What happened to ‘freedom’ and getting government off our backs?

Today is Election Day. I put my ballot in the box outside City Hall on Sunday evening. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported Republicans are taking steps to steal the election. Much of what happened in 2020 happened after the election. This time there is a lot of preparation being done before. The first step is to file lawsuits, about 120 of them as of last week, trying to somehow suppress the vote. One such case was in Michigan. It was thrown out because what they asked was in violation of state election law. Another is in Philadelphia, reported by Laura Clawson of Kos, which will slow the counting of this Democratic stronghold, giving Republicans a chance to say (as the nasty guy did in 2020) if it isn’t counted on Election Day it shouldn’t be counted at all. The second step is similar to what the nasty guy did in 2020. Several Republican party leaders and candidates are saying if a Republican doesn’t win it is because of fraud. The code words are “free and fair” and “transparent,” which appear to mean whatever Republicans want them to mean. The third step is to produce a flood of polls trumpeting a red wave. These will be used as “proof” of fraud of Democrats win – how could the polls be so wrong? Because they’re fake news. The fourth step is threats of violence against election workers. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported the polls over the last weekend don’t show a red wave. Jeff Guo and Nick Fountain of NPR visited the polling center at Marist College to try their hand at it with pollsters Daniela Charter and Barbara Carvalho. They found that it is common to dial 50-100 numbers to talk to one person. So there are lots of kinds of people don’t show up in polls. I’m one of those people quick to hang up on pollsters. One recorded voice called at least a half-dozen times. I hang up on pollsters like I hang up on sales calls. Some voting cartoons. I’ll let you look at one from RJ Matson. Pia Guerra tweeted one that says, “Vote as if you’re slapping Elon Musk in the face.” Tom Toles of the Washington Post tweeted one of his cartoons from 2012 that is, alas, quite accurate today. There is a poll worker at a desk and a person in a voting booth. There is also a person holding a sign, “I’m worried about voter fraud. So we need to make it harder to vote.” At the bottom of the image is, “Find the fraud in this picture.” Matt Wuerker of Politico tweeted a cartoon of a couple surrounded by cars, vans, and helicopters with signs that say “Election Police,” “Morality Police,” “Pregnancy Police,” “Book Police,” “Pronoun Police,” and a few more, all with lights flashing. The man of the couple says, “What happened to ‘freedom’ and getting government off our backs?” Donkey Hotey tweeted an image of an elephant in a gilded chair saying “Hey, hey, hey! Nice democracy you got there. It’d be a shame if somthin’ happened to it.” There is also the caption “GOP Morphs From Political Party to the Greatest Threat to Humanity in 50 Years.” David Sipress tweeted a ‘toon of a couple watching TV and the woman says, “Isn’t this political ad wonderfully false and misleading?” Christopher Weyant of the Boston Globe tweeted a ‘toon of an elephant working hard to pump a bellows to fan the flames of civil war while the nasty guy stands over him with a whip, saying, “Faster! It needs to be huge by the time I lose in 2024!” Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed the Republican declaration of intention to gut Social Security and Medicare. Yes, they’ve been after these programs for decades and because the cuts haven’t happened their intentions can be dismissed.

But this time Republicans are providing specifics—not because their own constituents would approve (they don’t, by huge margins)—but because they believe that they can sufficiently distract and misinform their own voters from their intentions by incessantly demonizing Democrats and focusing entirely on “hot button” grievances through their now almost wholly insular (and perpetually funded) media organs and social media. Those media organs—most visibly Fox News but now virtually all right-wing outlets—have effectively created a hermetically sealed bubble of reflexive, automatic distrust and dismissal of anything Democrats do or say, while simultaneously portraying Republican elected officials as blameless for any of the country’s problems. In short, Republicans are out to prove that there are no more “third rails” in politics, when your electoral base is, for all intents and purposes, conditioned into believing whatever you tell them to believe.

Mark Sumner of Kos published part 1 of his Field Guide to the Drones of Ukraine. It is part 1 because in 20 entries he got through only Paired Wing Drones with delta wing, rotor, and hybrid yet to come. I didn’t read much of it. I mention it for those into such things. Kos of Kos included a video (which I didn’t watch) that was tweeted by Anton Gerashchenko. The brief description says:

Russian children's show teaches that children deserve to die for misbehaving This atmosphere of total violence shapes people who are ready to murder, people who think it's the norm and people who are ready to be murdered.

A bit below that Kos included a cultural comparison:

English literature: I will die for honour. French literature: I will die for love. American literature: I will die for freedom. Russian literature: I will die.

They’re not even protecting their children. There is a video of a speaker telling youth to be ready to march to the front as soon as they’re old enough. A priest told women to have as many children as possible so that it is easier to send a son to the front. That priest has been killed in Ukraine. This is a society trained to be helpless.