Nice, and maybe a bit chilly this near-noon Wednesday here in California’s Central Valley with a cool breeze tempering the warmish sunshine — another autumn day to the growing roster before crisp becomes cold.
Worse maybe still is how fast 2022 has burned through the calendar. In a sense, hard to believe it’s quickly approaching the end of the year while feeling as if it just started yesterday
And a sensation, too, the beyond-perilously-important national midterms on Nov. 8 are also whiplashing toward us — now 26 days, 634 hours, 38,048 minutes, and counting. Due to the entire Republican party being batshit crazy, cruel and near-monsters, most-likely sad to say the way-most important election, like in forever.
Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post on Monday summed it up:
In four short weeks, the nation faces the most important midterm elections of my lifetime. This year, the choice is between our democracy as we know it — messy, incremental, often frustrating — and a hard-edged performative populism fueled by resentment, misogyny and racism. To have any hope of building a better future, we must make a stand here.
It is hard for me to write those words because one of the first things I was taught as a young journalist was to be wary of superlatives. But the truth is plain — and painful: Democrats must keep control of at least one chamber of Congress, and preferably both, because the Republican Party has become a danger to the American experiment.
This is not the traditional contest between one set of politicians favoring progressive policies and another offering a more conservative vision. It is between a Democratic Party that believes voters ought to be able to make those ideological choices and a GOP that no longer believes the will of many of the American people must be respected.
Actually, all the GOP believes nowadays is power — the power to control for no other reason than power:
Is it time to push the panic button on the 2022 midterms? I explore that question in the latest issue of my #OurLand newsletter.
Please read/RT: https://t.co/1YtRZMnweqPlus a look at @davidenrich's great new book, "Servants of the Damned."
Subscribe at https://t.co/REX6S9GJuO pic.twitter.com/CT2cALIoK3
— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) October 12, 2022
David Corn in his newsletter this morning at Mother Jones paints a brutal picture of the midterms — read the whole thing, etc., a clear-concise rendering of how we all should be scared shitless, but a shitload of Americans aren’t, and this could be maybe why:
Why aren’t more people scared of a GOP victory in November? Why aren’t we more focused on the prospect of a demagogue’s minions gaining power and hate-mongers like Greene and Tuberville attaining greater influence? My hunch: Trump Outrage Exhaustion. After more than seven years of Trump’s democracy-endangering conduct and his vile, racist, divisive, and deceptive comments, his latest transgressions—bear-hugging QAnon, signaling he would set free the January 6 rioters, and his autocratic responses to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago raid—come across as more of the same-old/same-old. Sure, they are a worrisome escalation in his anti-democratic behavior and an intensification of the threat he and his GOP cult present. Yet for many, it’s just more Trump junk thrown on an already enormous pile of Trump junk.
Although T-Rump is just the latest interaction of the Ron Reagan shitfire political asshole, he’s still the major pull for the base of idiot, cruel shitkickers.
I just got my ballot in the mail yesterday. The countdown ends soon — the future dark and ugly, or bright with hope?
Vote!
Quickly, once again here we are…
