Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Wednesday, June 1, 2022

The crystallized Republican strategy and tactics on fraudulent elections

The GOP propaganda and sleaze Leviathan appears to have settled on a strategy to appear rational about an argument that is pure partisan vaporware. Here's the secret: Argue vehemently that Democrats commit vote fraud, but Republicans do not.

It's not true, but it is brilliant. Sheer brilliance.

You might have noticed that many of the same Republicans who insisted that “voter fraud” cast doubt on Donald Trump’s 2020 loss mysteriously don’t see fraud at play in elections that they win. This is routinely described as “hypocrisy.”

But the “hypocrisy” charge doesn’t do this justice. Because embedded in this tactic is something more than mere political double talk. It embodies an actual principle of sorts: that when Republicans lose elections, the voting can be presumed illegitimate or suspect, and when Republicans win them, the voting can be presumed legitimate and above suspicion entirely.

Usefully enough, Rep. Mo Brooks has now stepped forward to confirm this. And the Alabama Republican’s corroboration is noteworthy in light of emerging details about a complex new GOP plan to make this principle actionable in future elections.

Brooks’s latest comes in a New York Times piece that reports on the selective approach that Republicans take with charges of voter fraud. As the Times notes, this exposes a “fundamental contradiction,” in which those charges are used to challenge GOP losses but not GOP wins.

Pressed further by the Times, Brooks blithely suggested that in Alabama, the fraud took place “in predominantly Democrat parts of the state.”

You see, in primaries decided by Republican voters in red areas, the voting is pure and unsullied. By contrast, in general elections that Democrats are trying to steal from Republicans, the voting in blue areas is marred by widespread fraud.

That form of fraud alleged by Brooks happens to be virtually nonexistent. But the point is that the mere assertion that something illicit happened is the coin of the realm here. It’s meant to give some kind of patina of a public rationale for naked efforts to subvert election losses.
I raised the question here before of who is disrespecting whom. I raise it again. This is another reason to raise it again. 

Republican elites and their propaganda and slanders Leviathan claiming that Republican voters are honest citizens, while claiming that Democratic Party voters are evil criminal socialist-communist tyrant pedophiles, and cannibal baby killers, or whatever other bullshit lies and slanders that (i) GOP elites choose to use, and (ii) most of its rank and file (~97% ?) indefensibly and unjustifiably believe.

It is past time to be outraged by corrupt, incompetent, lying neo-fascist Republican elites and their complicit rank and file. They are evil criminals and human scum, not the political opposition.


Questions: 
1. Is that rant over the top, or is there at least a non-trivial basis in fact to support most of that blunt harshness? 

2. Is it OK for Republican elites to call Democrats criminals on the basis of zero evidence because it is just politics?



This insulting stupidity is about what passes for mainstream 
Republican elite propaganda reasoning

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