And on the Tit-For-Tat front -
Saw a bumper sticker that read
Mitch Mitch Putin’s Bitch
It may have been inspired by this:
I came across it a few days ago and I think it's been making its rounds.
In other news I get a sense the Republicans are getting very nervous about white supremacist terrorism. My SO and I were talking about it last night. Over the last couple of decades the Republican party has become all about winning and very little about governing.
Every time a prominent Democrat pops up above the crowd, conservative media does everything it can to tear them apart. With Bill Clinton it was infidelity, with Hillary Clinton it was her shiftiness, and I watched them do it with Barack Obama. They threw everything against the wall and went with the only two things that stuck: the fact his father was not an American and racism.
They spun wild stories that were impossible to actually happen in the real world to get people to doubt Obama's legitimacy on grounds he might not be a natural born American (even though SCOTUS would almost certainly rule that 14th Amendment birth citizenship counts as natural born) and did lots of dog whistles about racism.
Then along came someone who made audible whistles about racism and the base who were already primed went for him. They made a bargain with the devil letting loose one of Americas darkest demons to hurt a Democratic president and they lost control of the party to a malignant narcissist and now nut jobs are becoming violent.
There are elected racist Republicans who probably secretly think this is a good thing, but some Republicans like Rick Wilson and Anna Navaro have been very concerned since 2015, the number of Republicans who are having qualms about all this is growing. A state senator from Nebraska spoke out about it yesterday.
Unfortunately the elected Republicans are in a catch 22 of their own making. They need the racist, nut job base to get nominated or someone who really is a nutjob will primary them from the right, but they need the independents and moderate Republicans to get elected in most places.
2020 might be the end of the Republican party as a force in American politics. They have been hijacked by extremists to such a degree that the moderate Republicans and right leaning independents they need to rely on to get elected are getting queasy about voting Republican. Now today the trade war with China is hitting the markets hard and could trigger a recession.
The signs are there for this to be an election to start a new party system.
1) Party systems last 30-50 years, this one started in 1980, 39 years ago.
2) At the end of a party system there is a national feeling that things are falling apart. Sometimes they literally are like 1929-1932.
3) The midterm election before the changing presidential election is usually a big win for the out of power party.
4) The last president of a party system is, with one exception (McKinley), a one term president who is seen as ineffective.
5) The first presidential election of a new party system often changes the electoral map as a new coalition comes together to win. The signs of this are the weakest of the factors, but suburban voters and women are trending much more towards Democrats now than they have in a generation. The party vote gender gap is the largest since women got the vote.
The new coalition is usually regional, but it looks like the new coalition is going to be cut along different lines: urban+suburban, women, added to the existing Democratic base. Places that are very rural will probably remain conservative strongholds, but the rest of the country will be voting against them.
The factors working against a new party system sweeping in next fall are Russian interference and the conservative propaganda machine. Russian interference is blunted by people knowing it's happening, but they can still hack into voting systems can cause mischief. The conservative propaganda machine is getting weaker too, and some within it are beginning to express some doubts about "dear leader" and his policies.
