We need something stronger now from the Democratic/Biden side of this battle against a Trumpian coup d’etat.
What Trump and his enablers are doing about the election they lost is really unconscionable, altogether unacceptable, a violation of the oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution, a betrayal of the nation, and assault on the heart of our democracy.
It could hardly be more deserving of the harshest condemnation. Political crimes do not get any worse than such seditious and treasonous acts.
If this is as bad as it gets, shouldn’t the condemnation be as forceful and loud as it gets?
The Democrats are condemning it. Biden is speaking increasingly critically.
But no one is shouting. And this is an emergency.
Someone running into the parlor to report that the house is on fire doesn’t deliver the message in a normal voice.
What Trump is trying to do in Michigan; the violation of her clear legal responsibilities by the woman who heads the GSA, who is obligated to sign the document that would enable Biden’s team to conduct the transition as the law provides; the refusal to begin briefing the Biden team, which threatens to hurt the nation’s national security and its bringing the pandemic under control.
All of those demand that the denunciations become as powerful and attention-getting as the protectors of American democracy can achieve. It requires coordination, creative messaging, planning, and passion.
The people’s attention must be grabbed, and the unacceptability of what the Trump world is doing must be conveyed as powerfully as possible.
For too long, the Democratic world has failed to match the intensity with which the Republicans have fought the battle to bring power to their broken ways. It is time for that to change.
For right now, it should not be Biden himself who takes that powerful denunciatory posture toward the other side. He should continue to be the bridge-building man of goodwill he has been since the election.
But everyone else – from Kamala Harris on down in the Democratic world – should be part of the team of going after a maximal portion of the American people in this latest battle of fascist autocracy versus liberal democracy.
Now is the battle. It is not a matter of waiting this out and then fighting Republican efforts to cripple Biden after he’s inaugurated. No, how the battle is fought now will determine the balance of power when that battle over obstructionism gets fought.
Discredit this attempted theft in the minds of as many Americans as possible, and the contest later will start closer to the endzone they have to defend.
And it would be folly to acquiesce in so many Republicans thinking the election was stolen, and that Biden is not legitimately their President.
Their delegitimization of Obama in the minds of much of their base made possible their acting so disgracefully in every other way to destroy Obama’s Presidency.
Biden cannot let them do the same to him!
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Afterward:
A comment below reads:
“You are right but not enough on our side seem to be listening.”
To which I responded:
What’s involved here is something very deep-seated in Liberal America.
- I’ve been watching it since the early 90s, when Liberal America left the conservative public to the ministrations of liars and manipulators like Newt Gingrich.
- Skipping the lamentable way the liberals fought the brokenness of W’s regime, I watched it during the Obama years when hardly anybody noticed that he was forfeiting the battle against the Republicans, when he could have gone up against those attaching his presidency with effective and forceful argument.
All the while, the force that hijacked the Republican Party— that eventually gave us something so unthinkable as a man like Donald Trump in the White House (it would be hard to find a worse person to give those powers to) — gained in power.
Now it is still undecided whether that dark, destructive, broken force that controls the Republican Party will gain such control of our nation that it can bring on the nightmares Donald Trump’s re-election portended, and that Joe Biden’s victory simply must be a means to eliminate from our possible future.