Arizona Dreaming

Dang. Just when I had a non-political column in mind, Trump holds another of his “I’ll lie and you’ll love it” rallies. In Arizona, to thousands of happy receptives, he topped his prior pernicious effluvium with this hallucinatory whopper: “The left is now rationing life-saving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating … white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white you don’t get the vaccine or if you’re white you don’t get therapeutics. … In New York state, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical health.” (Medical health?)

It was, of course, a steaming pile of Trumpian b.s.; a deliberate misstatement of what is, in fact, a medically reasonable policy. It’s among his most transparently evil and desperate lies, and it speaks truckloads about how exploitably stupid he considers his acolytes to be.

How many of the worshipful attendees had a moment’s hesitation; thought, whoa, he’s gone totally nuts? Somewhere around zero, probably. If they turned out after seeing his perseverating election lies debunked, up, down, and sideways, they’re onboard forever. And, of course, they were treated to the most thoroughly disproved of the big lies: he won Arizona.

It was a pathetic show by a babbling crazy person; the kind that if you saw him ranting on a street corner, you’d want to roust the men with white coats and butterfly nets. And yet, deliriously oblivious, they stayed.

There he goes again, say some readers: this columnist is full of hate, maddened by “Trump derangement syndrome.” What a convenient excuse for dismissing the inconveniently obvious. Is it hate to reject a lying liar’s lies; ones that are steadily destroying faith in our democracy? Is it derangement to criticize the Republican Party’s goosestepping toward plutocracy? Readers who describe me thus have plenty to say about President Joe Biden. It’s usually false, based on what they heard from Tucker, et awful, but I don’t call them deranged. Except for the danger to our country, I’d feel sympathy for their disinformed, childlike credulity.

When you have no agenda other than enriching yourself and your donors; when the only things you want are harmful to everyone else, you have no way to win elections except by deception and suppression. And, in “the world’s greatest democracy,” it’s working.

Seeing him as their only hope, elected Republicans have convinced their voters to succumb to an authoritarian liar. To believe elections they lose are rigged; that election officials are traitors deserving of death threats, causing many to quit, to be replaced by Trump loyalists who, like him, have no compunction about actual rigging.

Anti-democracy Trumpublicans are so afraid of having to confront truth that they’ve ordered future candidates not to participate in presidential debates unless they’re hosted by their sycophantic, lying press. A Russian mouthpiece is now their favorite Foxian. Previously treating Hillary Clinton’s emails like a DefCon 4 threat, they’re refusing to cooperate with the January 6 Commission, tossing the Constitution away like a used napkin. They forged elector documents to overturn Biden’s victory. As Mike Pence just editorialized, they characterize attempts to compel states to carry out fair elections as, ominously, “nationalizing them.” Defend the Constitution, he implored senators.

Yes. Please do. Because this is what it says: “[t]he Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” (My emphasis.)

Of course it may. The founders understood the indispensability of fair elections and foresaw the possibility of states attempting to pervert them. If ever there’s a role for uniform federal regulations overruling states, it’s when they try to abrogate fundamental civil rights. You’d think the Supreme Court would agree. Especially “originalists.”

But Republicans needn’t fear. Mitch McConnell has seen to it that SCOTUS is packed with right-wing ideologues who’ll protect their attacks on democracy. The way they overturned President Biden’s vaccine mandate for corporations confirms their undisguised partisanship; producing, too embarrassed to sign the order, the non-sequitur that “A vaccination, after all, cannot be undone at the end of the workday.”

Such illogical contortions aren’t surprising from the likes of Injustice Gorsuch, McConnell’s choice after blocking Merrick Garland, who refuses, alone, to wear a mask to protect diabetic Justice Sotomayor. Stickin’ it to the libs. What a d..k.

Okay, maybe I am deranged. That Arizona grotesquery did it. When half the country still can’t see what a dangerous, demagogic, incoherent sociopath Trump is, ranting into the wind is all that’s left.