Today there’s a new report of a woman needlessly dying in Texas from complications of a miscarriage. Meanwhile, Republicans have been showing us who they are, big time. They are freaking out over this ad:
When they tell you who they are, believe them:
This week, the fundamentalist Christian pastor Dale Partridge argued in a series of tweets that “in a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction”. In other words, he pits his version of the religion against the constitution, which, since the 19th amendment passed a century ago, guarantees adult citizens the right to vote regardless of sex. He argues that in marriage, the husband annexes and owns his wife’s voice and rights, so that he effectively gets two votes and she gets none. The far-right preacher is not alone in this argument that women should not have the right to participate in public life and act on their views and values.
Jesse Watters, the Fox News personality, has argued that if he found out his wife “was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair”. It violates “the sanctity of our marriage; what else is she keeping from me?” Rightwing agitator Charlie Kirk also got upset about the idea that women might vote according to their agenda and not their husband’s.
The ad was produced by an organization called Vote Common Good, not the Harris-Walz campaign. Here’s another ad featuring men that has gotten less attention:
Even now I don’t think these hyperconservative man-babies understand that women are really alarmed at women dying preventable deaths because it’s more important to Republicans to stop an abortion than to save a woman’s life, even when there’s no hope the pregnancy will produce a live baby. Women more often appreciate that while most pregnancies are routine, lots can go wrong, and go wrong catastrophically. And in some heartbreaking circumstances a pregnancy has to be terminated to save the mother.
Also, the man-babies are pretty much confirming what the right-to-abortion people have been saying for years: They’re not so much interested in saving infants as in controlling women.
See also Why are so many women hiding their voting plans from their husbands by Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian.
As in previous election cycles, people doing door-to-door outreach to voters are encountering men who prevent their wives from even conversing at the door or who believe their registered-Democrat wives are Republicans and women fearful of speaking or of disclosing their party and chosen candidates.
One Pennsylvania man who has been canvassing for several weeks told me: “So many times we … have knocked on doors and when both husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend have come to the door together, after hearing what we were there for so often the man stayed and the woman walked away ‘to do other things’, or the man came out to talk to us. Often the woman would come out by herself and say or whisper: ‘I’m with her and he doesn’t know it.’” Another friend reached a voter by phone, who told her that because her husband wasn’t in the car, she could admit she was voting Democratic.
Which raises the hope that there may very well be a bigger Harris vote than is showing up in the polls. Seriously, if you were to design a candidate who would disgust and repel women voters, you couldn’t do any better than Trump. His “whether the women like it or not” comment yesterday was a clear expression of Trump’s contempt for women, right down to the snear in his voice. I understand that if Harris gets even a small majority of white women, she’s probably going to be POTUS.
Another aspect of this election I haven’t gotten around to writing about is that electing Trump will probably mean handing the federal government over to a pack of billionaire tech bros. Elon Musk is one of the bros; Peter Thiel, who is J.D. Vance’s patron, is another. They have their own agenda, which has little to do with either MAGA or the good of the nation generally. Trump’s brains are fried, and his health issues are not going to go away if he’s elected. The bros will let him sit in the Oval Office as long as he’s pliable and can pose for photos in the chair, I suppose, but he won’t be running anything.
Elon Musk will want to gut safety net programs, which means I could lose my affordable and partly subsidized apartment, not to mention Medicare. Thiel’s agenda is contradictory — a mix of libertarianism and authoritarianism — but whatever it is, he’s putting a lot of money into getting Trumpy candidates elected.
He’s no tech bro, but he’s terrifying: RFK the Lesser expects to be given control of federal agencies that oversee medical care, food, and drugs. He wants to stop all vaccinations, of course.
Four more days.
Update: Hugh Hewitt has resigned from the Washington Post. I take it he couldn’t deal with a conversation in a live event with Jonathan Capehart and Ruth Marcus, and he threw a fit and stormed off, and isn’t coming back. (Please.) This is being reported at several places, but I can’t find any trace of it at the Washington Post. And I fully expect Bezos the Spineless to hire another MAGAzoid to replace him, to keep the MAGA to normie ratio in the editorial section at 27:1.
Seems like its been a while since there was any whining from the Right about billionaire George Soros, pure coincidence I'm sure, or maybe something about "glass houses"?
Righties are incapable of seeing their own hypocrisy. I'm sure they're whining about him somewhere.
The paternalism jibes with my own fundie family relations. Dad in charge, mom a closet alcoholic. And/or a great many other secrets which dad doesn’t want getting out.
I’ve seen far-leftists online ignoring the threats a Trump presidency poses to their kind, because they assume he’ll be an incompetent senile. One has to remind them that it’d be his plutocratic handlers manning the orange puppet strings. All Trump really wants in return is they keep him out of jail while he occasionally collects some pass-go dollars.
On the positive (such as it is) is that a fascist government in America probably couldn’t last for very long. Not in an America which has been continuously conditioned for generations to want it all, want it fast. The steep economic drop predicted by most economists, would be intolerable. I can't think of a single fascist government which did well economically, outside of needing to finance it with stolen Jewish wealth. With most Americans already living paycheck to paycheck, our version of 'Da Joos' are mostly Trump supporters. I think there’d be a lot of gun-toters wanting their freedumb consumerism back.
You're seeing people I'm not seeing. All the lefties I encounter are terrified of Trump II.
This is good to hear. Since I left those places (but not without a fight), I'm seeing a whole lot less of it as well. And I'm feel ing healthier for it. I think they're either the 'gotta burn it all down first' types, or maybe have been Putin-compromised (as in troll farms) to hate everything America does.
Many blogs and influencers have already gone over what has happened elsewhere throughout world history after such events. Me, I'd just like a return to New Deal days when Christianity wasn't dominated by these hyperconservative man-babies.
From Digby…
"And it isn’t just the oldsters who have them worried about Pennsylvania. Here’s some juicy Mar-a-lago gossip from Tara Palmieri at Puck:
Let the bloodletting begin."
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Obviously, I do not know what's happening in Mir-a-lago. But something happened to provoke Trump into the idiotic statement the he will protect women, "whether they like it or not!" Finding out that PA will likely go to Harris because of young women and because of the abortion issue will piss Trump off bigly. Trump is the worst poker player – he absolutely gives away what's in his hand. We'll continue to see eruptions with major tells about the inside info about the status of the race. (Another "tell" today was the threat against Liz. Obviously, she's effective.)
Re "lawfare" in PA: I just heard that the GOP in PA is appealing a decision by the PA Supreme Court regarding provisional ballots to the USSC today. As I understand it, the state supreme court said that a person who realizes their mail-in ballot may be flawed can cast a provisional ballot (which can not count twice) if the mail-in ballot gets kicked on a technicality. The PA Supreme Court merely interpreted PA law and the PA Constitution. IMO, the GOP anticipates that PA could come down to fewer votes than Florida in 2000. Again, my opinion, this supports the suggestion that MAL is in panic mode.
Not that I watch the polls, but I couldn't help but notice that a Times (UK) YouGov poll of the swing states came out yesterday that has Harris up by 4 in Wisconsin and up by 3 in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Those three states probably will get her to 270 electoral votes. YouGov is one of the better polling firms, I understand. She's also up by 1 in Nevada. Trump is up by 1 in North Carolina and Georgia. So we may be okay.
https://www.thetimes.com/world/us-world/article/us-election-2024-swing-state-polls-c8r398mnf
So much changes over time. First time voters today know of only Trump as the top name associated with the republican party. That fact alone, conveyed by a pundit I cannot recall, leaves one up the river of Apocalypse Now. The protagonist, played by Marlon Brando, is far up the river. He answers to no higher authority than himself. Surrounded by sycophants and warriors that he commands, he operates a war within a war. He is obsessed with an abstraction, a feature of war that has addictive properties. It is the horror of war. He is obsessed by it and surrounded within it; his little heaven; full of death, destruction, and uncontested authority. A heaven for one in a sea of horror.
The end may be near in our journey, or we may enter a similar sea of horror. Some twenty years ago, the republican party first time voters have no personal memory about, was all concerned about the fear of Sharia Law. That party is replaced. Fascist fundamentalist theocracy with the heaven for one consumed the old party while they worried about the wrong horror. All we can do is hope real life copies the movie and we escape the pending apocalypse.
It is the curse of interesting times.