The last straw. "It's over"

     “There’s no question the president formed the mob. The president incited the mob. The president addressed the mob. He lit the flame.”

              U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, (R) Wyoming

"Be wild," President Trump had urged. It was time for direct action to put the fear into Republicans.

Don Junior warned Republicans: "We're coming for you." 

President Trump, the Trump sons Don Junior and Eric, and the president's lawyer Rudolph Giuliani were all there to wind up the crowd. The situation was dire. 

Six battleground states had let Trump down when their election officials, legislatures, and judiciary decided that there was no fraud that would change the election result. The federal courts had let him down by ruling against his allegations. His Attorney General had let him down by saying there was no meaningful error in the election. Now his Vice President was letting him down by saying he could not unilaterally throw out votes from states that had chosen Biden. The Representatives and Senators who could choose to void electoral votes cast for Biden were refusing to do it. Good Republicans were letting him down, after all he did for them.

Constitutional government and persuasion had not worked. Elected officials needed to see and hear the direct fury of Trump's people.

Trump's lawyer Rudolph Giuliani told the crowd, "If we are wrong we will be made fools of. But if we are right, a lot of them will go to jail. So let’s have trial by combat!" The crowd roared approval.

Donald Junior thanked the "red-blooded patriotic Americans" in the crowd and urged them to "stand up to the bullshit." Republicans who were not willing to support Trump had a target on them.

   

 Don Junior said, "It should be a message to all the Republicans who have not been willing to actually fight. . . . This isn't their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump's Republican Party. This is the Republican Party that will put America first. If you’re gonna be the zero and not the hero, we’re coming for you and we’re going to have a good time doing it!"

The rally did not target Democrats. Democrats were understood to be thieves who stole the election. Does anybody think Joe Biden could possibly have won eighty million votes, when the alternative was a great president like me, Trump asked? Of course not. Trump and his entourage focused on Republicans--weak, cowardly ones who failed to back up Trump. Republicans had the power to stop Democratic electors from being counted. It was a matter of power to assert anything they wanted. If they said they saw fraud and a landslide victory for Trump, no one could tell them that it wasn't there to be seen. 

Trump said, "We are going to have to fight much harder. And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn't, that will be a sad day for our country because you're sworn to uphold our Constitution. . . . We are going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we are probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them--because you will never take back our country with weakness."

He said supporters should "walk down to the Capitol" to let Republicans know their political future was in Trump's hands. He would be watching to see who was naughty or nice. There was an army coming at them. Eric Trump had tweeted:

     "I will personally work to defeat every single Republican Senator/Congressman who doesn’t stand up against this fraud. "They will be primaried in their next election and they will lose."

The crowd moved to the Capitol.

Broken furniture, broken doors

The Capitol Police force was inexplicably lax. Possibly it was simply incompetence and lack of preparation, although this show of physical force had been announced months in advance. Possibly it reflects some White House influence, communicated through the Department of Homeland Security, to take it easy on the crowd and let them do their work. Mainstream media commentators note that it is inconceivable that a similar body of Black demonstrators would have been allowed to invade the Capitol, break down doors, climb walls, enter offices, and break up a session of Congress without mass arrests. 

Whether it was accidental or intentional, the effect backfired on Trump. It looked bad. It was frightening to the people in the Capitol. "This is a coup attempt,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) tweeted. 

The rioters circulated the Capitol building searching for legislators and were quoted asking, “Where the fuck are they?” They were sheltering in an undisclosed place, getting news that people were breaking down doors and had taken over the House chamber and were standing at the Speaker's lectern and sitting at her office desk with their feet up.

Trump and his entourage were sending a message of physical and political intimidation to Republican legislators. They didn't like it.

The day signaled another giant step in the break from Trump. Mitch McConnell urged Senators to stop claiming the election was stolen. Lindsay Graham called the senate objections to Biden's election "a uniquely bad idea." He said "When it's over, it's over. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are lawfully elected."

Fox & Friends, the morning show that had reliably gushed over Trump, was different this morning. They had moved on. They talked with a frequent guest, attorney Jonathan Turley, about the 25th Amendment. The question on the table was what to do with a president who showed definite signs of manic mental instability and erratic behavior. Trump was dangerous. He had the nuclear codes and might do something crazy. Turley noted the two four-day waiting periods built into the Amendment. It was too late, he said, to exercise the 25h Amendment. We were stuck.

Fox & Friends Steve Doocy shook his head in dismay and worry. Stuck. 

"Mr. President, the data you have is wrong."

Trump:  "The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry. And there's nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you've recalculated." 

Raffensperger:  "Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong."

The Georgia Senate races confirm the Presidential result. Georgia voters split about 50-50, with a tiny edge, apparently, for Democrats.  

No big surprise.

 Fox News is risking its profitability and its position in the market. Fox is reporting news that is unwelcome--maybe even unbelievable to many of its viewers--that apparently, once again, Democrats got just about exactly half the votes in a Georgia election. It's real: People actually vote for Democrats, legitimately, right under the eyes of voting officials. 

Fox wrote it as straight news:

      "Democrats moved a step closer to taking control of the Senate on Wednesday after winning one of two critical runoff elections in Georgia, with Rev. Raphael Warnock projected to defeat incumbent GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler while the second contest remains neck-and-neck. . . . In November, Joe Biden defeated President Trump in Georgia by less than 12,000 votes out of the 5 million cast in the state, winning 16 electoral votes. . . . Loeffler declined to concede the race before Fox News and other media outlets projected Warnock had won and [she] encouraged her supporters to "keep fighting." 

There is an imbedded message here. 

The denoted, overt message is a report that Warnock and Biden won. Simple. The imbedded message is "Hey, wake up! Face reality. Biden won, duh. We aren't arguing that Biden won. We aren't taking the position that Biden won. We are sharing the simple reality that Biden won and so did Warnock, and maybe Ossoff."

Meanwhile, Trump. Trump was busy last night, tweeting. 

And he kept tweeting:

The hardest thing to notice is what is not there. Trump wasn't there, front and center on Fox's web page. We don't see a story by Fox headlined something like: "President Trump protests widespread fraud, cites 'voter dump.'" The ninth story on this morning's opening page is an announcement of the upcoming rally near the White House. It concluded with a wet blanket:

     "The president sang the praises of the vice president, but Trump warned the crowd that Pence could lose his favor if he doesn't do what the president expects. "I hope that our great vice president – our great vice president, comes through for us. He's a great guy. "Trump said. "Of course, if he doesn't come through, I won't like him as much." But regardless of how much the president turns up the volume on his vice president, White House officials told Fox News that Pence will "follow the law" on Wednesday."

Trump is becoming an embarrassment. 

Trump's alternative view of the world persists, but it is no longer reality at Fox. There is a reality owned by Trump, yes, plus die-hards and the gullible, and by partisans who voice it for strategic reasons or out of inertia. It is performance, a show, just like the one Pence will do, implying that he loves Trump, and Trump is right, but that his hands are tied. 

The objectors today are acting in a drama intended to bridge the two realities, the Trump reality and the reality that Republican voters are slow to wake up to, that Trump lost. A parent knows how to let a child down easy: There is no Santa Claus, but he exists as spirit and is more real than ever, and he will keep coming next Christmas and the ones after that. 

Senators Hawley and Cruz have reason to put on the show because it connects them to the populist base. We are seeing the 2024 campaign already. They want to be more Trump-y than Trump, Don Junior, Ivanka, or anyone else. Voters around the world who share emails and Facebook assurances that Trump is a victim of some dark conspiracy of theft will continue to hold on a while. They need not believe Trump himself exactly, but they believe Trump's cause is just. The Trump spirit is as real as ever. 

There are lots of reasons for partisans to hate Democrats and love Trump, and we are at the front end of a long process of watching a new reality settle in. Republican politicians, like Fox News, are hoping to pull their audience along with them. That means ditching Trump but keeping the spirit of Trump.

Trump the man has to go. He has gone wacko.

Trump sold a lie, really, really well.

     "We built the greatest economy in the history of the world."

              Donald Trump

Trump sold the idea that he turned around an economy in carnage. Trump was persuasive.

Trump sold the idea that businessman-Trump saved an economy spiraling into depression.

The stock market did, in fact, do well these past four years. However, it did not do as well as it did during the same period of Obama's presidency. 

Theoretically, Trump had a huge advantage in a matchup of records comparing himself to Barack Obama. As he announced in his inauguration speech, Trump inherited "carnage," and therefore presumably an economy with low starting point numbers. Obama, theoretically, had a difficult comparison, since he was taking over from a pro-business Republican, one with a MBA from the Harvard Business School, no less. After all, Republicans are supposed to be good for business.

People who remember economic circumstances twelve years ago will remember an economy in collapse as Obama came to office. De-regulation of banks and a search for yield in bundles of mortgages, unleashed the financial industry's ability to self-destruct and to bring the economy down with it. Deregulation under Clinton and George W. Bush allowed a feeding-frenzy of foolish behaviors. The economy recovered over the eight years of the Obama presidency.

Trump sold this idea

Trump inherited a growing economy and a steady trend of declining unemployment. Trump was masterful in selling the idea that he inherited misery and that, suddenly and magically, two months into his term of office, he made things great. 

This was the single biggest marketing success of Trump's presidency. He sold the idea that America had been losing big and then, under him, it was winning big. The idea has plausibility, or "truthiness" to use the word this blog cited recently. It seems like it could be true, indeed ought to be true. He is a Republican businessman, so of course, the economy would do well. The single biggest marketing malpractice by Obama was to have been largely silent while Trump sold this idea. The economy was recovering but Obama and Biden saw the glass as half-empty, a very incomplete work in progress. They saw that manufacturing jobs were moving offshore. They knew "rustbelt" manufacturing states were hurting. They knew things were better, but not yet good so they feared to talk about the progress they had made. In that void, Trump defined the narrative: Half empty.

Then, understanding the value of relentless optimism he promptly claimed economic victory shortly into his term, and branded himself the hero. Look how full the glass is now! Optimism is infectious. Happy days were here again.

This narrative of economic success is a foundation for Republican messaging going forward. Trust Republicans with the economy. Everything was great until COVID, and blame that on China, not Trump. Moreover, Democrats and public health nannies made everything worse with their freedom-killing masks and shutdowns. Besides, the only people who die were going to die soon anyhow.

That is the big story out there. Is it real?

Stock market. The reality is that under Trump--in an era of extraordinary fiscal stimulus and monetary easing--the stock market is up, almost up as much as under Obama in the same period.

Trump's stock market lagged Obama's, even throughout the pre-COVID period. Does that surprise? Trump sold the opposite story, a turnaround story,  and that is the one that stuck.

Unemployment. This is a graph this blog has displayed in the past, a chart of the unemployment rate for the past twelve years:

Trump did not bring a turnaround from carnage. We saw a steady, unbroken trend of decline in the unemployment rate. Then COVID hit and things got bad.

Trump is a promoter, a salesman. He has a gift of seeing what he wants to see, of believing what he is saying while he is saying it, and therefore selling without reservation. His conviction communicates. 

The hour-long call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger illustrates why Trump was successful in communicating an economic narrative belied by readily available data. Trump's voice communicated that he absolutely, without reservation, believed he won the election in Georgia. It is not clear whether to feel sorry for Trump or to be in awe of the expression of blind, unwavering faith in something belied by evidence to the contrary. Data that conflicted with his belief simply could not be true. We observe Trump grasping at straws, citing rumor after rumor. It did not penetrate. 

This has legal consequence. Trump reveals a shocking mental incapacity, but not criminal intent. Criminal intent would require a desire to persuade Raffensperger to cheat, which is, of course, what Raffensperger and other election officials think Trump is doing. They are indignant and offended. But Trump cannot understand that they could administer an election with an impossible result, i.e. that somehow more people voted for Biden. Trump is blind to how a majority of people perceive him. He has the cheering crowds. People around him affirm him. Surely most people love him.

He can sell and be believed because he has sold himself.

Republicans will regret this

Republicans are winning the battle of undermining faith in the election.

They won't like where this leads.

Trump and Republicans are doing an excellent job of weakening Biden. If that is their sole goal, they are succeeding. 

It isn't their sole goal.

Biden needed a honeymoon, and he won't get it. Biden does not create hope and excitement the way that Reagan, Obama, and Trump could. People with ability to connect emotionally create political consensus and movement where none existed before. Biden does not have that gift. His best hope was that his old friends and colleagues would want him to succeed so that the country will succeed. 

Biden needed every bit of the trappings and power of the office itself to lead, and that has been taken away. Biden's cannot achieve his goal of bipartisan action on infrastructure, on COVID vaccine distribution, on COVID economic mitigations, on national mask-wearing, on health care expansion, on the environment, on taxes, on everything. GOP officeholders want Biden to fail, or more exactly, they cannot be seen by Trump or Republican voters to be helping Biden succeed. Bipartisanship gets you a primary opponent.

There is a corollary and consequence to this partisan victory. Election reform.

Trump succeeded in making "election fraud" top of mind for GOP voters. Trump argues that states--even ones with strongly partisan Republican governors and election officials--are not to be trusted. He says they are run by dishonest or incompetent people and results should be thrown out. That is a big statement with big implications. The issue on the table today and tomorrow, with over a 120 Representatives and Senators signing on, is a demand that Congress--not the voters, not the states, not the electoral college--select the president by deciding which electoral votes are legitimate. 

First off, this is a direct slap to voters everywhere, especially to those in affected swing states. Republican leaders are saying that after asking the opinion of voters in a state, and voters suffering through the commercials, the text messages, the door knocking, them paying the expense of an election, and then getting a result, Republicans in Congress overrule their vote. That is the sort of thing that messes up relationships, personal and political. There is no nice way to spin this insult to voters, and it is being done to the voters of the battleground states. This will fester.

Republicans are advocating replacing the electoral college and claiming Congress has authority to over-rule it. The electoral college gives extra weight to the small and thinly settled mountain and plains states. Residents there are acutely aware of their advantage, in part because California complains loudly about it. Now Republicans are attempting to declare population-weighted Congress to be the body that chooses presidents. Congress is not held in high esteem, with consistent favorability ratings in the low teens. It has no credibility as a true reflection of the popular will. Congress is understood to be the sewer end of the swamp. Who taught Americans that? Experience, augmented by Trump saying so. 

Click: Republicans realize the precedent

The notion of this country being a federation of states rather than a single national government has been a bedrock of Republican thinking. In this era, Democrats have been more comfortable with the notion of a single national polity, particularly as regards elections. Republicans have advocated states' rights. Let each state handle elections on its own, they say. The tradition in southern states--now mostly red--to create roadblocks to voting by the "wrong" people--i.e. Blacks--is a multi-century project, now a matter of subterfuge and resistance. Southern states like doing it their way.

Republican attacks on state elections are the ideal foundation for federalizing national elections. After all, Trump says state elections are filled with fraud. Congress demands to check and approve the states' election work. Great. That means national rules and procedures to set the standards of wary legislators. Tell states exactly what is expected of them. That means national rules on felon voting, on residency, on absentee ballots, on dates, on voter ID, on paper backup, on purges of voter rolls. National rules would tend to expand voter access--a Democratic goal. 

National standards would also give impetus to a national popular vote for selection of presidents. After all, with good, credible national standards, the vote in each area is equally cast, which makes more plausible some Constitutional work-around like the popular vote interstate compact. Under current partisan voting patterns, a popular vote would bring landslide elections to Democrats. 

Democrats would be wise not to reflexively oppose the implications of Trump's critique, although opposition would be their instinct. The better long-term Democratic strategy is for President Biden and Democrats to agree that we need the radical reforms that Trump's concerns require. Put Democrats on the side of people voting; let Republicans try to defend over-ruling voters. Republicans have been saying to count every legal vote. Good for them. Good for Democrats.

The threat that Democrats would be OK with empowering Congress to decide the elections--or better yet that VP Kamala Harris has the power to discard Republican electoral votes--is a reminder to Republicans that election reform is better than an election hijacked by Congress or a VP, which is currently being advocated by Republicans. Trump has paved the way toward national elections and perhaps a national election-day holiday, the better to accommodate Trump's preferred way of voting, in-person. GOP voters are demanding it. Good.

This is a big win for Democrats if they see it as the opportunity it is. 

Heck with elections. Who needs them?

     "You would be amazed at the questions you can get wrong and still score 100 [on an IQ test.] Half of the people in this country are not even that smart."

        Recent comment to this blog

Who should choose the president? Maybe not voters.

We aren't that smart???

Readers should not feel insulted. The nation's founders felt the same way, 

Fear of voters is why the original Constitution provided that only the House of Representatives would be chosen by direct popular vote, and there was no provision for initiatives or referenda. Meanwhile, state legislatures chose senators, electors chose presidents, and presidents and the senate chose judges. It was a republic, with democratic power diffused through representatives.

The founders did not trust democracy. Neither do many Americans. 

The current focus is on Republican efforts to disregard an election but a slice of the Democratic electorate has shown skepticism of its own. The DNC preferred Hillary to Sanders in 2016 and in 2020 Buttigieg, Klobuchar, O'Rourke, and Bloomburg all dropped out and endorsed Biden. Many Sanders supporters considered these acts "ganging up" on Sanders. They called the process rigged. But in the end, Democrats unified under a candidate whose legitimacy was based on a foundation of having won the most votes. 

Republicans are positing much different ideas, ideas closer to the position of the founders: The popular vote cannot be trusted. 

Gohmert: VP can decide on his own

Vice President and House of Representives choose. Louis Gohmert's lawsuit advanced the premise that the Vice President, as presiding officer of the Senate, can use his authority to recognize some state electoral certifications and not others. He says Vice President Pence has an obligation not to recognize ballots from six states that voted for Biden, thus causing neither Biden nor Trump to have a majority of electoral votes. That would throw the election to the House of Representatives. The premise is that the Vice President, through the power of selective recognition, has discretion and can use his own judgement about which electors are legitimate.

 

Congress Chooses. The lawsuit by Senators Cruz, and about a dozen others makes the claim that the House and Senate have authority to investigate, deliberate, and decide the merits of competing slates of electors on whatever basis each member finds persuasive.  Elections in the states are not dispositive, Congress' decisions are. The House and Senate independently decide which electors are legitimate, decided by majority vote of their members. If the two chambers agree, their choice becomes president. If they split and do not agree, the Speaker of the House becomes president.

Cruz: Congress can decide on its own

This would be a quasi-parliamentary system, except that a president once elected has a set term of office unless impeached and removed. This system would make Congressional districting even more fraught and consequential, and incentives to partisan gerrymandering would increase. One would be choosing both a legislator and presidential selector.

State Legislatures choose. Trump and multiple Republicans have asserted, and the Hawley lawsuit asserts now, that state legislatures have constitutionally-given unalienable plenary power to decide their state's electors. Legislatures in every state arranged for a vote of the people, but legislatures are not bound by that vote. They can change their mind at any time on any basis. In the current instance, there is a Republican majority legislature in key states that ended up voting for Biden. But so what? Legislatures can exercise their own judgement. Trump is urging them to do so.

Giuliani: Legislatures can decide on their own

The elections were close. State legislative districts are partisan and gerrymandered. Their own district's voters may well be delighted their legislator exercised "common sense" and voted for the right candidate. The net result would be that general election campaigns for president would take place primarily in the selection of state legislatures. This would dramatically increase the incentives to gerrymander state legislative districts. 

Martial Law. Former National Security Advisor Flynn openly suggested it. Trump has repeatedly tweeted that people should show up in mass on January 6 and "Be wild." In the face of major disruptions, general strikes, shootings, bombs, and arson, the Insurrection Act could give legal basis for a general takeover of democratic institutions. 

The US military signaled that they are not interested in participating in this, so it is unlikely to happen in 2020, but Trump placed it on the political table of possibilities. It is no longer "unthinkable." A Secretary of Defense and top generals who voiced "grave concern" regarding domestic disorder could move this from thinkable-but-no into a necessity-for-public-safety-yes. It would not take many people to trigger panic. A few hundred committed people in DC and other cities who placed bombs of the Oklahoma City variety, perhaps in subways, tunnels, airplanes, and major buildings, might spook public opinion enough that people would choose order over democratic process, especially if millions of armed partisans were parading in the streets. 

Trump showed America that we are open to anti-democratic government.

A significant majority of Republicans support Trump's assertion that the election was stolen and that he is right to ignore the vote. It did not require judicial validation, only an adamant claim of fraud by the losing candidate. Voters want the partisan result, not the democratic process.

What about Democrats?  Could Speaker Pelosi use a Democratic majority to refuse to seat any Republican Members? Would Democrats approve of that as payback and fair play political hardball? No one has proposed that, and no Democrat has Trump's charisma or authoritarian inclination. At this moment, using power not to seat opponents is a Republican effort, not a Democratic one.

The actions of officeholders are not as salient for the future as is the fact that a majority of the GOP voters accept ignoring the election. That makes everything possible, if not this cycle, the next one. If it is possible, and on the table, it may become politically necessary. Otherwise, one is a RINO, a Republican in Name Only.

Portland Mayor Finally Wakes Up

     "My good-faith efforts at de-escalation have been met with scorn by Antifa and anarchists bent on destruction. It's time to push back harder."

      Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler

No. It's past time. Way past time. 

Portland's Mayor Ted Wheeler seems to have discovered something that has been glaringly obvious to people in his city, state, and country since the beginning of June. He spoke at a New Year's Day press conference.  He seemed to realize, finally, that Portland had gotten out of control. "There are just some people on this planet who are bent on criminal destruction. There are just some people who want to watch the world burn," he said. 

Well, yeah.

Portland has had nightly confrontations since the beginning of June, when the protests over the killing of George Floyd began. The protests gave cover for street violence, arson, looting, vandalism and police confrontations. Yes, Mayor Wheeler, there are people who not only want to watch the world burn, they are burning it, burning Portland, your city, and under your watch. 

New Year's Eve

Hoodlums have been taking advantage of Portland's residents and its government. America has been watching them for seven months. Americans of all political stripes have been telling Mayor Wheeler that there was a profound difference between peaceful protests over injustice and the behavior of people who were using the protests as cover, and in some cases moral justification, for vandalism, arson, and hooliganism. I watched Democratic Senator Ron Wyden say it early, repeatedly, and forcefully. Peaceful protest are fine, an all-American activity. But put a stop to the violence, he said. Violence is not peaceful protest.

The arson, vandalism, and violence continued night after night. It went beyond tiresome; it became incomprehensible. Disorder in Portland was making life miserable for residents anywhere near it, and residents who could stay away from it, did so, which created dead zones. Those  became magnets for more violence. The disorder was destroying neighborhoods and businesses that had given Portland its charm and "livability." Good, old, friendly, "weird" Portland was becoming dangerous.

Portland had become the national poster child of Democratic incompetence. In Republican messaging it was the undeniable documentation that the public could not trust Democrats to protect citizens. Trump's rallies and GOP ads nationwide had a message: Look at Portland. Look at the fires, the vandalism. Look at the riots. Democrats do nothing. They are afraid to offend rioters. They think destroying statues of George Washington and burning up businesses is racial justice. If you want your town to go up in flames like Portland, vote for Biden.

At his press conference Mayor Wheeler asked himself out loud, "Why? This is the hardest of all questions to answer. Why would a group of largely White, young and some middle-aged men destroy the livelihoods of others struggling to get by? It's the height of selfishness."

The answer was readily apparent to people across the political spectrum. Peaceful protests had been hijacked by bad actors. Some of those vandals were completely un-political and opportunistic; the protests provided cover to act out, steal things, and get into fights. It was complicated by the fact that some people adopted political rhetoric and moral justification; the world is screwed up so break things to force change. The nihilism of frustration is a theme this blog has seen voiced in several guest posts this week. Nihilism of the right has a supposed-upstanding prosperous, White, retired physician advocating revolution in the form of discarding a election. Nihilism of the left finds frustration in the corporate and government institutions that entrench wealth, causing people to want to re-make capitalism. 

Mayor Wheeler had allowed the claims of moral justification to violence, and the muddle confused peaceful protests with violent vandalism and it muted efforts to restore order. He did not articulate well enough that the vandalism and violence was not bringing racial justice; it was delaying it. 

John Flenniken lives at the edge of Portland and has spent a career in teaching and working for the electric utility in buildings in downtown Portland. He is up close to the situation in Portland. I consider him to be a political liberal, and therefore his voice of frustration over the problems in Portland have special salience. He isn't taking direction from Trump or Fox News. He is living life in Portland. Liberals don't like street vandalism, arson, destruction of property. They don't like sidewalks littered with human waste. He has felt frustration over what has been happening in Portland.

Guest Post by John Flenniken

The last straw.

So Ted Wheeler says it’s the last straw, this latest spat of vandalism and violence. Well that’s just great! He’s about 4 years late in this declaration. I know two business owners, one a jeweler in downtown and another who owns a unique boutique Portland-weird coffee house, both of whom are out of business, and most likely will never reopen because of the continual vandalism and street violence. If you combine their years of successful business operation they span almost 150 years of operation.

I have attended, as a favor to the coffee house owner, a fact-finding meeting on the homeless situation, petty crime and vandalism around her business that harassed her employees and customers on occasions to the point where they had to hire private security for their staff. These two long-time successful business owners felt the city was not listening to their concerns nor responding to clear and continual threats and vandalism. The downtown jewelry store had to be open by-appointment-only to their boarded-up shop in the main core downtown business district, but few customers were willing to risk being downtown.

I also have relatives that served on the Portland Police force, but are now retired. My retired relatives stated that if they picked up a vandal or homeless person assaulting an employee or a citizen, their reaction time was slowed by cuts to 911 personnel, caused by the need to hire more officers and provide more resources to handle the rise in serious misdemeanors and minor felonies. Walking beats in the core are gone. The mounted officer patrol in Old Town is disbanded. The police task force concentration on gun violence is disbanded. The police presence is low throughout the city at the moment. If they did make an arrest, the person was often released with low or no bail if the jail was too crowed or the District Attorney’s would not prosecute.

Serious problems now facing Portland are magnified by the COVID pandemic and resulting restrictions declared by Governor Brown, whose restrictions are mostly ignored  by the small group of hell-raisers who spend most of their time on the street. Incarcerating too many leads to overcrowding and virus-spread. Overcrowding is against court orders to limit the number of people that can be in one cell.

Customers and clients seldom venture into the city to do business or dine or attend a show. The city is struggling to regain it’s footing. 

We have a new slate of city commissioners ready to tackle the problems, and I am beginning to have a glimmer of hope. Possibly the city, at long last, has come to a stark awareness that what is happening now has absolutely nothing to do with peaceful protesting.

Trolling Democrats. Oh, what fun!

Conspiracy accusations don't need to be "true."  They do need to be outrageous and memorable.

Stick Democrats with denying their candidate has a side-business running a pedophile brothel out of the basement of a pizza joint.  Ha!  

Let Democrats try to prove they don't kill children to drink their blood. Ha!

Even some smart people buy into the con. They want to believe. 

Comedian Stephen Colbert invented the word "truthiness" and it became the Miriam-Webster "Word of the Year" in 2006. Truthiness is a seemingly truthful quality that is claimed for something not because of supporting facts or evidence but because of a feeling that it is true or a desire for it to be true. 

Truthiness is successful political entertainment.

Yesterday's post drew an unusual number of comments, mostly off-line directly to me. I was criticized for giving space to the retired doctor who is sticking so strongly to his conviction of election fraud and Biden's illegitimacy that he justifies sedition as both patriotic and Christian. He would install a dictator rather than believe our election and judicial system. What's wrong with him, people asked me? What kind of whack-job does Oregon allow to practice medicine, asked out- of-state readers?

The writer of the guest post is not stupid nor senile. He is deeply caught up in a web of political entertainment created by provocateurs on the political right. It is a popular and profitable business model in cable and social media. Conspiracy accusations have been around forever, but they got an accelerant via talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh, then Fox News, and in the last decade in social media. Limbaugh's extraordinarily successful show began with a big element of hi-jinx and humor with over-the-top name-calling and political insults. He knew he was being naughty, a provocative shock-guy, but people tuned in. In recent years, his show emphasized political trolling; less humor, more outrage. 

Donald Trump mimicked that style. It caught the wave of rising populist spirit in GOP voters, who were deeply suspicious of "facts" as delivered to them by supposed experts and institutions. "Birtherism"--Trump's relentless accusation that Obama was born in Kenya and his Hawaii birth documentation was all fake--was trolling Obama. It was teasing. It was school-yard name-calling, a form of bullying, but GOP partisans liked it.Trolling works. Polls showed that Republican voters bought it. Republicans wanted to believe Obama was a fraud, so they did.

Fox opinion hosts, plus political entertainers Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Dinesh D'Souza and many others, make accusations, often in the form of questions of suspicions. Tens of millions of people tune in every day to this trolling. Did Hillary Clinton kill Vince Foster? How about the pedophile brothel she runs out of the pizza shop? What about Hunter Biden? 

Click: Clinton murder victims

Trolling was the underlying purpose of Trump's famous phone call to Ukraine. He wanted to be able to say that Ukraine found something suspicious to investigate. They would be just asking questions. Trolling Democrats normally has no political cost. Republican partisans love it; Democrats hate it; Republicans love that Democrats hate it.

Democratic commentators assert and hope that Republicans will regret their growing association with Q-anon and its suite of conspiracies. That would be true if there were a limit to what accusations voters believe about Democrats. There may not be. Q-anon conspiracies are going mainstream. Q-anon accusations start with an over-arching premise that Democrats are led by a Satan-worshiping cabal of pedophiles who kill and eat children to extract blood from them to extend their lives. The cabal includes top Democratic politicians, Hollywood entertainers, religious figures including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama, and the omni-present Jewish conspirator, George Soros. Under the conspiracy, the "Deep State" Democrats created COVID to derail Trump. Bill Gates was in on it, hoping to profit from creating and selling vaccines. 

They are confounded in this work by Trump, the hero.

Some people are acting on these beliefs. The Nashville bomber may have believed one of the conspiracies, that powerful Democrats including Barack Obama are extra-terrestrials-lizard-beings disguised as humans. 

Do Republican voters believe this? Some do, some don't. Many believe some of it;  not all of it. It sounds suspicious--suspiciously right. It has truthiness. 

If the lizard part seems a little farfetched, then maybe the part about Democrats working with liberal Jews to suck blood from children is possible. That idea has been around for centuries. That sounds like the kind of thing Democrats would do--George Soros, at least--even if there isn't exactly proof of it. He has the money to pull it off.

In the context of the many conspiracies circulating, the election fraud conspiracy troll is comparatively plausible. Maybe Democrats changed tens of millions of votes right under the eyes of Republican election officials, confounding auditors, creating paper ballots that match registrations and getting Republican election officials from County Clerks to Governors to deny it.The Deep State could have arranged it. That has truthiness. 

Republican officeholders see a mindset and are loathe to contest it. They don't want to be outflanked in a primary election. Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri looking ahead to 2024, is not an idiot. It would insult him to say that he believes what he is doing in challenging the electoral vote. He is being strategic, playing to the base and protecting his conspiratorial-right flank. He doesn't say he believes the conspiracy; only that it could have happened, maybe, and it should be investigated because 75 million people did vote for Trump.

Click

Meanwhile Ben Sasse, the senator from Nebraska, also looking ahead to 2024, is not an idiot either. He is risking the other path, accusing Hawley of hurting Republicans with a dangerous, false accusation. Possibly with Trump sidelined, GOP voters will distinguish among the conspiracies, and assign the election fraud to the non-credible lizards and blood-drinking category.

Sasse has the harder path. He is choosing the Fox news reality and not the Fox opinion reality, nor the reality that spreads on social media. He is betting that without Trump, GOP opinion oscillates back toward more credible troll themes, and not one that requires hundreds of Republicans being in on the corrupt election conspiracy.

Conspiracies are good business for conservative media. Biden is boring but the conspiracies are not. 

Yesterday's post was a matter of scorn, pity, and disbelief by many readers, but the author is not a big outlier. Believing is seeing.  Election fraud has enough truthiness for that guest post writer to justify overthrowing an election and ending the republic. And it isn't like he asserted that lizard-people stole the election, just hundreds of Republicans in the Deep State helped Democrats do it. That's more credible.