One Answer to Why

From TPM commenter Maximus:

A Soulless Monster is What They Want

Keep this for the 7 million times between now and November when some DCCC concern troll says Democratic candidates can't win unless they reach out to trump voters.

First, Steve M on modern Conservatism:

How do right-wingers decide which policies to support? It's simple: They support whatever infuriates or actively harms their political enemies -- and they don't care what happens to society as a whole. They support President Trump's saber-rattling in the Middle East because it enrages their domestic enemies and inflames the region -- but they assume no harm will personally come to themselves as a result of the policies. They like loose gun laws that result in increased American bloodshed, because they know they won't die in the high-crime cities they never visit, and they assume their kids will never die in a school shooting or a gun suicide. They like voter ID laws because they can easily obtain birth certificates and driver's licenses, so who cares what the laws do to democracy in America? They're fine with police brutality against non-whites because they're white and so they don't have to worry about it. They want Obamacare repealed because most of them have employer-paid insurance or Medicare, and who cares what happens to America when other people can't afford to stay well?

Pre-millennial dispensationism is the ultimate right-wing religious belief: Let's do what we can to make the end of the world arrive sooner, even though other people will go to hell, because we won't. We don't care about the majority of our fellow humans -- all we care about is ourselves and our tribe. We'll happily make things catastrophic for everyone else if it means we can get what we want.

That's really the definition of modern conservatism.

Then Paul Campos on Trump denialism:

Refusing to see that Trump got elected precisely because he’s a soulless monster is just another iteration of American exceptionalism, in all its endlessly parochial stupidity and pride.

People Like This Vote. Do You?

Yes, it's from Australia.  But you can easily find a majority of repug voters here who agree.

From Pharyngula:

Republicans Vote for Republicans. Always.

Like I been sayin' for years, Charlie Pierce:

The biggest mistake the Ossoff campaign made was relying too heavily on the notion that there were Republican voters in that district that could be broken off from their party. This almost is never the case. Through decades of constant and unrelenting pressure, and through finagling with the franchise in a hundred ways in a thousand places, the Republicans have compressed the votes they need into an unmovable, diamond-hard core that will vote in robotic lockstep for whoever it is that wins a Republican primary. In American politics today, mindlessness is one of the strongest weapons you can have. Republicans vote for Republicans in Republican districts.

Not just in republican districts, either.  There is no force in the universe that will compel republican voters to vote for anyone who does not have a "R" next to her name.

That's why the myth of the Obama voters who voted for Trump is such a vicious, motherfucking lie.  In a Venn Diagram of "people who voted for Obama" and "people who voted for Trump" there is zero overlap between the two circles. Someone who voted for Obama then voted for Trump is a fish that suddenly sprouted wings and flew to the moon.

Impeaching the Orange Loser Won't Remove the Real Threat

Neighbor of mine still has his Trump Pence sign in his front yard.  He won't ever remove it.  That makes him a clear and present danger to American Democracy.

DR Tucker at Political Animal:

The greatest threat to our institutions comes from those who choose to embrace nihilism and ignorance at the ballot box—a problem that will remain with us long after Trump has left the White House.

Those who voted for Trump—those who put this madman into power, and who will be eager to put future right-wing madmen into power—threatened our institutions. Those who voted for Trump bear full responsibility for the havoc he has inflicted upon this country. Those who voted for Trump owe an apology to everyone who will suffer as a result of his actions.

Is it too harsh to regard the people who voted for this man as citizens who, with extremely rare exceptions, sought a “safe space” from an increasingly diverse country and a culture trending leftward? Is it too snobbish to regard these voters as the sort of people who, when they say they want “good jobs” to return to this country, actually mean they only want one specific demographic to have access to “good jobs”?

Donald Trump did not make himself President. A significant portion of the American electorate begged for a candidate like Trump—someone who scorned expertise, someone who believed that talking tough constituted leadership, someone who believed America fell into degeneration in the years following Brown v. Board of Education. Trump is the natural consequence of a generation of folks that watched All in the Family and actually thought the Archie Bunker character would make a one heck of a president.

The folks who voted for Trump knew exactly what they were doing. It wasn’t desperation. It wasn’t confusion. It was a willful and deliberate attempt to turn the clock back, to “deconstruct the administrative state,” to live out a fantasy of privilege, prejudice and power.

When Trump attacks our institutions, he is doing so with the full and total imprimatur and approval of those who voted for him. They like what they’re getting. Progressive nightmares are the same as their dreams.

It’s easy to put this all on Trump. It’s easy to say he’s out of control. It’s harder to countenance the idea that those who voted for Trump wanted chaos and disorder, wanted national and international harmony destroyed, wanted to eliminate all vestiges of progressivism and enlightenment in this country. No one wants to believe their neighbors hate them.

But they do. And they always will.

The Resistance: Fact-Correcting To Their Faces

No, you do not have to sit there and seethe or scream obscenities when trumpies repeat the lies and fantasies they have been fed by wingnut media.  Give 'em facts and watch them deflate.  A lady in a focus group teaches you how.

Wonkette:

What we didn’t think we’d see today was a whole mess of “regular people,” as focus grouped by none other than Frank Fucking Luntz, who had a hell of a lot more to say — correctly — than the pundits did. They were not buying his bullshit! Not even for a second! (Well, a few guys did, for a second, and they were SHOUTED DOWN by people who KNOW THE SCORE.) We know you never watch the videos, but make like an Abba song and Take a Chance on this one! It’s FUN! 

OOOH BOY they are SPITFIRES! Whenever any of them are incorrect, the others hoot and shout him down with FACTS! Like, one dude says “hey, he gave an olive branch to the Democrats,” and they are like NO HE DID NOT, HE SAID THEY HAD TO WORK WITH HIM, and then another guy claims the Congressional Black Congress wouldn’t even meet with poor President Trump and the big black woman is all NUH UH UH and she backs it up with the real facts of the matter — that they had sent him a letter in JANUARY and he STILL HASN’T RESPONDED TO IT, and she is not having that dude’s JIVE. (She didn’t say “jive,” but she didn’t even need to, she was so rad and good and loud and facty.)

Frank Luntz: “OKAY, WE’RE NOT ALL GOING TO JUMP ON MARK AT ONE TIME.”

No, they will TAKE TURNS.

And this is how we must all be, every single fucking day, when we are met with half-baked alternafacts from people who get their info from Alex Jones or Trump (same thing) and shout them all down with TRUTH, and also #RESIST.

Dead Wrong Then, Dead Wrong Now, Dead Wrong Forever

I grew up with these motherfuckers, too, and shame on Bill Clinton for absolving them of guilt for their crimes.

The Nation:

To be sure, the country still counts. America surely must hear the voice of the “forgotten” voters who put Donald Trump in the White House: the angry rural whites and the neglected high-school dropouts and the women for whom race and class weigh more heavily than gender. Bill Clinton spoke prophetically about them back in 1995, in the wake of an earlier revolution that became known as Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America.” Back then, a wave of disgruntled rural voters elected 60 new and deeply parochial members of Congress, flipping the House of Representatives to Republican control and blocking most of what Clinton was trying to enact. The president spoke wisely at a Camp David confab I attended back then, where he took on angry liberal staffers and even his own wife:

I know how you feel. I understand Hillary’s sense of outrage. It makes me mad, too. Sure, we lost our base in the South; boys voted for Gingrich. But let me tell you something. I know these boys, I grew up with them. Hardworking, poor white boys who feel left out… Think about it, every progressive advance our country has made since the Civil War has been on their backs. They’re the ones asked to pay the price of progress. Now, we are the party of progress, but let me tell you, until we find a way to include these boys in our programs, until we stop making them pay the whole price of liberty for others, we are never going to unite our party, never really going to have change that sticks.

No, no, no, a million times no. If you took every whining white boy in the country, stripped him of every civil, constitutional and human right, forced him to work without pay, to starve and freeze and suffer rape in horrific conditions, and continued that punishment for him and all his descendants for five hundred years, you would not even begin to scratch the surface of what those white boys should have to suffer for what they inflicted on people of color, on women, on immigrants, on gays, on jews and muslims and everybody who is not them.

The fact that they can DARE to whine about their slightly-less-than-perfectly-privileged existence today is proof they have learned nothing and never will.

Or as the Rude Pundit put it to the irredeemable residents of Beattyville, KY:

But for the poor who voted for Trump, you are going to be punched in the face repeatedly by your own fists. And you'll come running to Democrats to help you, and we will, 'cause that's who the hell we are, and then you'll run right back to the racist pricks because that's just who the fuck you are: ungrateful, uneducated bastards who have been brainwashed so thoroughly that you don't realize who is stabbing you and who is trying to get your wounds healed, willing victims asking, "Please, may I have another" as the knife is twisted in your gut.

Final Repug Victory: Voters Too Stupid to Understand Anything.

Repugs have been destroying American education for decades for exactly this purpose:  Make voters too fucking stupid to figure out which policies help them and which policies hurt them.  

This is also, of course, why freakazoids so frantically oppose teaching "critical thinking" in schools.  People who can think critically don't vote for lying demagogues.

Steve M.:

Here's the problem, though: When Price (a Republican congressman who's Donald Trump's choice for Health and Human Services secretary) or Ryan proposes a number like $1 billion or $2.5 billion, it doesn't matter how stingy that actually is -- the average voter out there in the heartland is thinking, A billion dollars? Two and a half billion? Hey, that's a lot of money!
Republicans always take advantage of the fact that any dollar amount over, say, $1,000 (if we're talking about a government grant for an eccentric-sounding research project) can be made to seem like a huge outlay that really picks the pocket of Joe and Jane Lunchpail. Liberals can generate all the infographics and floor-of-Congress easel charts they want demonstrating that these proposals are woefully inadequate, and still much of America will think their cost sounds like a king's ransom.
The numbers in that Commonwealth Fund study aren't all that hard to explain. If a Republican plan were to cover as many of those who were priced out the pre-Obamacare insurance market by pre-existing conditions as Obamacare does, it would be covering 13.7 million people. If those people had an average of $20,000 in annual healthcare costs and paid $7,000 of that per year in premiums, that would leave $13,000 to be covered by this high-risk insurance. Multiply $13,000 by 13.7 million people and you get $178 billion. Ryan proposes to pay for less than 1% of that. Price has proposed to cover even less.
But it's likely that explaining this would make the average voter's eyes glaze over. Maybe it's making yours glaze over. Ryan and Price are proposing outlays that are very stingy but sound like really big numbers. And that will probably be enough to bamboozle America.

Or as Wonkette put it:

Fine, we will read this article by “Melody Forbes,” because we are sure she is one of those principled, smart Trump voters literally no one on earth has been hearing about:

I voted for Donald Trump because I wanted to see change in our country. One change I didn’t want to see was access to health care at Planned Parenthood blocked.

WELL IT’S A SHAME THERE WERE NO CANDIDATES NAMED “HILLARY CLINTON” IN THE RACE WHO MADE DEFENDING PLANNED PARENTHOOD ONE OF THE LADY CENTERPIECES OF THEIR LADY CAMPAIGNS.

Our Anti-Fact World

Robyn Pennachia at Wonkette:

How do we come to terms with the fact that we are moving towards a society in which a large segment of the population would take the Weekly World News seriously if it were to come back into print? Where actual facts are met with more suspicion than bizarre speculations based on no evidence whatsoever? The people who believe in things like Pizzagate are supposed to be wearing sandwich boards and too many sweaters and hollering at you while you wait for the bus, not on the nightly news. But here we are!

Not Denying Reality, Just Their Own Racism

This is why they won't care when he takes away their health insurance.  They won't care when he fails to create jobs.  They won't care when he doesn't build a wall.  They won't care when he unleashes Wall Street to steal their last dimes.  They won't care when he ushers in a permanent recession.  They won't care when he starts a nuclear war.

As long as he frees police to shoot ni**ers and spics in the streets, rounds up muslins and messicans and makes liberals cry, he's the greatest president ever to them.

Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:

In the weeks following the election, the supporters of the candidate who lost the election (but won the popular vote) were treated to a whole series of lectures about their need to empathize with the supporters of the candidate who won. That always struck me as the opposite of what happened after the 2008 election. But that’s simply a casual observation.

Today, Daniel Dale (the Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star) is on the streets of DC interviewing Americans who support the president-elect enough to travel to his inauguration. Specifically, he’s asking them what they like about Trump. I have to admit, I’m frankly blown away by their answers.

Michelle Arnett, of Tennessee, thinks Trump will bring back jobs. She was laid off in a clothing-plant closure she attributes to NAFTA. pic.twitter.com/55KVTAJ5m2

Rick Gardner, a Christian minister in Arizona, says he most likes Trump's honesty - "truly a man of his word" - and his selflessness. pic.twitter.com/ca2vETlWLG

Dennis Poer, painter in Illinois, says tomorrow is the "greatest event in American history." He loves Trump's honesty. pic.twitter.com/kpdwEFYl0D

Rhonda Pearce, homemaker in North Carolina, most admires that Trump is always willing to admit he was wrong after he misspeaks. pic.twitter.com/Mdg8FOFZ0Y

Tyrus and Ashley Cobb, of Indiana, like that Trump is a man of faith who will bring Godliness back. They wish he'd stop tweeting.

You can see more examples on Dale’s Twitter feed.

These look like really nice people. But I seem to live in a completely different reality than the the one they inhabit, and have no idea how they reached these conclusions about Donald Trump that are the opposite of what I believe to be true. This goes way beyond political differences on policy issues to something much more fundamental about how we perceive the world. I’m not sure that even empathy can bridge that divide.

Nothing can bridge the divide, Nancy, but the divide is not about perception of reality.  The divide is racism.  Every single one of them voted for the guy who fed their rage against that ni**er in the white house.  Everything they say is cover to hide the racism.

Matches

Divine Irony:

As eager as we are to put this election behind us, we must never underestimate the flammable potency of an uneducated and misinformed populace in the hands of a matchbook salesman.

• ↵ Reblogged from sagansense

The Racism, the Whole Racism, and Nothing But the Racism

Via LGM, Jamelle Bouie explodes all the "economic anxiety" bullshit:

The Donald Trump who won the presidency on Tuesday is the Donald Trump who demanded execution for five boys, wrongly accused of a crime. He is the Trump who ran on a platform of “law and order.” The age of Trump will be an age in which police can act with impunity. And as an officer of color, he knew, perhaps better than anyone, that it’s people who look like us—who are brown and black—who will face the brunt of that impunity.

Pundits and observers will attribute Trump’s win to “populism” or his “anti-elite” message. This is nonsense. Trump ran for president as a nationalist fighter for white America. He promised to deport Hispanic immigrants. He promised to ban Muslims from the United States. He refused to acknowledge Barack Obama’s legitimacy, casting him—until the end—as a kind of usurper of rightful authority. When faced with the fetid swamps of white reaction—of white supremacists and white nationalists and anti-Semites—he winked, and they cheered in response. And for good reason.

More than anything, Trump promises a restoration of white authority. After eight years of a black president—after eight years in which cosmopolitan America asserted its power and its influence, eight years in which women leaned in and blacks declared that their lives mattered—millions of white Americans said enough. They had their fill of this world and wanted the old one back. And although it’s tempting to treat this as a function of some colorblind anti-elitism, that cannot explain the unity of white voters in this election. Trump didn’t just win working-class whites—he won the college-educated and the affluent. He even won young whites. Seventeen months after he announced his candidacy, millions of white Americans flocked to the ballot box to put Trump into the White House. And they did so as a white herrenvolk, racialized and radicalized by Trump.

 Or as the Rude Pundit put it so eloquently, Trump voters are shit.

No, Sam: The Winner of Today's Repug Primary is NOT Jack Conway; He's the Loser

C'mon, Sam.  You've been in Kentucky long enough now to know that repug voters are never fractured, dismayed, discouraged or dissuaded from voting in the general election.  It doesn't matter which piece of shit "wins" the repug primary, because repug voters never vote for the repug nominee in November. They vote against the evulmuslincommieterrist running as the Democratic nominee.

That's what they live for: defeating Democratic candidates.  Nothing - not even the repug nomination of a likely abortionist, because driving your girlfriend to the clinic is the exact same thing - will stop them from turning out in droves to defeat Jack Conway and put a repug - any repug - in the Governor's mansion.

Comer will likely lose the primary today because of the abortion allegations, but if he wins somehow, every single anti-abortion freakazoid who voted for a different repug will be in line at 6 a.m. Nov. 3 to make sure the Democratic candidate goes down to ignominious defeat.

And then they will immediately start working on defeating every Democratic candidate in the state House in November 2016, so that the new consolidated repug regime in Frankfort can get down to the essential, buybull-mandated job of turning Kentucky into Somalia, just like Kansas repugs have done to their state.

Sam Youngman at the Herald:

The sun will come up Wednesday morning, and it will dawn on a fractured state Republican Party.

Going into Tuesday's primary, it is all but impossible to tell which Republican will emerge victorious.

But it's easy to see that the winner of the primary is Conway.

SNIP

They are divisions that have been around in some cases for 20 years, but now they are deeper, far more entrenched and a good reason for Kentucky Democrats to smile for the first time since before last November.

There are always concerns that a contentious primary might leave a party divided in the fall, but this primary has taken an unusually dark turn, and those fears are unusually well-founded.

To be sure, there is still hand-wringing within the Democratic Party. It's what they do, and it is appropriate given the state's increasingly conservative electorate.

There are concerns, born of Alison Lundergan Grimes' disastrous U.S. Senate race, that Conway did not do enough — or really anything — to define himself in the minds of voters this spring as the Republicans ripped one another to shreds.