Hispanic Fanatic

When this horrific era of death and isolation and lockdowns and screaming men with guns and infinitely long Zoom meetings finally ends, I know the phrase that will encapsulate it for me:

“Can I please share?”

That’s what my seven-year-old son says approximately 3,862 times a day. He yells this while he is in his remote-learning class, when he is one of two dozen second graders vying for the teacher’s attention.

“Can I please share?” he will shout while waving his artwork or math sheet or grammar lesson at the computer screen. Of course, many of the other kids in the class also want to share their work, or just be the first one to give the right answer. So they all start shouting, “Can I please share?” or “I want to share” or “It’s my turn to share.”

And then it turns into an online Lord of the Flies, but with arguments about adverbs and improper fractions.

In any case, I’m grateful that my son is doing ok in his virtual classroom. Because the same cannot be said about many American kids.

Although early studies of online learning indicate that “the Covid-19 pandemic and the learning disruptions it caused have been less detrimental than researchers had expected,” it could be years before we know “the true educational toll of the pandemic — and the effects could be long-lasting.”

And we know that for many “Black and Hispanic students, as well as those in schools that serve low-income populations, the situation is more concerning — with marginalized students falling further behind in reading and math.”

This, of course, means that the educational gap between ethnic minority children and White kids is only widening.

Now, that’s grim news, to be sure. But hey, won’t everything get back to “normal” after all those kids get vaccinated and return to the classroom?

Well, this presupposes that Black and Latino kids get vaccinated at the same rate as White kids. And the truth is that “America’s history of racism in medical research and a lack of trust in the federal government is making some Black Americans and Latinos hesitant to take the vaccine.”

It’s almost like the Tuskegee experiments, the forced sterilization of Latinas, and the unethical testing of procedures “that caused health complications or death” have left ethnic minorities distrustful of the medical establishment.

I mean, what are the odds?

Currently, only 14% of Black Americans trust that a coronavirus vaccine will be safe. Latinos are more optimistic, with 34% saying they trust the vaccine to be safe. But compare that to the 61% of White people who are eager to be vaccinated.

The result is that “vaccine hesitancy could result in some Black and Latino Americans not being vaccinated as Covid-19 continues to batter their communities at disproportionate rates.”

Latinos have the additional burden of being fearful of the government, which is something that just sort of happens when a president spends his entire term demonizing Hispanics. Indeed, the Trump Administration’s “anti-immigration policies, public charge rules that create barriers to citizenship, and threats to the Affordable Care Act have made some Latino families reluctant to receive healthcare.”

As a final handicap, keep in mind that many ethnic minorities live “in poor and urban neighborhoods that don’t have doctors or healthcare facilities near their homes.”

So we have a situation where Black and Latino kids are suffering the most from the pandemic, and are the least likely to come out of it quickly.

For those kids, it will 2020 for years to come.

In theory, by this time next year we will all be vaccinated against COVID-19. And then we’ll hug and clap hands and laugh about the silly virus.

“That whole killer pandemic thing,” we will chortle. “What was that all about anyway?”

Well, before we banish the coronavirus and the entirety of 2020 into the deep, dark memory hole where we bury all our unpleasant thoughts, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the here and now.

You see, because of the Trump Administration’s unique combination of incompetence, hubris, idiocy, and depraved indifference, we are now at about 14 million Americans infected, with over 270,000 dead. We are seeing higher numbers of death on a daily basis, and soon we will endure the equivalent of “a 9/11 every single day.”

In response, the administration has fluctuated between doing nothing, embracing denialism, promoting quackery, and dismissing the experts, which is “in keeping with their guiding philosophy that there is no problem so great that it cannot be solved by knowing lessa bout it.”

Of course, this is not a recent collapse. Months ago, the administration basically gave up fighting the virus and hoped that “Americans will go numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day.”

And that’s pretty much what conservatives have done. Hey, over half (52%) of Republicans believe that “the U.S. reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic is overblown,” which is double the percentage of Democrats who think the same thing.

So if you’re in the GOP, overflowing hospitals and widespread death is no reason to get all excited. This is despite the fact that “only cancer and heart disease will kill more Americans this year” than coronavirus. In fact, the bug has already “killed more than twice as many Americans as either strokes or Alzheimer’s disease, about four times as many as diabetes, and more than eight times as many as either gun violence or vehicle accidents.”

Again, none of that is reason to be concerned — if you’re a Republican.

If you are not, and you actually respect science, you might be interested to know that recent studies verify “what health officials have been telling us for months: Masks do work by significantly slowing the spread of COVID-19.” In fact, there may be up to “a 50% reduction in the spread of COVID-19 in counties that had a mask mandate compared to those without.”

But of course, our disease-ridden president mocked facemasks for months, and provoked the stupidest culture war of all time, apparently because masks weren’t manly or would hurt the economy or something similarly incoherent.

Oh, and speaking of Republicans and their favorite subject — the economy — keep in mind that mask mandates lead to “greater confidence and spending among consumers,” and “are also linked to higher consumer mobility.”

So if conservatives really wanted to rescue the economy, and not just kill grandma in a futile ploy to boost Wall Street, they would be clamoring for everyone to wear a mask. Also, the conservative insistence that lockdowns would destroy the economy looks even more pathetic now, considering that most economists say “the U.S. would be in a better economic position now if lockdowns had been more aggressive at the beginning of the crisis.”

In essence, the Trumpian approach killed more people and made the economy worse — a win-win only if you are a delusional Republican or a cackling demon from the underworld who loves human suffering.

Yes, the virus was always going to be bad, but this level of calamity is the direct result of an infantile, self-obsessed president and his “incessant destruction of reason, evidence and science in the service of his personal whims, conspiratorial mindset and political requirements.”

In future generations, there will be myriad books, documentaries, and feature films about American life during coronavirus. And they will all come to the same conclusion:

It didn’t have to be this bad. 

Now that this grueling, era-defining election is over, let’s take a moment to reminisce.

No, not about the Trump presidency. We will be reliving that in our nightmares for the rest of our lives.

Instead, let’s fondly recall the myriad ways that the GOP tried to steal this election. Oh, I know that most Republicans are convinced that it was the Democrats who cast illegal ballots, threw out GOP votes, forged dead people’s signatures, hacked voting machines, or mumbled some satanic curse that fooled the media, election experts, and the majority of Americans into thinking Biden won the election. But that just shows how devious liberals are!

Because as we all know, there is just no way that a guy who lost the popular vote in 2016, was projected to lose this time, is reviled like no other president in recent history, and who never once cracked 50% approval for his entire term (a first in polling history) could possibly come up short. 

I mean, it’s just impossible. Right?

In any case, if politics were a football game, the GOP would facemask, eye-gouge, trip, elbow, spike toes, and throw punches in scums. They would do this nonstop. Then they would whine to the refs if the Democrats were off-sides once.

Consider that Republicans, without exception, do everything they can to make voting harder or limit who can vote. To them, voting is not a right. Hell, it’s not even a privilege. It’s a rare luxury reserved for conservatives, preferably white ones.

For example, in my current state of California, the GOP put out ballot boxes, marked them “official” (which they were not) and when caught, simply refused to “comply with an order from the chief elections official to remove the unofficial ballot drop boxes from counties with competitive U.S. House races.” Yes, the party of law and order defied the law and ignored orders. 

In my home state of Wisconsin, “a sophisticated and multi-front effort by Republicans to prevent many Wisconsinites from casting a ballot” was just part of the GOP’s plot to create the most gerrymandered state in the country.

And in Texas, the conservative governor didn’t like all those latte-sipping liberals in the big cities being allowed to vote easily. So Texas counties, regardless of size, were limited to “only one drop-off location for voters to hand deliver their absentee ballots during the pandemic.” Texas Republicans also tried to throw out 120,000 votes from “the state’s most populous, and largely Democratic, county,” which I’m sure was just a coincidence.

Oh, and they also tried to disqualify votes in Pennsylvania, and to stop the counting of votes in Nevada.

When none of that worked, Republican senators just openly tried to “find a way to throw out legally cast absentee ballots.” And if you’re wondering, yes, that effort just might have broken “any number of laws.”

Even after the election was settled, Republicans in Michigan tried to block certifying the results “based on dubious claims of voting irregularities in Detroit.” And then after being shamed into doing their jobs, they attempted to rescind the certification, upon orders from their divine leader.

Of course, the president’s hapless, humiliated lawyers are enduring defeat after defeat, basically getting laughed out of court, as they try to conjure a world in which their delusional client got reelected. Indeed, “some of the lawyers at the firms handling the litigation work for Trump’s campaign or related Republican Party organizations are now raising concerns internally about the legitimacy and purpose of the legal claims they are currently being asked to advance.” The attorneys are concerned that they may run into ethical trouble for filing frivolous lawsuits. But to the GOP, that’s their problem.

However, all this Republican subterfuge really started before the election. After all, it was our neo-fascist chief executive who shrieked those “frequent and false claims of widespread voter fraud and repeated calls for his supporters to ‘watch’ the polls and stop it.” And as we know, conservatives need very little provocation to show up with guns and intimidate people.

Furthermore, it was the president’s supporters who sent threatening emails with the subject line “Vote for Trump or else!” to Florida residents. Opinions vary about whether the originator of the emails was the Iranian government or the Proud Boys (both are winning organizations). But in either case, the message “we will come after you” was pretty clear. 

And don’t forget that the fabled Hispanic vote — which was either a godsend or a major disappointment, depending on your point of view — was likely influenced by “a web of disinformation websites aimed at Latino Americans.” Again, it wasn’t progressives spreading the fake news.

You see, “the objective, pursued by Republicans in a seeming war of attrition, is to use a range of tactics and tools to reduce the number of votes cast by people of color.” The GOP dream is that young people, ethnic minorities, and anyone who lives in a city just shut up and let white rural Americans make all the decisions. 

And yet despite these gargantuan efforts, despite these desperate ploys and unethical maneuvers and pathetic illegalities, Trump still lost — solidly as it turned out.

So to my GOP friends, I must assert — without malice — that if you lie, cheat, and whine but still get trounced, maybe it’s time to admit the truth:

Most Americans just didn’t like your guy.

Look, I don’t know if the guy is planning a coup, or plotting revenge, or just being pissy. Nobody can figure it out.

Even after 48 months of daily insanity, we are still perpetually shocked at the scattershot behavior of a septuagenarian whose rambling self-absorption should disqualify him from hosting a neighborhood bingo night, much less guiding a nation of 300 million people through a pandemic and an economic collapse.

What we do know is that Trump’s administration is “taking on the characteristics of a tottering regime — with its loyalty tests, destabilizing attacks on the military chain of command, a deepening bunker mentality, and increasingly delusional claims of political victory.”

We also know that the number 70 is popping up with disturbing regularity, like it is some kind of mystical numeral.

Witness the fact that 70% of Republicans “say they don’t believe the 2020 election was free and fair.” Their entire basis for this belief is, of course, that their guy lost.

Contrast this with the statistic that Biden’s winning base “encompasses fully 70% of America’s economic activity.” This means the areas that voted for Trump account for less than a third of our nation’s economic output, which is interesting in that they are supposedly the hardworking ‘Mericans being victimized by the big evil cities, when in truth they are being subsidized and would starve in the gutter without urban areas to prop them up.

The third appearance of this magical number is the stat that more than 70 million citizens voted for the reelection of the worst president in history. They apparently believe that these last four years of hell were the fault of liberals, the media, the Chinese, or anybody but a president who can’t string two sentences together without complimenting himself. Yes, almost half of our fellow Americans are fine with this guy.

Of course, this reveals another disturbing fact, which is that although “pundits suggest that the two different political ideologies in America are about values and principles,” the truth is that “the primary difference between the two camps is between those who are living in a fictional world, created by generations of right-wing media, and those who are living in the real world.”

And speaking of living in the real world, keep in mind that despite the bellowing of conservatives, there is not a micron of proof that massive voter fraud took place. In fact, it appears that the most significant lying and cheating is being done in the name of the GOP. 

Furthermore, Biden’s win was actually more decisive than you think, and it was certainly more convincing than Trump’s victory in 2016. Yes, I’m sure plenty of right-wingers are politely debating those very points on Parler right now.

You see, conservatives are depressed that their hero went down in ignominious defeat. Of course, for most people, the first stage of grief is denial. But for Trump supporters, it’s more like denial interspersed with shrieking, foaming at the mouth, and issuing death threats.

In any case, our favorite soon-to-be ex-president has more or less checked out, and he isn’t even pretending to do his job anymore.

This isn’t all bad, in that a monkey with flamethrower would be a more effective leader than Trump.

But it is interesting that he is abandoning his post just as coronavirus makes its dreaded encore. The stable genius who said the virus would magically disappear seems to have gotten it just the tiniest bit wrong. But he clearly doesn’t care about that insignificant detail.

This collection of motley facts is the full extent of what we know.

So let’s not indulge in conjecture about what happens next. Because to be honest, it’s anybody’s guess.

Like all of you, I am exhausted, so I’m not going to get it into too much until we have a declared winner. But as of right now, you would rather be Biden than Trump.

In any case, many Americans are shocked at how close this election turned out to be. 

Yes, we have plenty of commentators rehashing the same argument from 2016, which is that Democrats have alienated swing voters because of their embrace of “socialism.” This is interesting, of course, because it implies that Joe Biden (i.e., the most politically moderate man in America) has either hid his secret socialist agenda for decades, or that a small group of congresswoman is deviously pulling the strings (and no, there is nothing insane, illogical, or flat-out misogynistic about that — nope).

This argument also lets the Republican Party off the hook, because it implies that they have not built a cozy home for bigots, conspiratorial lunatics, and neo-fascist freaks, who in turn, now feel emboldened to get out the vote for the GOP. It also hints that millions of kind-hearted, good-natured Americans have no choice but to vote for a corrupt, incompetent, authoritarian racist whose degeneracy is obvious to a 10 year old. They just have to vote GOP!

No, my friends, it is perfectly obvious who Trump and the modern Republican Party are. And it is also clear that millions of Americans like it.

But if you want to keep blaming liberals for this mess, go ahead.

I’m just going to get some sleep.

At the end, perhaps it is the “rapists” who will undo him.

That would be ironic, considering that we all remember how this little nightmare started, with Donald Trump announcing his 2016 presidential run by insisting that Mexicans — and by extension, all Latinos — were nothing more than thugs and rapists.

At the time, conservatives and media figures fell over themselves insisting that this creepy failed businessman didn’t actually mean what he so clearly said. The result of the gaslighting was that millions of Americans voted for the guy, only to find — four long, horrific years later — that he did indeed mean every word of his grotesque opinion. Their bad! It could happen to anyone, right?

Ahem. 

But here in 2020, many commentators theorize that the fabled Latino vote could be the tipping point in a potential Biden landslide. For example, if Hispanic voters turn out in force for Biden, it would give him wins in Texas, Florida, and Georgia. And that, of course, would be the end of the line, electorally speaking, for the GOP, regardless of what happens in other swing states.

However, that is a huge “if,” considering that Latinos are less likely to vote than other demographics. And keep in mind that even though Biden has overwhelming support from Latinos, a sizable minority of Hispanics still plan to vote for a xenophobe who would happily deport them if he could.

To complicate matters, remember that there are multiple subgroups within the Latino demographic, so it is impossible to say definitively who is or isn’t Hispanic, or how that lines up with polling. Indeed, some analysts boldly insist that “there is no such thing as the Latino vote.”

Whoa — now we’re getting metaphysical here.

So let’s return to the subject of Hispanics as thugs and rapists. As we all know, rather than sending us their criminals, Latin America is actually sending us their bravest, such as the 100 wildland firefighters from Mexico who are in California to assist with firefighting efforts. And don’t forget that “nearly 40 countries across five continents have received Cuban medics during the pandemic.”

Closer to home, “Latinos are on the coronavirus front lines,” working as essential workers and suffering much higher rates of infectionbecause of it. In fact, global health experts say that coronavirus is causing “the historic decimation of the Latino community, ravaging generations of loved ones in Hispanic families.”

Basically, our country is fine with Latinos risking their lives to keep the nation intact, but not so upbeat about, you know, actually accepting Hispanics as Americans with equal rights. You might find that a sickening contraction, but to Trump supporters, it’s a patriotic virtue.

The good news is that if our health care system continues to flounder, we can just go to Mexico for civilized treatment. That’s right, many Latino families who lack medical insurance and resources “are crossing the border for affordable medical visits and medicine.” More than 2 million “medical tourists” make the crossing each year, because in Mexico, “it is possible to save from 40% to 65% on a treatment compared to the United States,” and the quality of medical care is “usually first class.”

Just don’t tell Trumpists that, because they might actually start heading south for decent medical care. And we certainly don’t want to send Mexico our worst people.

PS: I rarely update my articles after I post them. I figure that once the words are out there, it is what it is (to quote a super-genius).

But I just read this info, and it directly relates to Latino voters, so I’m adding this little tidbit to the post:

“The gender gap among Latino voters — 26 percentage points — is significantly larger than it is among Black, white or Asian voters.” Apparently, for many Hispanic men “the macho allure of Mr. Trump is undeniable.” In fact, “what has alienated so many older, female and suburban voters is a key part of Mr. Trump’s appeal to these men.” 

So the point is that, once again, we should all listen to the Latinas.

In the early days of the pandemic, many conservatives insisted that Covid-19 was no big deal because the fatality rate was only about 3%. So even if every American caught the virus, the claim went, we shouldn’t get too worked up when 3% of the country dies. 

By this logic, the Civil War was a minor affair, because it killed only 2.5% of population.

In any case, all that gibberish about the coronavirus being no worse than the common cold has mysteriously disappeared within conservative circles. In fact, there is some evidence that Republicans are finally taking “the coronavirus more seriously.”

Is it the fact that America’s response to the pandemic, by any objective standard, has been abysmal? Is it because we are closing in a quarter million deaths, a ghastly number that once seemed unimaginable?

No, it’s because one old man who refused to wear a mask has now caught the virus.

Yes, in a development that is either ironic, karmic, predictable, joyous, shocking or horrifying — depending upon your viewpoint — our supposedly invincible chief executive is currently fighting off the virus that he has both cavalierly dismissed and criminally downplayed. He has checked himself out of a top-tier medical center, where he enjoyed premium healthcare for free, so that he could return to the White House and resume his busy schedule of tweeting all-caps insults and jarring non sequiturs.

So how will Trump’s infection affect the election?

Fuck if I know.

So rather than analyze the future, let’s look at how we got to this point, where members of the president’s own family believe that the guy may be cracking under the pressure.

The catalyst, as it is for so much of the conservative movement, is fear.

Yes, we all know that right-wingers portray themselves as brave warriors, unafraid of those pathetic liberal snowflakes. But if your whole worldview is that you need a dozen AR-15s and a massive wall to protect you from scary brown people — to say nothing of the panic you feel when you see a mosque or hear the words “gay marriage” — then you are not in a position to lecture anyone on the topic of fear. In fact, many studies have shown that conservatives tend to be more fearful and squeamish than progressives.

And that fear reflex has led to real-world chaos.

For example, when it comes to Covid-19, “the president’s delayed reaction to the crisis was partially due to his fears about the deep state.” In this case, the conservative fear of an imaginary enemy helped turn a bad situation into a national catastrophe. Trump’s response to coronavirus was “colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the ‘deep state,’ the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.”

Many Americans are dead today because the president got jittery about a nonexistent threat, while ignoring a real disaster. 

It got worse after that, as the stupidest cultural war of all time ignited over face masks. Millions of Americans, particularly men, refused to mask up because they were afraid — absolutely petrified — that total strangers might consider them wimps. The irony, of course, is that if you alter your behavior out of fear that people might think you’re weak, it means you’re a wimp who cares what people think of you. And this terror of social disapproval — which didn’t exist, by the way — helped Covid-19 spread faster, leading to even more death. Clearly, the right wing’s “narrow definition of masculinity has lethal repercussions.”

And what of those so-called looters and rioters that are burning down our cities? Well, this is yet another figment of the conservative mind. In truth, 93 percent of Black Lives Matter protests have been peaceful. And when violence has occurred, it is usually right-wing extremists who are committing it.

For example, there have been 66 incidents of vehicles driving into crowds of protesters. In a truly disturbing development, seven of those incidents involve police.

Furthermore, there have been 33 incidents where Black Lives Matter protesters were threatened with a gun, shot at, or killed. However, there have been just 12 similar incidents where counterprotesters were the target.

So the fear that BLM is coming to ransack your house is absurd, because if anything, the protesters are more likely to be the victim than the offender.

This twisted focus on fake threats, and the related dismissal of real danger, is a conservative hallmark.

You see, lovers of Fox News spend their lives trembling in terror over the progressives who are out to kill them. The idea that leftists are a bigger danger is completely backward, considering that “America’s greatest domestic terror threat stems from racially and ethnically motivated extremists, following a record high in hate-motivated attacks and the rise of neo-Nazi and white supremacist violence,” now formally recognized by the FBI as a significant threat.

Since 2018, white supremacists have conducted “more lethal attacks in the US than any other domestic extremist movement, demonstrating a longstanding intent to target racial and religious minorities, members of the LGBTQ community, politicians and those they believe promote multi-culturalism.”

Basically, that guy with a swastika tattoo is more likely to come after you than some Earth First vegan.

This fact has been true for decades now. After all, it was not Antifa or BLM that bombed Oklahoma City (i.e., Timothy McVeigh wasn’t exactly a bleeding-heart liberal).

The doublespeak of this situation is evident in the right-wing chorus of “Facts, not fear,” and in their insistence that they are the toughest hombres around for staring down Covid-19.

But of course, it’s all projection. Because there is nobody more scared right now than Donald Trump. And his fear, as well as the fear of his followers, is infecting all of us.

Yes, we’ve all been there.

At some point, we’ve all been jammed into the uncomfortable position of reconciling our sincere beliefs with unpleasant facts, with the result that we are often found wanting. 

For example, some of our greatest artists are horrible human beings. But we still buy their books and see their movies.

We preach sustainability, but when there’s no recycling bin around, we’ll throw that soda can in the garbage.

And we say we’re compassionate people who detest bigotry, but then we support white supremacy and calls for violence. 

OK, stop. 

As it turns out, maybe we haven’t all been there.

You see, we’re closing in on the election that will decide if America is going to crawl out of the intractable quicksand of oligarchy, racial warfare, and religious fanaticism, or if we’re going to happily cannonball into the abyss.

And Trump supporters have made it clear that they are having no crises of conscience, no blinding epiphanies, and no moments of hesitation. 

When our cacophonous chief executive told the Proud Boys to “stand by,” this pack of neo-Nazis responded by shouting, “Yes, sir!” And rather than glance around at the company they are keeping, and growing alarmed about it, most Republicans just shrugged and mumbled something about Hunter Biden and creeping socialism.

It is just the latest in an unending string of lemming-like behavior that, way back in 2016, might have caused us to wonder how anyone could be so delusional, hypocritical, and abhorrent, not to mention self-destructive.

But we have now come to accept that 40 percent of our fellow Americans will rationalize just about anything rather than flick on the neurons that provoke empathy, logic, or introspection.

These are people who are furious that “illegals” don’t pay taxes (even though undocumented immigrants “pay billions of dollars in federal taxes annually”). However, their fake billionaire dodges his taxes for years, and that just makes him “smart.”

One would think they might be disturbed that a privately owned U.S. immigration detention center in Georgia forcibly sterilizedimmigrant women. But then conservatives realized that we’re talking about brown-skinned women, and anyway, unauthorized hysterectomies without anesthesia are completely justifiable because Trump is simply carrying out God’s will.

And the threats that Trump will not leave office even if he loses, and that his minions are plotting to undermine democracy? Well, in a refrain that has become farcical, we hear that Trump “doesn’t really mean it.”

Clearly, the guy could mock their religion and play them for suckers, and they would be fine with it.

It must be exhausting for Trump supporters, constantly spinning their president’s deranged threats into patriotic virtues, and insisting that everyone is a malicious liar unless he works for the administration or Fox News. 

They might view their perpetual churning of reasons and motivations as charming complexity, or an example of the inherent contradictions of being human.

But the rest of see a bunch of hate-filled zealots eager to sell out their supposed principles just to say they owned the libs.

You see, being a Trump supporter “is about winning at any cost, cheating and subjugating. It’s about unraveling the culture in service of just one aim: victory over the others.”

The rest of America can do nothing except futilely hope for the president’s acolytes to snap out of it, and come to their senses. In this sense, it is we who are standing by. But our wait will be endless.

Here’s a fun fact:

“Both of the last two Republican presidents — Bush and Trump— have lost the popular vote, and yet each nominated two Supreme Court justices, who have been confirmed by the votes of senators who represent a minority of the American people.” So a fifth member of SCOTUS confirmed in this way will “create a solid majority on the court, which can then unwind the legal framework that a majority of Americans still supports.” 

Wait, did I say, “fun”?

Sorry, I meant to say, “grotesque travesty of logic and a trampling of basic civil rights.”

I get those things confused sometimes.

Yes, the great Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave it her best shot, but she couldn’t quite hold on until January, when a potential President Biden could nominate a replacement who wouldn’t, for example, possess a “deep, deep contempt for the rights of voters” or insist that “it’s time for Roe v. Wade to go.”

No, that probably would not happen.

Of course, the idea that the death of one octogenarian woman means the collapse of decades of social progress does not, in any way, indicate that America’s political system is a pathetic façade that autocrats can twist and contort at will.

Ok, maybe it does.

You see, the supposed principles of America, and our theoretically strong institutions, are not just a house of cards, but a tower of water-soaked jokers, perched upon a shit-covered dog trying to scratch itself in unpleasant places.

I think you’ll agree that this is indeed a shaky foundation.

And yet many of us have placed our faith in these systems, and in the people who were entrusted with running them. Our reward for this delusion was a parade of Republicans who did everything but slap our naïve faces for believing — even for a slice of a nanosecond — that they would refrain from indulging in a blatant, salivating power grab.

I mean, a few GOP senators offered tortured rationales for their inconsistency — something about this event being different than 2016 — but those reasons quickly devolved into a MC Escher contortion of self-serving nonsense.

However, most Republicans didn’t even bother to reconcile their torpedoing of Merrick Garland then with their embrace of rushing through a confirmation today. 

And many GOP senators flat-out reveled in their hypocrisy. They thought it was just fucking hilarious that Americans would believe they might be men of their word. Just a scream.

So what happens now, when the Republican Party has revealed — for about the 883^rd time — that they don’t really care about democracy, decency, or effective governance?

Well, there’s a lot of talk about the Democrats stacking the court, and indeed, some of them may just be pissed off enough to try it. But come on — we’re talking about the Democratic Party here. Most of their leaders think Joe Biden is too progressive, and that we all have to continue worshipping the white working class, and that making Republicans angry is so upsetting that it’s better to cower in the corner and avoid doing anything too “radical.”

So no, I highly doubt that you will see Democrats re-impeach Trump tomorrow, or ram through four liberal justices in January, or do much of anything beyond pout and ask Middle America to please love them.

But of course, even if there were some way to stop Trump’s third appointment in four years, it would be a stopgap. Because we need to go deeper.

Gentlemen’s agreements about how to run the country don’t work when one side is just fine with fascism, racism, and armed vigilantes in the streets. Lifetime appointments for justices who love theocracy is not a workable idea. Pining our hopes on a 250-year-old document that is impossible to amend is not a productive approach. And hoping that a system engineered to keep rich white men in power will somehow reform itself is not a comforting plan.

If the age of Trump has taught us anything, it is that all options have to be considered. Because the Republicans have figured this out already, and they think it’s cute if you don’t see it that way. 

Yes, it’s simply adorable.

Last week, I attempted to deal with the nonstop deluge of horrific behavior spewing out of the White House by asking, “Is there something that we progressives can do to make conservatives feel better, so that maybe they won’t, you know, destroy the country and devastate the entire planet?”

After all, we liberals are well-known for blaming ourselves for every monstrous action that right-wingers embrace. And American society is all about excusing conservative aggression and justifying GOP incompetence.

So let’s just run with it. Here are some of the ways in which liberals can make things easier for you conservatives.

First, we don’t want to hurt your feelings by pointing out that Trump is a dangerous moron whose own advisors “hesitated to give him military options, fearing the President might accidentally take the US to war.” Hey, I’m sure that statement has been true about every president.

Of course, we also know that Trump only ran for president as some kind of bizarre branding exercise, and for some unfathomable reason, you bought it. And yes, our sociopathic chief executive possesses the attention span of nine-year-old, has revitalized fascism, and is arguably the most corrupt president in history. But you won’t hear that from us.

Similarly, we will not bring up the fact that if you support Trump, you are more likely to be racist — even though study after study has shown this. No, you can go right on thinking that Black Lives Matter are a bunch of terrorists, even if the FBI has stated that “White supremacist extremists present the most lethal threat” to the country.

Oh, maybe you don’t know about that last item because “top political appointees in the Department of Homeland Security repeatedly instructed career officials to modify intelligence assessments to suit President Donald Trump’s agenda by downplaying Russia’s efforts to interfere in the US and the threat posed by White supremacists.”

Apparently, the guy flies into a rage if someone tells him a fact that he doesn’t want to hear, and in a maneuver better suited to calming a screaming toddler than advising the most powerful person in the country, his lackeys twist the truth to keep him appeased. Or, in an assessment that we swear we are not making up, “the President prefers to operate without intelligence.”

Yeah, he does that a lot.

In any case, you keep on believing that a doddering septuagenarian with a history of failure and garbled syntax knows far more than the top medical professionals in the world. While we’re at it, go on and forward that conspiratorial video from your high school acquaintance who flunked chemistry and has never left his home state, but who somehow is plugged into the inner workings of a vast cabal of mad scientists.

Above all things, we will not question American exceptionalism. We don’t want to destroy your belief that our country is vastly superior to all others, even if this “too often clashes with its culture of guns, mass incarceration, the death penalty and the war on drugs,” and has left us way behind on multiple quality-of-life measurements.

Woops, I see that I’ve upset you. I apologize, and I definitely will not mention that the border wall with Mexico will never be built. Yes, that endeavor wasted tons of taxpayer money, and did nothing more than provide a front for right-wing con men to steal your money, like you were some kind of fucking rube or something, but…

OK, now you’re crying. Let’s try to make it up to you.

Hey, would you like to vote twice? You know, because you’re so special? The president says it’s fine, so go for it.

And you know what else? We will ask newspapers to avoid endorsing candidates, because it might upset conservatives. There, there.

You know what would really cheer you up? Ending all of that diversity nonsense.

Yes, the president who is incredibly popular with neo-Nazis — a coincidence, we’re sure — “has instructed federal agencies to end racial sensitivity trainings that address topics like white privilege and critical race theory, calling them ‘divisive, anti-American propaganda.’”

And good news for you: It’s not just the feds who are canceling diversity. Companies such as Google have “significantly rolled back their diversity and inclusion initiatives in an apparent effort to avoid being perceived as anti-conservative.” 

In fact, some of these companies have “stopped saying the word diversity” altogether, because it’s so very very very controversial — well, at least to you Trump supporters. So we bend over backward to ensure that you’ll never have to hear disturbing facts about racial inequality or have your 1950s thinking challenged in any way.

You see, it’s all about being nicer to you, the hardcore Trump supporter who screams, “Fuck your feelings” and shrieks that progressives are sensitive snowflakes. And that’s when you’re not threatening us with guns, or beating us up to prove that we’re the violent ones. Or just shooting us in the street while the cops watch.

We want to make sure that you feel good about yourselves. Because that’s the most important thing in the goddamn world.

Yup.