There is a tendency to lay at the feet of the Former President all the ills of the current GOP ignoring the fact that pre-existing rot is what allowed the charlatan to leap to the front of the GOP field in 2015 and take command of the party.

With the COVID-19 pandemic killing over 800,000 Americans a time-travelers from a mere decade ago would be shocked at how virulent the GOP bases is in resisting this literally lifesaving vaccine, but that time traveler would be ignoring the GOP’s history with an anti-vaccine stance.

Human Papillomavirus is responsible for a number of cancers found primarily in women. HPV is often transmitted via sexual intercourse and can lay dormant in a person for decades. In 2006 the first vaccines against HPV reached the market with the promise to save thousands of lives. For the vaccine to be most effective it is best to administer it before any HPV infection dictating the best course is to vaccinate before sexual activity.

Conservatives rebelled. Ignoring the danger to the lives of thousands of women their only concern, and an utterly unfounded one, was vaccinating against a virus that was principally transmitted sexually would encourage promiscuity. To date legislation merely recommending the vaccination has been defeated by GOP forces.

In 2015 as candidates jostled for the GOP presidential nomination, Senator Paul Rand, a doctor for god’s sake, tied vaccination to autism, a thoroughly discredited position. When confronted with video of his statement Paul insisted his words did not mean what they meant suggesting that people should believe him over their lying eyes.

We’re all familiar with the fable of the boy who cried wolf. How charged with guarding the flock at night he falsely twice cried out alarm of the wolf, turned out the adults and laughed at them then on the third alarm when the wolf has actually appeared no one came and, the way it was told to me, he was eaten by the wolf. A cautionary tale against telling lies for when you will need to be believed you won’t be.

But what happened the day after the wolf?

No doubt with the boy killed and the flock in danger the adult sprang into action, formed hunting parties, beat the wood and either drove off or killed the wolf.

It is the follow up that interests me as next year it appears more than likely that our 6 person majority court will strike down Roe v Wade and take back a right from Americans. For years, literally for decades, we have heard the alarms that this was the goal of the right. The cry went up in every campaign that this danger was approaching and following the campaigns the ruling wasn’t overturned. Now those who raised these warnings were not the boy who cried wolf for they were not lying, they saw clearly the looming threat, but the length of time required for the right to gain the power to achieve their goals dulled the alarm and reduced the warning to background radiation of our nuclear war politics. But now it appears the boy will be eaten and what will the response be?

I have heard voices on the right dismissing any political blowback as alarmism. They point to exits polls and how few people voted on the abortion issue alone, but this may very well be a poor extrapolation. There is a very real difference between a hypothetical event, be warned that a danger may exist, and a real event that crashes into the political landscape like an asteroid. Nearly three generations of people have lived with the accepted knowledge that this right existed, its sudden extinction may very well be a shocking, traumatic, and mobilizing event just months before a national election.

Maybe.

We have not been in the situation before. Until this case the progress has been expanding rights of the individual not eliminating them and the past gives us very little upon which to see the future.

There is no doubt, no confusion, no mistaking noise amongst the data, at this time in the United States Covid-19 is killing more ‘conservatives’ than ‘liberals.’ At both the state and county level vaccination rates track with election results, the more a region voted with the Democrats the more vaccinated its population and the more vaccinated the population the more protected that are. Where Trump won larger votes shares more people are dying of Covid. The cause and effects are stark, clear, and lethal. Rejection of vaccines and mitigation measures such as masks are the cause of the pandemic continued lethality among ‘conservative’ populations.

To those basking in schadenfreude at this misfortune, at the suffering and death of your political opponents I say, stop! For practical and moral reasons, we should not, at all, take any sort of pleasure or preen with and sense of superiority over these human tragedies.

Many, if not most, of the people suffering, dying, and losing loved ones are pawns, used and manipulated by cynical sinister and anti-democratic forces. They are victims of the greedy, venal, and evil people that control ‘conservative’ thought in America. Yes, they placed those people into power and now those in power are sacrificing them as they have so many others before. ‘Spiking the ball’ will not open eyes, it will shut them, but perhaps, maybe, a little compassion will save some of these misguided souls.

This terrible tragedy is killing more than just those who have been led into suicidal behavior. Hospitals in these regions, already underfunded, are stressed to. and some areas, beyond the breaking point and people in need of critical care are dying because there is no care left for anyone else. If you are taking joy in these prevented covid deaths, you are also taking joy in the collateral damage it spreads. There cannot be one without the other.

Abuse, individual and cultural, is a cycle and the abused becoming the abuser. Only when the abused can find their way out and not visit upon other what has been done to them can the cycle shatter. Many of these ‘conservatives’ have indulged in their own schadenfreude over others suffering from disease and addiction and while it is hard, very hard, now is the time for the formerly abused to break the cycle and not continue it.

None of this is to say that the political fight ends with compassion and welcoming arms. There is a proto-fascist movement seeking to end democracy in the United States. It’s aims are to subvert and discredit elections while stealing them with discriminatory laws and regulations. For that enemy there is no compassion, no forgiveness, but for the pawns that use, abuse, and discard we can be the better people. When they said, ‘hate the sin not the sinner,’ they lied, we do not have to lie. We can be the moral people and we can be the righteous people without becoming the cruel people taking joy in death.

In the long before time of the Cold War it was easy to see who the enemy was in the eyes of nearly every Republican, The USSR its satellite states and its desire to spread the glorious revolution globally. The enemy allowed the diverse GOP a point of unification. Northern ‘Rockefeller’, rambunctious Libertarians, evangelical pro-lifers, and southern social conservatives set aside their vast and deep differences to unit in the fight against global communism.

Then they won.

The USSR dissolved, the Eastern Bloc shattered, and the only Communist nations left in the world was Cuba and North Korea.

The division that had been suppressed within the GOP became meaningful. Rockefeller Republicans were run out of the party labeled as RINOs and the remaining cliques fixed their eye on a new enemy to unify their ranks and stoke anger and fear to motivate their base into the frenzy required to separate them from their cash and win their vote and that enemy were their fellow Americans. But the calculus that stoked the anger failed to recognize that anger can be self-generating and the energized base is easily transformed into the murderous mob. Now, with the murderous mob in their party no one has the spine to confront their creation and the list of enemies grows and the list of actions ‘beyond the pale’ to acquire power shrinks to nothing.

The attempted recall of California Governor Gavin Newsom failed by a staggering 28 points. Wasting time and nearly a quarter of a billion dollars the sane citizens of the Golden State resoundingly rejected the GOP’s desperate do-over and its mad scheme to place the control of nation’s most populous state in the hands of a conservative celebrity.

Hopefully I wish for the national Democrats to learn this valuable lesson, tie every last Republican to the leader of their Turd Reich. From dog catcher to Senator every single motherforking one of them to their orange man-baby, endless sound bites of them praising the Manhattan Mussolini and at every debate pushing them into corners forcing them to either denounce the madness or own it. Rick Wilson, former Republican election strategist wrote a book Everything Trump Touches Dies, make every damned GOP candidate touch him. This must be the North star for Democrat for countless election to come.

But California needs to reform its recall system. This is madness. I’d say go ahead and leave the signature requirements and such the same. We should not make it too difficult to remove a person who needs to be removed but the actual replacement should simply be the Lieutenant Governor. That’s why the office is there, to become Governor when there is a vacancy. Given that the GOP has proved it cannot win statewide offices anymore that post is almost certain to be a Democrat and there would be little fire to exchange one Democratic for another.

I hadn’t planned on two political posts back-to-back, but a bit of news sent my blood boiling and made this morning’s essay inevitable.

First off let me state that I do think the second amendment as written was intended as an individual right but like all rights that is not absolute. It can certainly be met with restrictions and regulation. So, my anger does not spring from a well of hatred towards guns or their owners.

Nearly nine years ago an evil man strode into Sandy Hook elementary school and slaughtered children and teachers.

Federal law, rightfully or wrongfully, protects gun manufactures from liability in how their products are used but parents or the gun-down children filed a suit in court not focused on the use but on the advertising used to sell the guns and a lead defendant is the arms company Remington. I do not know if their case has merit or not, I have not studied the law in the matter and that is something for the courts to determine. Remington as much as any person has a right to their day in court and to their defense.

When you sue or are sued you have a right to force the other side to retain and produce documents and evidence. IN this case the plaintiffs are demanding internal documents and such pertaining to Remington’s advertising campaigns. That’s fair, that the crux of the matter in the lawsuit.

Remington on the other hand is demand the attendance, grades, and disciplinarily records of murdered children.

How the actual fuck does any of that pertain to defending themselves over their advertising choices? I can’t see any conceivable way this at all bears upon the question before the court.

To me this stinks of nothing more than mental torture, of harassment, perhaps to cause enough metal trauma and anguish to force the parents to leave the suit.

Everyone has a right to a full and vigorous defense, everyone. Everyone also gets to reap the whirlwind of being a vicious, cruel, asshole which Remington and their lawyers seem intent on reaping.