As We Dance on the Razor’s Edge of This Fateful Election...

...people and institutions are reacting according to their nature.  

By hook or by crook, should Trump end up back in the White House in January, we Liberals know exactly how screwed we are.  Trump 2.0 will be the Republican Hell Train we have been warning about for 40 years arriving, at last, at its final destination.  

To the place where it has been headed all along.

We Murrica-hatin', terrorist-lovin', baby-killin' Libtards knew we had targets on our backs once the blogosphere took off and we found we could tell Bush/Cheney (and the Republican filth and legacy media stooges who gave us Bush/Cheney) exactly what we thought of them in big, bold, public letters.

Along the way from there to here some of us died, some of us disappeared, and others dropped the charade and showed us that they had never been one of us at all.  But for the rest of us, we had a pretty good idea what we signed up for.  

Under a Trump 2.0, the suffering of us small fry would be relatively small, but we'd feel it.  Little things like, say, the heart meds you need are suddenly no longer covered by your insurance.  So sorry!   They might be covered under TrumpCare, but you'll have to talk to your local Loyalty Office about getting on that plan.

On the other hand, the fact that we small fry have been pariahs for so long and so aggressively kept out of the national political conversation may work to our advantage.  After all, in the 20 years that we've been blogging we have proven decisively that  A) we have been right about the Right all along and, B) no one pays us the slightest heed.  And anyway, how far up the Enemies List can we be when we've been cursed, dismissed as rude pests, and blocked by Tim Miller and Matthew Dowd and Tom Nichols and Charlie Sykes and Glenn Greenwald.?

To be held in contempt by all of those and so many more?  Who knows?  With those credentials, in a new regime I might be to wrangle an ambassadorship!   

On the other, other hand, this is a very big country, and with local media being decimated and major media corporations knuckling under to a rising fascist party --

-- in that possible future it will likely fall to the small fry to get the word out about what's really happening to anyone who cares to listen.  So now might be a good time for all of you to archive your writing on a hard drive.  Y'know, just in case.

So much for the small fry like me.  

The suffering of the larger fry will be appreciably worse.  

You may see faces you know, voices you trusted, on teevee, now disheveled, gaunt and hollow-eyed, recanting their previous criticism of Il Douche.  Or they may just be gone one day, leaving no forwarding address.  Or perhaps they'll find a new base of operations in some congenial foreign land, although congenial foreign lands may quickly become less congenial when a nuclear-armed fascist government declares that harboring an Enemy of the Patriotic American People is something Il Douche does not look kindly on.   

Obviously, I'm not saying any of this will happen.  And I'm sure every one of us is doing everything in our power to make sure this is not our future.  But we writers and we copious readers have the curse of clear and vivid imagination, and this all really might happen. The numbers are so close that the future has become truly unknowable.  

And when the stakes are this high and the outcomes are this genuinely unpredictable, the bet hedging begins in earnest

Right off the bat, everyone knows that, if Kamala Harris wins, she isn't going to avenger herself on crap shacks like The Washington Post, or stage live show trials featuring True Conservative (tm) pettifoggers like Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat (despite my fervent wishes to the contrary,).  And crap shacks like the Post and elite slugs like Stephens and Douthat know it: under a Harris administration, those awful people and institutions will be free to go right on being as awful as they are now. 

Probably worse!

But under a Trump 2.0 administration?

Oh my friends, that is a very different animal indeed, which is why the cowardly, the careerist and the feckless are hedging the hell out of their bets now.

The L.A. Times -- 

The Wrap is reporting the LATimes had also planned a "Case Against Trump" series to run alongside its Kamala Harris endorsement before the owner quashed it: https://t.co/sk6A6RTpjG

— Eric Deggans at NPR (@Deggans) October 25, 2024

-- and the Washington Post --

Today would be a good day to cancel your Washington Post subscription. @wapo will not make an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election: Democracy versus Fascism & they don't want to weigh in after 36 yrs despite their Democracy Dies in Darkness sloganhttps://t.co/cokGFw81ny pic.twitter.com/M1hzGHSsLB

— Fly Sistah 🪷 (@Fly_Sistah) October 25, 2024

-- both want to make it abundantly clear to any future Ministry of Truth officers that they never officially took sides against the fascists.  

As if that will save them.

 

If you were wondering about the endorsement policy of our local Republican rag, they abandoned their tradition of endorsing candidates four years ago, because of, y'know, "polarization" and such.  Back when they went from being our local Republican rag to a Gatehouse Media gutted corpse of a Republican rag:

There are few community recognition programs with the esteem of the First Citizen. We are proud to continue the tradition.

And as we celebrate the kick-off of one tradition, we are ending another — the SJ-R will not endorse candidates for office.

That decision was not made lightly.

Political endorsements have been a tradition for many news organizations. However, they are a holdover of days past, and I am not convinced that any endorsement we made would influence you to vote for a particular candidate. In 2008, when the country was not nearly as polarized as it is today...

The SJ-R is not alone in its decision to move away from endorsements. News organizations across the country have made similar choices. The Dallas Morning News announced earlier this year that they would not endorse a candidate for president. The Peoria Journal Star and The Indy Star are among those who also will not make endorsements this election....

While our approach is changing, it fits today's political climate.

As always, thank you for reading the SJ-R.

Leisa Richardson is executive editor of The State Journal-Register and Lincoln Courier.

 

This week, as we have have already discussed, The New York Times' Bret Stephens went to truly ridiculous lengths to hide his terse, grudging endorsement of Kamala Harris under an avalanche of tarted up MAGA talking points about how incompetent and featherweight she is, how she's probably a Sekrit Commie Sleeper Cell and how, if Trump wins, it certainly won't be because the Republican base are a mob of bigots and imbeciles.  Heavens no!  They're all awesome!  The salt of the Earth!

The fault would lie with all of us god damned Liberals calling them bigots and imbeciles.  

And when the mob comes for him, he can calm them and turn them away by waving all of that in their faces.

As if that will save him.
 

And finally there is the case of Ross Douthat: Stephens' fellow True Conservative (tm) at The New York Times'. 

You remember Ross Douthat, right?

Douthat goes even further down Vichy Highway than Stephens by declaring that Harris is so terribly unfit for the presidency that he cannot bestow upon her his meaningless endorsement.  And for reasons I will leave it to you all to chew over out for yourselves, our Never Trump "allies" felt that two weeks out from this fateful election was the optimal time to elevate the petty, whiny opinions of their very good friend Ross.

Douthat argues that since Liberals have gone insane in the past five years, he cannot in good conscience support Kamala Harris.  In support of his thesis, Douthat cites wildly goofy nonsense like crazy Liberals are responsible for things like [no kidding] increased traffic deaths during COVID so, y'know, he just can't get onboard.  This is someone who has left the bottom of the barrel far behind that he is now scraping at the Earth's asthenosphere for excuses to keep his True Conservative (tm) skirts clean and hold himself aloof from making the only and obvious choice.

So when a phalanx of enforcers from Stephen Miller's Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice show up at The Bulwark's door, they can wave this interview in their faces as proof that they were committed to making sure Both Sides were fairly represented.  

And when they come around to Douthat's house to "interview" him, he can wave the very same interview in their faces as proof that he he was an obedient and loyal citizen who never took the side of the dirty Commie Marxist Left!

As if that will save them.

Burn The Lifeboats