Krugthulu (via email, so no link) shares the following chart and commentary:
A normal political party would respond to this problem by trying to solve it. OK, some blame-shifting — attributing rising prices to forces beyond the president’s control or insisting that current problems were caused by the previous administration’s policies — would also be par for the course.
But MAGA is trying to deal with its affordability crisis simply by denying reality. Over the past few days multiple prominent Republicans have gone on TV to insist that gas prices are falling. On Thursday Sen. Tim Scott said that “gas prices continue to come down,” while House Majority Leader Steve Scalise declared that gas is much cheaper than it was “two years ago,” when, he claimed, it was $6 a gallon. The average price then was actually $3.66.
And Pete Hegseth, the Defense secretary, told Congress that gas prices in California were $8 a gallon on the eve of the Iran war; the average was actually $4.64. . . .
So what’s the purpose of these MAGA lies? The answer, of course, is that they’re aimed at an audience of one. Voters know that gas prices are way up and that inflation is elevated, but Donald Trump, swaddled in his Mar-a-Lago bubble, doesn’t. Trump says that we have no inflation. He recently insisted that inflation was 5 percent at the end of Biden’s term and took credit for falling inflation before he took office. So Republicans determined to say whatever he wants to hear — which means everyone still in the party — feel obliged to praise his inflation record, the facts be damned.
Right. In fact, the person occupying the office of President of the United States is a demented lunatic who is living in an alternate reality of delusional grandiosity. This is disconcerting because the situation is completely unpredictable. There's no telling what he'll do next -- maybe he'll suddenly remember about Greenland, who knows? He is surrounded by groveling sycophants and amoral cowards, which includes the entire Republican congressional delegation.
The question is why? Why are all Republicans "determined to say what he wants to hear"? Is Lindsey Graham afraid that Vladimir Putin will reveal to the world that Graham is gay? Maybe, but that doesn't account for the rest of them. They could have been rid of him in 2020. They can get rid of him now -- all it would take is four Representatives and 18 senators. If they don't want to remove him from office, they can effectively neuter him. Is Putin really blackmailing all of them? I really want to know.
3 comments:
Precisely! What the hell is going on here? Is our society so completely rotten from within, that every single Republican in Congress has no other motive than impression management?
These are people with personal lives, probably most of them with wives and husbands and children. It's not just that they have no shame; they seem to have no brain activity.
How could one Russian dictator manage to blackmail every single Republican member of Congress? What fear is so great that it drives these people to completely abdicate every responsibility in their public lives?
The other gobsmacking thing here is this: everything we hear on "the news" is a watered-down version of reality. What actually is going on--that is, the ineffable magnitude of the president's treason--is never spoken of. A president who is murdering his own country at the behest of a malignant, murderous foreign dictator who is blackmailing that very president. No one speaks of it in the mainstream media.
It's not just that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes; the emperor is a treacherous, cancerous infestation of the body politic.
And why aren't Democrats saying this?
Post a Comment