Loyalty oaths and re-education sessions

Check out these weasels (apologies to actual weasels):

Just 27 congressional Republicans acknowledge Joe Biden’s win over President Trump a month after the former vice president’s clear victory of more than 7 million votes nationally and a convincing electoral-vote margin that exactly matched Trump’s 2016 tally.

Two Republicans consider Trump the winner despite all evidence showing otherwise. And another 220 GOP members of the House and Senate — about 88 percent of all Republicans serving in Congress — will simply not say who won the election.

Those are the findings of a Washington Post survey of all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate that began the morning after Trump posted a 46-minute video Wednesday evening in which he wrongly claimed he had defeated Biden and leveled wild and unsubstantiated allegations of “corrupt forces” who stole the outcome from the sitting president.

Here’s the most interesting (non)response in the Post’s three question survey:

Do you support or oppose Donald Trump’s continuing attempts to claim victory?

Oppose: 9

Support: 8

Unclear/no answer: 232

“No answer” is of course tacit support, and there’s not the slightest doubt that the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans would favor stealing the election if this were in fact possible to do. Since it turns out not to be possible to do under these precise circumstances (Guardrails! Wisdom of the Framers! The Integritude of our judges!), they are continuing to support Trump’s attempts to cancel the results of the election by not opposing those attempts in even the weakest symbolic way by, you know, acknowledging that Biden won.

A semi-interesting question is what changes a week from today, after the Electoral College votes to make Biden president. My guess is pretty much nothing. Trump of course will continue to lie and bullshit and grift, while elected Republicans will mumble things like “we had an election, and the process will conclude soon.”

And just watch: it will soon become a conservative shibboleth that there’s something very wrong and hurtful and indeed cancel cultureish about even asking these questions of GOP officials (Watch for phrases like “loyalty oaths” and “re-education sessions” to get sprinkled around liberally.)

Also too, Democrats never accepted Trump’s victory as legitimate, so both sides:

The morning after media outlets called Trump the winner, Hillary Clinton conceded and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N. Y) fielded a call from Trump. Schumer issued a statement shortly thereafter congratulating the president-elect and calling for Americans to “come together.”

OK well they said that but they didn’t really mean it.

Methinks that this is all part of a larger pattern, which itself is a key to understanding how it was that more than 74 million Americans (47% of all voters in the 2020 election) voted to re-elect the worst person in the country as the country’s president.

That pattern is made up of a series of interlocking resentments born of the sensation that, as a conservative, you have to be apologizing all the time. This is where all the fury about “political correctness,” recently rebranded as “cancel culture,” really comes from.

And what Republicans/conservatives/right wingers love most of all about Trump is that he doesn’t apologize, ever.

To point out that Trump is incredibly corrupt and stupid and ignorant and racist and misogynist and nativist is just the kind of thing that liberals are saying all the time about conservatives, and so very very unfairly too!

The undeniable fact that these charges are very obviously totally and completely true in Trump’s case just doesn’t matter, because at least he speaks his mind/isn’t politically correct/is a real fighter/never backs down etc.

This is the fundamental logic that explains an enormous amount of Trump’s support. At least he always fights back against the sort of accusations that are always being thrown at conservatives. That the accusations are true is irrelevant: the point always is that it’s wrong and un-American to constantly accuse people of “racism” and “sexism” just because they won’t take a loyalty oath in a re-education session about how its good for socialist drag queens to teach our children that gender is a social construct and property is theft.

Or something.