Twenty Points Down

The popular phrase in preventing the smug assumption that Biden will beat the evil clown in a landslide, even though he clearly should beat that failed attempt at a functioning human being by seventy points and five hundred electoral votes, is to act like you're way behind in the polls. Ignore the polls. Don't get lulled into complacency by months of leading in the polls. And so forth.

This is fine as far as it goes, but it's easy to forget that people have been repeating that mantra for months with regard to a Biden-Trump matchup specifically, and they've been beating themselves with it for several years in general.

And it's a great idea in general. Show up. Make sure you can show up. Don't ever get complacent again, at any level.

With that mantra in mind, combined with current circumstances and rhetoric, it is not unreasonable or unforeseeable that many people are getting concerned about the practicalities of the election itself -- counting the votes properly, abiding by the results, transferring power properly. When you've been dulling your senses for the past four years that at least a third of your fellow citizens are perfectly okay with an open slide into outright fascism, it makes sense that you might start expecting the worst.

So I get where this guy is coming from, as far as the political probabilities go, and I think we can probably be cautiously optimistic about the ultimate outcome here.

But you know, I'd drop the whole quit being so paranoid, you fucking ninnies tone there. This has been a consistent pattern throughout Trump's reign of error -- the insistence that norms and rules and process will ensure correct outcomes. And in each instance, he has proven that none of that shit matters if there's no one to enforce it, if the only side that even respects those things anymore is also the side that refuses to use every tool at their disposal to exert what little power they actually have.

It's not a paranoid pipe dream at all:  Trump has repeatedly said that any election outcome where he doesn't win is by definition illegitimate. He continues to maintain this stance. No one is challenging him on it in any meaningful way -- not his own party, not the corporate media, not the courts, nobody.

It doesn't require any sort of violent overthrow, or even a stubborn "refusal" to vacate the White House. All he has to do is what he's openly threatened to do, and what political observers across the spectrum have speculated -- declare victory early, before mail-in ballots are counted; if Biden is the winner after the mail-in count, declare those votes invalid (as he has been doing for months already); muddy the waters just enough to throw it to the courts and the individual states.

He has all those tools at his disposal. His own party has long given up challenging him on anything; he could nuke Omaha tomorrow and Ben Sasse would say, Thank you sir, may I have another?. The Democrats have made it clear that they are either completely unable or unwilling to undertake any meaningful action. They will wait and dither and agonize until it's too late.

Now, do I think all of these things will happen? Probably not, but there is definitely a non-zero chance of it. It's definitely possible.

And that's the real trick right there, the root explanation for why so many people right now have this desperate, anxious undercurrent. It's not just that Trump is a piece of shit, or that the people who work for him are scumbags, or that the corporate media are cowed by the whole circus and just want clicks. It's the realization that there are more angry idiots and toxic weirdos out there than they thought there were, and that they have real leverage now.

The rise of the QAnon cult -- an utterly ludicrous, incoherent smattering of conspiracy jabber -- is a perfect example. Imagine a group of people that spin these credulous yarns about cannibal pedo cults and sex trafficking, while they emphatically support a party featuring such well known pedophiles and enablers such as Jim Jordan, Dennis Hastert, and Roy Moore.

And Trump himself -- in countless videos hanging out partying with his good buddy (and one-time neighbor) Jeffrey Epstein, on audio and video describing how much fun he had peeping in on teenage pageant contestants getting dressed, on his own daughter being a hot piece of ass, on sexually assaulting women. Right now he's refusing to give DNA that would exonerate him on a rape charge.

And yet you have this seething, teeming, growing movement of cult loons -- maybe thousands, maybe more -- who would rather construct an insane, impossibly baroque conspiracy that has no basis in fact, than confront the very real network of people right in front of them who indulge in sexual perversion.

I know that as good libruls, we're not supposed to judge others on their sex kinks, and 99% of the time, that's a pretty good rule to follow. But in the context of their own words and beliefs, it's helpful to keep in mind:  Roger Stone is an orgiast who gets off on watching his wife get spit-roasted by strangers. Paul Manafort enjoyed setting up gangbangs for his own wife, who has some cognitive disabilities from a horse-riding accident years ago, and may not have been an entirely willing participant.

Again, we're not allowed to judge, but just consider for a moment the sort of sexual pathologies one must have for those activities. This kind of shit makes the Falwells look like rank amateurs. Now keep in mind that Stone and Manafort have been business partners for forty years. One of their earliest clients -- who they still work for to this very day -- was a young swashbuckling real-estate developer named Donald Trump.

Turds of a feather, you know? I wouldn't stay in the same room with people like Stone or Manafort for five minutes, and I led a pretty wild life for a long time. And I sure as fuck wouldn't turn to people like that for guidance or advice on running a country. These are people who have spent their adult lives weaponizing the worms in their brains in the devil's arena of political consultancy, where nothing is true and everything goes.

We have a good chance of muddling through all this ugliness, if enough people are willing to show up and stick with it. But let's not shit on the folks that are getting nervous about their prospects. They have no one they can trust anymore -- their fellow 'murkins have lost their fucking minds, the Democratic party is full of ineffectual blowhards, the Republicon party is full of flat-out traitors, the basic mechanisms of the country no longer function, and the figurehead tyrant has openly promised multiple times to fuck up the electoral process.

You don't have to be paranoid, but you might want to at least wonder what the contingency plan is for when shit starts coming down. Hoping that certain people will "do their job" when that has failed multiple times previously is barely more than nothing.