WatDabney

Lots of monochrome in this thread.

If you took pretty much all of the finger-pointing positions to which individuals are stubbornly clinging to the exclusion of any and all other positions and strung them together with "and"s, you’d have the closest approximation yet to the reality.

Civilizations are born, then they live, then they die.

The US is critically ill, and at this point, it looks terminal. It might not be, but the odds are that it is.

And that, as they say, is that.

I presume as an alternative to paying him…

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard.” - H.L. Mencken

While there are strategic advantages to that - if he wins, it’ll feel more like a mandate that will justify whatever horrifying shit his administration intends to do and if he loses, it’s an instant objection - I tend to think that the real foundation of this whole attitude is just Trump’s delusional narcissism.

Trump’s reality isn’t rooted in actual objective reality. It’s based on himself and himself alone - if he believes it, then, to him, it is and can only be true, and he believes whatever serves to assuage the squalling demands of his titanic ego and his childish greed and need for attention.

I have no doubt that in the fantasy universe in which he actually lives, he really can’t possibly lose. It’s just in the real universe - the one the rest of us live in but he does not - that he can (and hopefully will) lose.

Rather obviously, there’s one and only one real reason why they would try to bar federal monitors - because they don’t want any witnesses to whatever they’re planning.

Unfortunately, there’s likely some truth to that. In spite of the SC fairly consistently destroying the rule of law to rule on Trump’s behalf, if even one time they rule against him, even on just one ruling that’s so vividly obvious that the otherwise wholly corrupt and compromised SC can’t possibly cobble together an excuse to rule in Trump’s favor, that really is likely to touch off more violence quicker than just about anything else.

There is zero chance that there is not going to be fairly significant violence from Trump’s supporters between November and January.

It will happen, absolutely no matter what.

Either he’s going to lose, in which case they’re going to engage in retaliatory and/or insurrectionary violence, or he’s going to win (or be handed the win by the Supreme Court Rubber-stamping Service), in which case they’re going to engage in celebratory, very enthusiastic and likely officially sanctioned violence.

That’s it. At this point, there is no third option. Trump, in his pathological narcissism and complete lack of empathy or sound reason, has fostered an atmosphere of anger and hatred, and it’s not a question of if it will result in violence and murder, but simply of when and of what specifically will touch it off.

rogue state

noun

1. A state or nation acting outside of the accepted international norms and policies.

Israel is a rogue state.