Blogger Kevin Drum passes along some dispiriting yet unsurprising news from The Washington Post: Voters in a poor Pennsylvania town cast their ballots for Oney I. Kinfixit “even though they depend on welfare benefits that Republicans have long wanted to cut back.”
Here’s 55-year-old Lori Mosura, one of the townspeople quoted in the piece: “He is more attuned to the needs of everyone instead of just the rich. I think he knows it’s the poor people that got him elected, so I think Trump is going to do more to help us.”
Cue Messrs. Simon & Garfunkel:
I am just a poor boy
Though my story’s seldom told
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles
Such are promises
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest
Mad Blog Media 
Ain’t that the truth?
Was it really poor people that got him elected? I am not buying his shallow analysis of a few interviews.
Kevin’s pretty sharp. What I took from this post was his sadness that some of the very people who stand to suffer most under TFG’s regime are those who — through ignorance or desperation — imbue him with qualities he does not possess and believe him to be their savior, the Hand of God at work on their behalf.
He will not be the instrument of their deliverance from evil. He is the evil.
I agree that he is a sharp cookie, and that his sadness shows in his post. Here is the Washington Post article with no paywall. If you don’t read the article first, his post comes off as blaming poor people for the republican’s wins in the election. I live in a place where most folks are very well off. The repubs won here as well. And, I witnessed fanatical support for dumpster in our neighborhood from people who have no excuse for ignorance. So, when we will accept that ignorance and stupidity doesn’t depend on income level? The endless analysis of the election results gets tiresome for me.
“There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong”
If I’m reading between Kevin’s lines correctly, the subtext is that while the well-off dummies should be able to weather the storm they helped create, the dummies who are just scraping by right now are gonna be in the shit soufflé for reals.
That they (a) didn’t see that the Donks tried — and in some cases, succeeded — to ease their burdens a bit is the fault of the party for failing to trumpet its successes. It’s also on the “press” for choosing to focus on other eye-ball-grabbing tidbits.
Meanwhile, we need to keep a couple things in mind.
One, this is not Weimar Germany. Those folks were in a whole different pickle politically and economically and had very little experience with constitutional democracy.
Two, the election was not a “mandate” in any way, shape, or form. Yeah, the Elefinks hit the trifecta, but only barely. If the Donks can take a page from the ’Finks’ playbook, fight a delaying action, and come up with good programs and better candidates for the next go-round, maybe — just maybe — we might not be having this particular discussion in 2028.
Three, we’d best start paying attention downballot. We wind up with a constitutional convention anytime soon and we will be massively, thoroughly, and permanently fucked.
Yep, no mandate at all. And, I forgot the link to the whole article on MSN, and now I can’t find it. Down ballot results are more important. The local politicians have more influence on your daily life. Most people don’t give a shit based on primary and off year voter turnout. So, we watch the country being sold to the highest bidder. $30 billion spent on political advertising for the presidential election alone, almost all on cable news and social media. And it worked. So, where are we? We are watching the world slowly roasting and our democracy being slowly destroyed. Talking to Liz and Andy, many younger folks, especially college age, see you no future for themselves. They have given up on ever retiring, having adequate health care, or seeing climate change be addressed. I could continue to piss into the wind, but I ain’t. I am literally too old for this shit.
I’m not an optimist by nature. Still, I was certain that we’d all roast on a nuclear pyre of our own construction before I was old enough to vote. And here I am all those years later, old enough for Social Security. You’da told me that’d happen, I’da told you you was nuts.
It was none of my doing, of course. I tripped over my own feet every other step along The Way and somehow managed, finally, to land on that fabled catbird seat. Can one of today’s kids spend a couple-three decades fucking up and get away with it? I dunno, but as I said, I’m not an optimist.
One thing I’m pretty sure about is this: It will be the Youngs that save themselves, if salvation is possible. We Olds have made a right bollocks of things and should not be trusted.
Herself and I throw money at various social ills, but it’s like trying to bail out the Titanic with a slotted spoon as the captain and his officers keep shooting holes in the boat, selling its fixtures to pirates, and telling the passengers not to worry because ice cures bird flu.
Yupurr! I wish them every success.
Now off to a jam session with ya Patricio! I hear and obey oh mighty Perro Loco.
Rock awn, bwah!
Read about the late twenties/early thirties elections in the Weimar Republic. Maybe history does repeat itself.
I was contemplating thinking of that when I scrolled down to your comment Khal and see that you already mentioned it.
Imagine Weimar with a 24/7 propaganda machine that would’ve given Josef Goebbels a Reich-nice woody. Faux Noose is the biggest little blue pill ever.
Kevin has for some time blamed the relentless Faux disinformation campaign for many of our current ills. It is not and never has been a “news” organization. It is engaged in the manufacture and distribution of chaos for profit.
In Bibleburg you couldn’t walk into a governmental office to renew a driver’s license or await jury duty without that fire hose of bullshit going full blast in your face from a Ninth Circle of Video Hell bolted to the walls because of course people need the TV for their Two Minute Hate while they wait for the Deep State to do them an injury. Vigilance!
Shit, you want a two minute hate from the left? Read the comments in the Fanta Se People’s Daily!
Read your earlier comment and sure, we are not “Weimar” but I am not sure we need to literally be Weimar in order to get suckered in by a man on a horse. Or a man who is a horses’s ass. Recall the NSDAP never got even close to a majority; at best, it got about a third or so of the vote. It’s just that the opposition parties couldn’t find their asses with both hands and had no credibility for solving problems. By the time they realized they were doomed, it was too late. Enough Germans really did think “I alone can fix it” was more credible than the Social Democrats. Where the NSDAP had storm troopers, the TrOP has social media and fake news. Used to be you had to mimeograph the bullshit off and hand it out no street corners.
I had not thought about that S&G song too carefully for some time. Someone, might have been Tom Nichols, says that every generation has to be taught the basics all over again. We are not doing that.
Downballot is important. Your old buddy Milan Simonich has been excoriating the State Legislature lately for frittering away its time on The Official State Smell and specialty license plates while New Mexico circles the bowl. It is only because the GOP here is utterly bankrupt of ideas that it still can’t muster more than about a third or so of the seats. But as long as people think having an official state smell and specialty plates are more important than reforming the regents, fixing CYFD, fixing pretrial detention, fixing homelessness, growing an economy not centered around the Pentagon and nukes, addressing that we fund college scholarships with poor people’s gambling money, and are promoting dope as a cash crop, we are truly fucked here.
I’ve been reading Matthew Yglesias’ columns lately (to the point of attaching a credit card billing to Slow Boring), such as his “A Common Sense Democrat manifesto”. Not sure he is right about all he expounds, but I think he is on the right track. Dems gotta figure out a message that sells to the half aware guy on the factory floor in the non-union shop who doesn’t like paying off someone’s college loans for that gender studies degree. Sure, most Ds are not out in left field. Unfortunately, the ones who are out by the left field foul pole get a lot of bandwidth on social media used against those of us who are not crazy. Messages gotta be simple and to the point. But hopefully, still honest.
Down ballot measures AND the Born again repubs are the threats, The old adage “Saints preserve us from Saints” rings true. These idjits will try to save us from ourselves. Most cannot understand the basic tenets of democracy but will follow blindly where a preacher or Con man or rapist or liar spouting a feel-good message will lead them into a dark alley to be abused. s. However, the Dems need to realize the progressive apple bite they endorsed bit them in the butt. Transgender individuals, and illegal immigration, are not huge issues to most folks. Rising prices, high interest rates and hit the lower social strata harder than a 16-pound sledge. Dems need to put a message out that emphasizes jobs, economic stability, and quality education just doing the proper actions are important. Please keep it simple Stupid (KISS rule).
Same deal with the deportation threat. Local church here in western Nebraska is just now realizing a quarter of their congregation might be gone this time next year. There a 50 year old with grandkids, dude moved her when he was 3, his parents worked for a dozen different farmers, he’s been married for 30 years, and 90% of the congregation voted for the guy who wants to us the 101st Airborne to send him to a place he knows nothing about.
Stuff like that always reminds me of a passage from John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row.” A group of “high-minded ladies in the town demanded that dens of vice must close,” etc.
The primary den of vice usually shut down for a week when business was slow, to handle repairs and give the working girls a break. But as Steinbeck tells it, one year the ladies “went on a real crusade.”
“They wanted somebody’s scalp. It had been a dull summer and they were restless. It got so bad that they had to be told who actually owned the property where vice was practiced, what the rents were, and what little hardships might be the result of their closing. That was how close they were to being a serious menace.”
I’m not sure our modern-day “high-minded ladies” are capable of learning from such a revelation. The menace remains.
“I didnt think the jaguars would eat MY face …”
I’d like a Big Mac, and the lettuce and tomato had better be certified as harvested by US citizens with union cards and documented social security numbers.
And don’t get me started about how the domestic beef was grazed on federal lands by ranchers who pay fees that are a single digit percentage of what they’d pay to lease from a private land owner.