The faceoff is over the Constitution.#
A lesson I've learned from recent successes in blogging. You must always think of your blog as if you were starting it now, not in the past. The world is different. There was no Twitter in 1994. Twitter wasn't usable until last year with the switch to 280 chars. Facebook was used for serious discourse (somewhat) until a couple of years ago. Email is resurging as a publishing medium. People are still thirsty for stories that relate to their lives. But getting into their minds with all the competition requires constant creativity. Not showmanship.#
NYT reporters are supposed to care about facts, yes? Why do they report that Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine was trying to “turn up damaging information about Democrats.” Not true. They just wanted an announced dramatization of an “investigation.” That’s all they needed or sought. Probably because there was no actual damaging information. That’s the depravity of Repubs. They manufacture insinuation, not information. And the complicity of the NYT for accepting their lies as fact.#
It’s a good thing Google discontinued their RSS reader product. Had it continued, they would likely be torturing RSS the same way they are HTML and HTTP. Had they kept it they could have siloed podcasting, for example.#
Yesterday I wrote about the need for a Marshall Plan for Republicans. I didn't explain what the original Marshall Plan was. After the Allies won WWII, the US did something unusual for a victor. We rebuilt the country we defeated, Germany. We didn't have to. In fact at the end of WWI we did the opposite. We imposed reparations on Germany. Then came the Depression, and thus were planted the seeds for a rebirth of Germany as an even more ferocious military force in the second war. There was no third war, probably thanks to the Marshall Plan.#- When the Soviet Union broke apart in the early 90s, we kicked back, not a terrible idea, because any intervention by the US would probably have been seen as a threat. That would come later, during the Obama presidency, when Putin was reinstalling a Soviet style government, and we, via our State Department, were encouraging the opposition. Nothing wrong with that, except it didn't work. And we're left with a Putin who seeks revenge, and knows nothing helps a despot like a foreign enemy to blame everything on. That would be the pre-Trump United States. #
- Now we're on the verge of defeating the Republican Party. I don't want to go into detail on that, I can -- imho it'll seem obvious in hindsight, like the dissolution of the Soviet Union seemed obvious after the Berlin Wall came down, but until it happens it can be hard to visualize. The Repubs have been a fixture in American politics all our lives. But it has been changing all the time, trying to put off the inevitable by becoming more and more insidious relative to constitutional America. And now people of the party, the base, will be forced to decide. Finally we have broken Trump's monopoly on news flow. They're broadcasting the hearings on Fox, they have to. And it's going to get worse, much worse, in the next few days, for the fascists in the Republican Party to keep the base unaware. There is a splitting coming. The question is how big. My believe is that it will be big enough to create an opportunity that we should not miss. A chance to rebuild America before we fully fall apart. To be a Marshall Plan for ourselves. Because now finally we will have to accept Republicans as our fellow Americans, with some differences, important ones, but underneath it all, we don't try to steal elections and we accept that no one is above the law, especially the president. #
If we don't bring the constitutional Republicans in, without a solid majority in the Senate even with a Democratic president, we'll just see the McConnell Stonewall again. Obstruction. Nothing happens. And Trump, second of his name, comes along in 2024, this one is not Baby Huey, and a true fascist, much more schooled in the ways of America, and one who plays the part of president much better than this Trump does. That really will be the end of America. We'll be out of moves. #- PS: This is a rewrite of a Twitter thread. Twitter is becoming pretty useful as a place to develop my ideas before writing a blog post. This is a good example of that. #