leaders trying to shrink voter turnout. That is Mr Trump’s goal for November, which betrays his pessimism about the election. There is no evidence that postal voting benefits Democrats — and some to show it has helped Republicans. Yet Mr Trump is doing everything he can to make life harder for absentee voters.
Traditionally “absentee voters” are more likely to be senior citizens, and there’s plenty of polling out there showing Trump’s support eroding with this group.
https://twitter.com/TheViewFromLL2/status/1266032459747143680?s=20
The beauty of this absentee voter drumbeat is that any grifter candidate out there willing to ride the President’s coattails can adapt it to their campaign.
That’s exactly what Darrell Issa did on KUSI this week, spinning the GOP attack on mailing ballots in California to fit this narrative, by suggesting there would be piles of stealable ballots laying around outside dorms at UCSD since students may not be returning to campus.
Right. He’d like us to believe UCSD, the second largest employer in San Diego County is so incompetent that they continue to provide mail service for former dorm residents. Maybe he should have made a phone call or two before making that claim.
In addition to the President’s ravings on social media, the Dark Money crowd is working to keep conservative states in line when it comes to voter suppression.
From the Guardian:
A powerful new conservative organization fighting to restrict voting in the 2020 presidential election is really just a rebranded group that is part of a dark money network already helping Donald Trump’s unprecedented effort to remake the US federal judiciary, the Guardian and OpenSecrets reveal.
The organization, which calls itself the Honest Elections Project, seemed to emerge out of nowhere a few months ago and started stoking fears about voter fraud. Backed by a dark money group funded by rightwing stalwarts like the Koch brothers and Betsy DeVos’ family, the Honest Elections Project is part of the network that pushed the US supreme court picks Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, and is quickly becoming a juggernaut in the escalating fight over voting rights.
Twitter kinda sorta disrupted this effort on a national level when it flagged President Trump’s tweets by offering up a link to verifiable information about mail in ballots.
https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1265977036176269312?s=20
The level of the reaction from the administration, namely announcing an executive order enabling government agencies to pursue investigations, is a telling sign of just how important this bit of narrative shaping is to the Trump reelection effort.
The only good news in all this is the historic incompetence of the Trump political machine, and we certainly can’t count on that (or Biden wisely refusing to get into a pissing match) to end this reign of ruin come November.
https://twitter.com/Pappiness/status/1265439121935228928?s=20
We shouldn’t be distracted from a few really important facts coming out of this phase of the pandemic:
102,000 Americans dead,
1,750,000 infected
41,000,0000 unemployed
Net worth of America's billionaires grew 15% during last two-month period.
Also....
https://twitter.com/markos/status/1266026488588951552?s=20
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