Stupid People Ain't Got No Reason To Live [update]

More than a few folks have excoriated your humble servant for the observation that Democrats are wasting their time trying to win back Orange Julius Caesar zealots. The reason is straightforward: those folks have reached escape velocity from the Real World. They choose to believe anything from the Right Wingnuts.

Finding mainstream pundits who've also thrown in the towel is like looking for hens' teeth. Found one today.

But the problem is not the Russians — it's us. We're getting played because too many Americans are ill equipped to perform the basic functions of citizenship. If the point of the Russian campaign, aided domestically by right-wing media, was to get people to think there is no such thing as knowable truth, the bad guys have won.

Call it the Roy Moore effect; the desire to return to the false notion of 19th century USofA as nearly Eden. It wasn't, for all but the very rich. And these yokels have bought into the Cut Cut Cut Tax plan as good for the 99%.

About the scariest reporting:

When NPR tweeted out sections of the Declaration of Independence last year, many people were outraged. They mistook Thomas Jefferson's fighting words for anti-Trump propaganda.

The bright spot, most non-Right Wingnuts say, were the election victories in Virginia and such. Well, may be. But keep this in mind:

Northam did best in the metropolitan areas of the state like Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia. These places also witnessed the greatest bump in turnout. Northern Virginia saw a 12 percent jump, and Hampton Roads' participation grew by 9 percent. Combined, these two places accounted for more than 50 percent of Tuesday's vote.

Two points: the only way to counter gerrymandering and voter suppression is way, way, way above average turnout, and recognize that the split in the USofA is city/rural not Red/Blue states. Orange Julius Caesar won because the city folk just didn't turn out in PA, MI, WI.

In these three Rust Belt states [Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin], plus Ohio, Trump turned out voters from rural counties, improved on Republican Mitt Romney's 2012 percentage of the vote in most counties and closed the gap in or won Democratic-leaning counties, according to a cleveland.com analysis of unofficial election results.

Will the cities really Resist suppression next year? One might infer that Orange Julius Caesar and the Congress think they've only got a few months left given their frenzy. By most measures, the Base is about 25% of the electorate. The remaining 75% should be enough to toss out these bums.

[update]
Nick Kristof weighs in today on the topic. So some quotes.

Yet if one looks at blue and red state populations as a whole, it's striking that conservatives champion "family values" even as red states have high rates of teenage births, divorce and prostitution. In contrast, people in blue states don't trumpet these family values but often seem to do a better job living them.

And David Leonhardt has the wooden stake in the heart of the vampires.

"The G.O.P.," Henry Olsen, a conservative policy expert, recently said, "really wants to do nothing other than cut taxes for businesspeople and the top bracket based on what can only be called religious devotion to supply-side theory."

So, who are these folks?

And most Americans realize that the tax plan is dreadful. Only 16 percent of adults said they thought the plan would reduce their own taxes, according to a Quinnipiac poll released last week.

Just farmers and hedge funders? Strange bedfellows, to be sure.