This is Charlie Sykes, who spent nearly thirty years as the "Rush Limbaugh of Wisconsin", informing Bulwark listeners yesterday that, holy crap, there's a Republican voter problem everywhere in the country! And this is something "people tend to underestimate."
"Well this is an important distinction, um, because I think that a lot of people think well.. well... they're [Republican elected officials] afraid of a Tweet from Donald Trump. Well there are no more Tweets... they're afraid of Donald Trump. But, and, yes, that's true. But what they're really afraid of...they're afraid of the base because the crazy goes really deep in the Republican Party right now. It is the voter problem. And yes, there's a Trump problem and Mar-a-Lago. But there's also a base problem everywhere in the country. And the radicalization and the crazification of grassroots Republicans is truly... I mean, it's a... it's a thing. And, uh, even if Donald Trump disappears it is still out there. And... and... and... that's something that I think people tend to underestimate."
Some people knew, Charlie.
Some people have known for decades, never underestimated the danger, and spoke about it loudly and clearly. From the last paragraphs of Steve Gilliard's 2007 New York Times' "The Lives They Lived" year-end obituary retrospective:
...It was a life both short and loud. What began with a bad cough just after Valentine’s Day became a spiraling infection that ravaged Gilliard’s vulnerable heart and kidneys, and he spent most of his last four months hospitalized. The identities he kept separate for most of his 42 years collided in the days after he died; the few dozen mostly white bloggers who came to Harlem for the funeral saw for the first time the stark urban setting of Gilliard’s childhood, while his parents and relatives groped to understand what kind of work he had been doing at that computer and why scores of people had come so far to see him off. They must have been confused when Gilly’s online pals, sickened by the way some right-wing bloggers were gloating over his death, advised them not to disclose where he was buried, out of fear that someone might deface the site. The grave, like Gilliard himself, is known only to a few.
Some people knew, Charlie.
And they warned of the terrible danger facing our nation over and over again.
Maybe you shouldn't have spent your entire career calling those people crackpots telling them in no uncertain terms to sit down and shut up.
4 comments:
In evaluating the danger the question is how many of them are just bullshit cowards. Most. I read a piece in Slate (it was a long time ago, as you will see) about Ted Nugent getting taken as a guest to an Obama SOTU presentation. Ted spoke of how naked he felt not being able to carry a gun or even a knife. And, lest anyone forget, Ted had been invited to participate in a decades long massacre of non white people, which he declined to attend. I'm not entertaining the idea that he was too principled. He was afraid. Most of these are people, like Ted, whose sense of courage is not a thing that resides in them, but is a piece of iron they hang on their belt. There are some who are dangerous. We need to understand how many.
It is always my initial response to republicans by reflexively assuming What ever they say they are doing. It is not what they tell you they are actually doing.
Lile Tax cuts to improve the economy and wealth of Americans via Trickle down.
Reflex. It never trickles down. It always adds to the Debt. They always return to tell us all the things we cannot afford anymore afterwards and it always has to go to the wealthy.
I have always wanted just for once to try "Trickle Up" tax cuts for the economy.
Let's nite that next week marks 10 years since Scott Walker "dropped the bomb" on teachers and other public employees in Wisconsin, as part of a plan to "divide and conquer" the state.
And who was the state's biggest cheerleader, denouncing "union thug" protestirs and making up garbage to make those protestors seem violent to low-info listeners when none of that was happening in reality?
Yep, Charlie-tan Sykes. Reading lines fed to him by both Walker and the Bradley Foundation.
Trump used the exact same alternate-reality, resentment-based rhetoric that Walker and Sykes used I Wisconsin in 2011. Heck, Reince Priebus rode his success in Wisconsin to being the head of the RNC!
Using that memory superpower again. Unfair screams from Hannity to Kevin McCarthy echo across the partisan Rubicon.
Perhaps in GOP world What Reince and Walker call success in their party can only be calculated by where they are now and what damaged they perpetrated.
If they value harm to others and how long it lasts. Then they were successful. Because if it be conservative superior policies to improve things. I see it as failure to their beliefs and principals.
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