They win when the liberals accuse them of hypocrisy

I watched the Olympic ice dancing last evening on the Canadian station. They showed one batch of teams live. As the last batch did their warmup, they switched to another sport. So when they got back the ice rink they were showing things delayed by a half hour (according to the clock in the rink wall). The streaming finished at 12:15. I very much enjoyed watching all of the top half dozen teams. Alas, only three of those got a medal. Perhaps in the spirit of building community we could watch all of these beautiful programs and not worry about scoring or medals? SquireForYou of the Daily Kos community is an ER nurse and had a lot to say about an anti-masking bill that has passed the Virginia Senate with the help of a Democrat.

Newly elected Gov. Glenn Youngkin is like a toddler with a shotgun: enormous power, nowhere near competent enough to wield it, prone to fits of petulance, and unable to care about the damage he causes.

I’m one of many who believe Youngkin does know how to wield that weapon and the damage he causes is the plan. Our nurse knows the dichotomy – the mental whiplash – between those who say “What pandemic?” and the guy who shows up in the ER who can barely breathe and we had better get his wife and kids on the phone and hold it up to his ear. The people who ban masks haven’t visited an ER. This nurse is in Charlottesville. When hospitals in the rest of the state run into problems they send patients into the cities around Charlottesville. They are treated as the safety net. And they’re tired. It is the taxpayer who is paying for the costs of a spreading pandemic. Every traveling nurse demanding extra pay, every dose medication, every long COVID patient. People say they don’t want government run health care because they are convinced they’ll be waiting forever for care. But now people are waiting an average of eight months for a specialist. Except the elite, the ones making the laws, don’t have to wait. The Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor is open again. An Associated Press story posted on Michigan Radio reports it opened at 11 pm last night. The protesters had been cleared by police earlier in the day, but then a snowstorm came through, delaying the reopening. Yes, I shoveled show today. I think I got about an inch. I see my sidewalk has a drainage problem and a lot of meltwater collected on it, which then froze as the temperature got close to 0F. As I shoveled snow off the ice I could hear it cracking. On a second pass I was able to shovel away the broken up ice. Mister Race Bannon tweeted a quote from a person at the bridge blockade:

I’ll go to jail forever if it means freedom.

I didn’t watch that football game yesterday. I wouldn’t have watched even if there wasn’t Olympic ice dancing to see. I’ve heard the half time show (which I didn’t watch either) featured a lot of black performers and was a pretty good show. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Kos, quoted David Lauter of the LA Times. Lauter wrote that many Republicans are losing interest in the NFL.

People who say they are less of a fan now than they were five years ago are more than twice as likely as everyone else to say the NFL is doing “too much to show respect for its Black players.”

John Stoehr, in his Editorial Board, discussed the unsurprising backlash against Biden saying he would nominate a black woman for the Supreme Court. Republicans may not have the votes and can’t use the filibuster. But they can drive liberals crazy. They can say a black woman can’t be qualified. But Amy Coney Barrett was never a judge. Kavanaugh was credibly accused of sexual assault. Were either qualified? Liberals wail about hypocrisy.

Liberals can accuse the Republicans of hypocrisy all day. It won’t matter. They don’t care. Neither do their supporters. They’d have to care about the truth to care about looking hypocritical. They don’t. All they care about is winning. They win when the liberals accuse them of hypocrisy. The liberals are missing the forest through the trees. The Republican goal isn’t stopping Biden. They can’t. Their goal is making the nomination of a Black woman seem like an assault against white people.

Whenever black people gain just a bit there is a backlash. Stoehr discussed this backlash with Samuel Hoadley-Brill. He’s a fellow at the African American Policy Forum and a graduate student at CUNY. They discussed Christopher Rufo, who thought up how to repurpose Critical Race Theory to bash teaching race in public schools. Rufo is just one of many professional BS artists who receive a lot of funding and hype from people who want to stir up old-fashioned racial moral panic. They’re an American tradition. As are the people who want to ignore that we have a racism problem.

Race is a very powerful manipulator of the rational mind, especially in the US, and so race-baiting demagoguery can be incredibly effective.

The discussion turned to the similarities between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement. Both eras included the rise of organizations devoted to reasserting white supremacy.

Unfortunately, white backlash has been extraordinarily successful. It’s been able to undo a lot of progress without registering itself as a pervasive problem in our collective memory.

Kos of Kos posted his weekly collection of pro-vaxx memes. Here are a few of my favorites. The first one reminds me of the number of times Evangelicals accused gay people and others of such things as Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans and the 9/11 attack.

Should we tell the Evangelicals that as soon as they made a godless, lying, lawless, womanizing conman their messiah ... a plague showed up? Conservative n. a person who bets their life they will not be in the one percent of Americans who die of Covid but will be in the 1 percent who benefit from Republican economic and tax policies.

One by Steve Hofstetter:

New term: Agnorant. Definition: people who are extremely ignorant, yet are simultaneously extremely arrogant. Example: people who think they know more about science than scientists.

I ignore Valentine’s Day. Even so, I enjoyed CBC Music’s midday show that included stories of composers involved in Messy Love (see Hans von Bülow, his wife Cosima, and Richard Wagner), Friend Love (see Beethoven – always the friend, never the lover), and Love (featuring a few husband-wife performing teams). Leah McElrath tweeted an image by Introvert Doodle that said “You don’t need to be in a romantic relationship to live a life filled with love.” Examples include friend love, family love, fuzzy love, nature love, team love, book love, and self love.