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A common statement I hear repeated endlessly on political discussions is how the majority of GOP electeds, not the base mind you, are hoping for a Big Mac, or a Heart Attack, or a stroke to remove Trump from the political field by removing him from life. They suffer twin delusions with this fantasy.

The first is that somehow Trump vanishing from the scene would magically return the Republican Party to its state before that grotesque vainglorious buffoon descended that elevator. This ignores the fact that decades of stoking fear and hate created the condition that allowed Trump to seize the party from its establishment. It also ignores the basic truth of the universe, that time flows in one direction and the past is forever lost to us. The GOP today without Trump will carry forward Trump’s stamp. He has remade the party and while it can be remade again it will never be something from the past.

The second delusion is the idea that Trump’s sudden demise would be accepted as factual by his most fanatical supporters.

In July of 1973 actor, athlete, and producer Bruce Lee died. For many this was simply unbearable and rather than accept the simple fact that everyone dies and sometimes death is visited upon the healthy and fir conspiracy theories sprang up and continue to this day.

In July of 1999 JFK jr., son of the slain president, died when the airplane he was piloting suffered ‘controlled flight into terrain.’ The terrain being the Atlantic Ocean. One of the Q-Anon conspiracies is that he did not die, it was a hoax, and that he would return. The fact that so many very right people are holding out hope for a Democratic persona to returned gives evidence to the unhinged nature of conspiracy theories.

Trump’s death would instantly become a new and probably vast conspiracy theory. It may seem far-fetched and beyond reason to many of us but remember this is the population of people who accept that there is a secret cabal of Democrats feasting on infants in the basement of pizza parlors.

Between the lasting effect of Trump’s years at the head of the GOP and the fanatical followers who would not accept his death the party would find itself tethered to Trump ghost far tighter than they ever had been to Reagan’s.

Terrible Days Lay Ahead

I have been voting since the 1980 elections and throughout that time there have been those that conflate ‘conservative’ with ‘fascist.’ To be fair it was with equal abandonment that ‘liberal’ was conflated with ‘communist.’ Both conflations were the product of the ‘us’ vs ‘them’ mentality that required political opponents be treated as enemies rather than people with different views, opinion, and premises. A natural consequence is that the weight of those terms evaporated. If everything conservatives, right or wrong, is fascist by sheer frequency of occurrence fascism becomes more commonplace and therefore less terrible.

Now, the fascists that always hid inside conservatism have taken the movement and its devices. This was not a bolt from the blue because of a single presidential candidate or election. This is the result of decades of tolerating hatred, bigotry, and cruelty because it yielded electoral benefits. Eradicating fascism from American political life will be long, arduous, path requiring an unending commitment to its defeat at every level.

Because this is a long war, dark days are coming.  The fascist war on people, currently the focus is on the Transgendered community, but should they win, they will move against their next target, is not a war about any sort of sane policy or principled stand. The fascists, as fascists have always done, are fixated on myth, lies, and a history that never existed. They have created a prior existence and view of the world that is no more real that Camelot’s Court or Wakandan Science.

From 1980 through 2003 I was a registered Republican, though I scarcely agreed with everything the party argued for. (IF you do agree 100% with a political party I seriously doubt that you are critically considering all aspects and are more of an ‘us’ vs ‘them’ mentality.) To me it was clear that the growing authoritarian movement within the GOP was ascendant when they embraced torture of prisoners. A political philosophy capable of torture is capable of any terrible atrocity. The intervening two decades has only strengthened my conviction on this matter.

The fascists are going to win some of the battle ahead. There will be setbacks for liberty and freedom. At times all will seem lost, but we must never stop fighting. Only by thoroughly crushing this poisonous ideology and idolatry can we move forward to a future where everyone can live their true authentic lives.

Dine and Dash for those who are not aware is the underhanded trick of ordering and eating the food at a dine in restaurant and then leaving without paying the check.

It is also an excellent metaphor concerning the Republican Party and the Debit Limit.

Raising the debt limit is borrowing money, because the United States does not have it on hand, to pay for spending already done.

The spending is the meal at the nice restaurant, good food, a bread plate with bread, and even a dessert that doesn’t involved flambéing your diners. However, when the check arrives it is the GOP, who ordered food and happily ate it, insisting you do all their chores at home, or they will not pay the bill.

Except of course that not raising the debt limit, defaulting on our creditors, is not a minor irritating powerplay by an ass but rather a move that will ignite a global economic crisis.

The US Dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Anyone anywhere will take US Dollars for payment but that won’t be true if we crash the US and the world’s economy. People will turn elsewhere. The Pound’s time in the sum has passed, the Ruble won’t ascend to that perch, but the Yuan could.

The GOP’s idiocy could not only unleash hell on the US and its citizen’s it could launch the Communist Chinese Century. All because some Baby Boomer Bigots can’t seem to grasp the domination of the WASPs is ending.

I believe that we are witnessing the death of the currently constituted ‘conservative’ Republican Party, but that death may take a decade to come into effect and until then we are in grave danger.

There is an old saying that if you are not a liberal when you are twenty you have no heart and not a conversative with you are fifty you have no brain. Now, the saying itself is hogwash, implying that liberalism is for the unintelligent and unwise instead of recognizing that both political philosophies have something to offer and have solutions for pressing problems. That said, there is some truth to it. As people age, they begin to drift away from the politics that utilize higher taxes, care less for educational matters, and have a more ‘good old days’ orientation to social change. This is not the same has today’s GOP with its passion for strongmen, its adoration of violence, its callous disregard for the slaughtered, and its hateful attitudes those not of its ethnic/sexual/social identity. None of this is conservative any more than the Holodomor was liberal.

Political science has identified that the generations aging into their full political are drifting far less to the ‘right’ than their parents and grandparents. The American right is poisoning future voters and leaders turning them away in significant numbers. People who were repeatedly traumatized as children, not only by school shootings on the news, but in practice drills against their own potential massacre, have little patience for the ‘thoughts and prayers’ crowd of the baby boomers. People for whom non-traditional sexual lives, roles, and loves are simply a fact of their friend group have no tolerance for the bigoted hated wielded as a political club. People who entered their careers as the world’s economy burned have no use for the ‘capitalists’ that worshiped ‘greed is good’ and stole their children’s and grandchildren’s wealth. As the grim reaper removes the older generation from its perch of political power conservatism and the GOP will change.

That change is however slow and the wounded dying animal that is the neo-fascist movement of the current GOP will not die peacefully. It will lash out, it will thrash, and we must fight it at every level. There are better political times on the horizon, but we cannot dream of those better days, we must fight and survive to see them. It is said that the long arc of human history bends to justice, that is not correct. Not by itself, we must bend it to justice by the force of our actions, our morals, and our will.

In the last week Ukrainian forces liberated the city of Kherson from the murderous Russian forces while in the United States the Democratic Party not only retained control of Senate but quite possibly expanded their number, while limiting fascistic GOPers to very limited gains within the House of Representatives.

Yes, I am drawing a direct and clear parallel between the Russian butchery in Ukraine and the attempts to end American Democracy. If this upsets someone, I don’t care. American Democracy is far from perfect but by the blood, toil, and death of patriots it has expanded until the current incarnation of the Republican party devoted itself to self-serving sanctimonious power over liberty. American Democracy is something I will defend unlike those lying false pretenders.

The liberation of Kherson is not the end of the Ukrainian war, it is like Operation Torch in the European theater but one step closer to that victory, not the victory itself. And the same with the election. The Senate was saved and the House crippled but the war wages on, Berlin lies ahead for our democratic army not behind us.

The Japanese Emperor surrendered his nation and saved his people from a devastating invasion and from incalculable death while the mad men of Nazi Germany clung to their evil dreams and destroyed their nation. So, it will be with the Modern Republican party. The evil men now with their rigor mortis clenched fingers on the tiller will not surrender their controls, they will not save their people but rather insist that sacrifice everything to save the leaders’ precious bank accounts. This is an electoral war of destruction and until the GOP is burned to the ground and rebuilt it will go on.

A disaster in 2025 is possibly being laide next week here in 2022. Next week throughout the country vital positions in government are being contested by conspiracy-minded election deniers. Should they win offices in enough future battle groups states then they will be able to subvert our constitutional republic in the presidential elections of 2024.

It will not take many victories to place into vital offices, such as various Secretaries of State to make it possible for these antidemocratic Republicans to either submit a slate of electors of their own choosing or simply submit none at all. Either way with the battleground states at the tipping point thy would be able to install a wholly illegitimate Republican president, one that is very likely to be again Trump.

We would begin 2025 with a president who not only lost the popular votes but only by corrupt means installed into office. The souther enslaving states declared their secession from the Union because Lincoln won the presidency without a single Southern electoral vote but the election itself was seen as legitimate. The election and installing of an illegitimate president will be a magnitude worse.

When this corrupt presidency issues executive orders and action what will be the reaction of the deep blue Democratic states? Will California, Oregon, Washington, New York, and others ‘bend the knee’ to the white house?

I doubt it.

Will they honor the Supreme Court when its social conservative majority rules against them?

I doubt it.

There you have the shattering of our Constitutional Republic.

There you have the end of the Union.

Next Tuesday the future is in your hands, choose wisely.

In 2004 GOP backed initiatives in 11 states passed banning ‘gay marriage.’ During the early 2000s the Republicans repeatedly and consistently placed on local and state ballots initiatives to ‘ban gay marriage’ as a method to energize their base and play upon long held but weakening prejudices. There were enough ‘moderate’ voters holding to those bigotries that winning some of them over could swing elections.

When the current Republican led tirade against Trans people surfaced first surfaced, I thought it was a similar ploy. The ‘Gay issues’ had been settled at the courts and what followed surprisingly quickly was a sea change in public opinion. The ‘ban gay marriage’ movement had been corralled to the most bigoted and no longer held the potential of electoral victory. Trans people, still only a concept to many people and outside of common perception, might hold the key to again energizing the GOP’s base voters while winning over a few of the undecided middle. I do think that the ‘bathroom bills’ and such was a repeat play of the ‘gay marriage’ tactics of the early 2000s, but it has moved far beyond that now.

Following the trail blazed by the former president the GOP now seeks cruelty for its own sake and not merely as an after effect. They now longer couch their arguments and plans in bland inoffensive sounding language but instead drive directly to harmful, cruel, and targeted attacks on Trans people and their families vis the power of the state. From Texas to Florida and beyond the state wielding the terrible club of criminal action batters at a group already heavily marginalized, bullied, beaten, and murdered.

When you combine this with the active plot to destroy representative democracy it is clear that there are no good Republicans left.

In just over three weeks here in the United States we will hold our ‘mid-term’ election voting for the entire House of representatives and a third of the Senate, along with numerous statewide and local elections.

Traditionally this election coming in the middle of a president’s first term is one where the party not currently holding the Presidential powers gains significantly in politician power. Apathy by the party in power and in supporters, energizing anger at being out of power by the opposition, dissatisfaction with the unrealized and usually impossible promises of the current administration all combine to push the traditional direction of these mid-term elections.

If forced to place a bet today I would bet that, in general, this trend will hold, and the GOP will gain control of the House. But that bet would be at considerably lowers odds that in past mid-term elections.

Every election is unique but this one sees factors never before in play.

Usually, a president defeated at the box office quietly fades for a number of years from public life, leaving the electoral fight to a new wave of candidates. Not this time. The Former Guy has held nearly continuous rallies and has forced candidate after candidate to effectively swear their undying fealty to him and his lies that the last election was ‘stolen.’ Instead of allowing the public to focus on the new administration and its inevitable failings the Former Guy is reminding everyone what was so unpleasant about the last election. The one he lost.

After the last election a coordinated and violent attempt to overturn its results marred our perfect record of a peaceful transferer of power. Even when Lincoln won the 1860 election without a single elector from the Enslaving States, they attempted to separate themselves from the Union and not overthrow the election. The horrific images of the assault on the Capitol have not faded in part because the Former Guy insists on remaining in the public eye, continually reminding the public of his attempted coup.

In the intervening years since the last election the highest court of the land has also taken utterly unprecedented action, stripping, for the first time, recognized individual rights from the American people. This has possibly energized a base that would normally be complacent or even resentful of an administration that has failed to deliver everything the base desires.

Are these factors enough, are there are black swans, to change the course and upset the historical expectation?

I don’t know. I hope so, but I simply cannot know.