A third of America approves of negligent homicide

I’ve mentioned the nasty guy has been declaring vote by mail a fraud. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos has the latest chapter in the ongoing saga. The House Oversight and Reform Committee has called new Postmaster General Louis Dejoy to testify before them. Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney wrote to Dejoy: “Increases in mail delivery timing would impair the ability of ballots to be received and counted in a timely manner—an unacceptable outcome for a free and fair election.” That’s good to hear from Democrats. This is so urgent the hearing is scheduled for … September 17.

With the nasty guy bloviating about vote by mail, various GOP officials across the country are left in a bind. In North Carolina one official said the nasty guy is talking about other states, not North Carolina where our vote by mail system is safe and secure.

Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill tried to distinguish between vote by mail, which is bad, and absentee vote by mail, which is good. Glad we got that cleared up.



Jennifer Cohn is an election security advocate. Here’s part of the thread she tweeted:

I would like to know why Obama has NOT in these past three plus years made it a priority to warn the American people that, contrary to what they were told, vote tallies COULD have been hacked.

I would like to know why he and others in the know haven’t been screaming bloody murder about the need to remove the wireless modems that ES&S installed in precinct ballot scanners in Florida, Wisconsin, & elsewhere starting in 2015. They connect to the internet.

I would like to know why Obama and others in the know haven’t been screaming bloody murder about the need to locate and independently confirm the removal of remote access software in central tabulators, which ES&S previously said didn’t exist, but fessed up to in 2018.

I would like to know why Obama and others in the know haven’t raked voting machines vendors over the coals about these and other vulnerabilities. Knowing what they knew. What is wrong with them?! Seriously?!

Wireless modems on vote scanners can at least tell outsiders what the current vote tally is. Such modems can also allow tweaking a vote count here or there to make sure a certain person wins a close race.



Clawson also reported on an interview Jonathan Swan did with the nasty guy. Our Dear Leader had a handful of charts and diagrams that showed America’s coronavirus statistics in a favorable light. An example is the number of deaths per cases. When Swan tried to turn the conversation to number of deaths per population the nasty guy insisted you can’t do it that way. We can see how his mind works, which is not well. The transcript of the interview gets bizarre. And he’s going to occupy the Oval Office another five and a half months (and hopefully no longer than that!) while people keep dying.



In another post Clawson reported that the more the nasty guy talks about a coronavirus vaccine the more he throws doubt about its safety and effectiveness. Those most wary are black people:

Some communities have other reasons to be wary of a vaccine, especially a hastily developed one. Many Black people remember the unethical Tuskegee syphilis study. Now people of color have been underrepresented in some early coronavirus vaccine trials, even as the pandemic has hit Black and Latino communities especially hard.

Leah McElrath of Houston tweeted:

All of the dumpsters outside my apartment building were filled with furniture yesterday.

Not evictions. Those haven’t started yet.

This was people leaving without having the means to take their furniture with them (so staff cleaned it out after they left).

And so it begins.
…
People sometimes giving away furniture or leaving a piece or two behind on occasion is not what I’m describing.

I’m talking about six dumpsters for one apartment complex on one end-of-the-month day.

John Stoehr starts a thread with:

I felt some pangs of regret after saying Thursday that a third of America would cheer, or shrug, if the other two-thirds were wiped out by Covid-19.

Stoehr then reviews the story I mentioned recently that the nasty guy shut down operations to protect us from the virus because it mostly affected blue states. Stoehr calls it negligent homicide. Stoehr also mentions the early virus relief bills that mostly went to red states while blue state governors needed help the most.

What does this mean? While the president chose to let Americans who live in blue states get sick and die, Congressional Republicans chose to starve those same cities and states of resources amid their struggle to save lives.

Given that elected officials, from the president on down, tend to reflect the will of their supporters, it’s safe to say, in light of Trump’s 91% approval rating among Rs (per Gallup), that about a third of America approves of the GOP’s informal policy of negligent homicide.

It may sound cynical, but truth is, the pleasure other people’s pain often drives politics.

Paying so much attention to sadism runs the risk of ignoring its opposite: masochism. Some Republican voters are willing to hurt themselves, with exquisite pleasure, if hurting themselves exquisitely hurts their enemies.

Other Republicans, a small number, are defecting.

As the group shrinks, so does that pleasure, until, when Trump leaves office, MAGA addicts will “crash, many with their entire senses of self having been stripped away. It’s not their ‘evil’ that worries me most. It’s their anguish, and how they will respond to that anguish.”

A commenter added:

The collective trauma that’s coming from millions being forced to go cold turkey? And the fact that nearly every one of us on Team Blue is out of empathy for anyone who supported him? That is what should scare the s*** out of everyone.