Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → the danger of “feel-good” protests → liberals can be infuriating

A formerly pro-war libertarian, Neal Zupancic, who has since seen the error of his ways, looks at the liberal anti-war movement and asks why it was so unpersuasive to people like him. For instance:

It always shocked me how shallow the anti-war protesters seemed to be. My question to them was always, “you have protested the war, now what?” The protests didn’t work, of course, because Bush is the type to “stay the course.” And yet the protesters, who were willing to take to the streets to express their views, did not seem willing to act or investigate further the roots of the war. They did not seem willing to blame anyone but Bush… They went back to their daily lives, perhaps slightly more bitter, but convinced that their man would win in and everything would be alright. I was told repeatedly that millions of Americans marched in protest against the war. Where does the money for the war come from? It comes from taxes. If millions of Americans stopped paying their taxes I’m sure the federal government would notice. Yet the protesters continued to fund the very war they were protesting! I could not help but feel that the protesters were less concerned about reform and more concerned about stoking their own egos. Protesting was, in my opinion, not about opposing the war, but about convincing themselves that they had done something. Protesting, after all, is a valid, State-approved activity, and it’s supposed to be healthy for democracy. But what is democracy healthy for? War, apparently.

Joe Bageant works up a good head of bile and spits it into the comfort zone:

The second hardest thing for liberals is to admit that they are comfortably insulated in the middle class and are not going to take any risks in the battle for America’s soul … not as long as they are still living on a good street, sending their kids to Montessori and getting their slice of the American quiche. Call it the politics of the comfort zone.…

I do not have to tell informed readers that the rest of the world has long been repulsed by this sort of American grotesquerie, this darkly provincial, arrogant American spectacle. But some of the world still has difficulty admitting to what it observes: that Americans, have become belligerent, mean, and downright dangerous to world security and stability. For example, my English cousins, perhaps in an effort to be nice, tell me, “We don’t hate you, but we hate your government.” They echo many Europeans when they do so. Which is disingenuous on their part because, despite our crooked elections, government here is still elected by at least a plurality, and in many cases a majority, of voters. So you cannot piss on the elected government without hitting the people who elected it. Especially considering that a majority strongly support any and all of our government’s wars.

Nevertheless, except for Israel perhaps, the world wants to hate America. Common sense tells them they should — hell, we’re out of control. But unlike Americans, Europeans seem to have a difficult time letting themselves write off hundreds of millions of other people in one fell swoop. So they tell themselves that our morally corrupt administration is to blame for it all. BLOOOONNNK! Sorry folks, but no matter how you skin this woolybooger, our clown prince was elected with about half the popular vote, and he retains the open support of at least half the public. So if you hate Bush’s policies, then you hate the 140 million Americans who continue to solidly back his policies. At the very least, you must hate about half of us. Hell, we hate ’em too. Quit feeling so bad and admit that Americans have willingly elected a murderous gang of fascist pissbrains. Now doesn’t that feel better?

Don’t look now, anti-war Democrats, but your party is hard at work:

A team of Senate and House Democrats are planning to introduce legislation today aimed at significantly increasing the size of the U.S. Army.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), ranking member of the Senate Armed Services (SASC) airland subcommittee, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), a SASC member, and Reps. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), both members of the House Armed Services committee, are pressing for the passage of the United States Army Relief Act.

“rad mennonite” at Daily Kos, noticing with chagrin that the new Democratic Congress can’t even get a non-binding resolution about Iraq right, reminds anti-war liberals that “the power of the purse” doesn’t begin and end with Congress.

As Feingold reminded his colleagues, “The power of the government rests with the people.” He was referring to the powerful statement made by the people and for the people on . The fact is, though, we have more than the power of the vote. We have the power of the purse: our own purses.

“rad mennonite” goes on to give a good overview of war tax resistance to the Kos crowd.

Who Is IOZ? has been blogging , but I’ve just recently been clued in. Good stuff, and a great attitude. His latest screed rips into the tax-loving liberals, who are aghast at what the government is doing with their money and with the people who are spending it, but who nonetheless swell with civic pride as they imagine their money going to the Treasury.

Now since we all pay taxes — if we avoid ’em on income, we still get ’em on cigarettes and booze, or whatever — this is a little like taking pride in pooping. Not, in other words, something that an adult is supposed to do, though perhaps fit for a child. The basic idea is we’reallinthistogether, a Kumbaya paean to a naive One-Countryism in which your tax dollars are, as the saying goes, hard at work. This is the sort of thing that leaks out in the nocturnal emissions of bowdlerized Keynsians, a bare-breasted WPA workathon in which the money flows from the coffers straight into the mighty dams and highways and byways of the US of A. There is a feint in the direction of shared responsibility for The Bad Shit — it is “our war” — but the general tone and tenor is identical to the sentiment more concisely illustrated by “Freedom Ain’t Free” on the bumper sticker.

But the real underlying sentiment here is the old Bill Clintonism: You can’t claim to love your country and hate its government. The idea is that the country is the government, that peoplehood is just a collection of political institutions and symbolic traditions, and that but for the Risen Lord Baby Jesus himself, there is naught holier in this world than The Two-Party System, and all of its spending priorities, by god.…

At The Nation, editor Katrina vanden Heuvel spills lukewarm praise on Code Pink’s war tax resistance campaign.

She’s caught, as many progressive government-lovers are, by the conflict between their admiration for a large, expensive, coercive State in the abstract, but their dislike for its actual incarnation in Washington.

The social democrat in me has always been uncomfortable with tax resistance, despite my admiration for the War Resisters League. As progressives, we want to enlarge the public sphere, and elevate the primacy of politics, engaged in collectively, as the means for solving social problems. Taxes are obviously a crucial element of meeting our common goals. In that respect, opting out of the collective decision making of the polity about how to spend the nation’s money is problematic.

Arguments that some policy or other will “enlarge the public sphere” fire the same neurons in my brain as get triggered when I hear about how some new household gadget will “transform the way you think about your kitchen” or “give you a whole new you!”

And as for elevating the primacy of politics — in this season of political primaries, is there anything that could sound less appealing?

But somebody, I suppose, has to mistake this carnival of grotesques for collective engagement in “the means for solving social problems.” If nobody really believed this falderol then any naïve child might wander in and point out with a laugh that the Collective is naked — and then who would subscribe to The Nation?

Indeed taxes are obviously a crucial element of meeting our common goals, should those goals include a massive bureaucracy that imprisons Americans in vast numbers, exports mass murder around the globe, and threatens everyone everywhere with incineration if they don’t get with the program of the bloodthirsty psychopaths that rise like scum to the top of the public sphere.

How problematic it would be to opt out of funding such common goals as these!

Some links that have caught my eye recently:

If you thought the “dissent = treason” equation was fun when you saw it on the chalkboards during the last administration, you’ll love the new progressive remake of this timeless classic.

The latest ugly incarnation of this idea comes from Melissa Harris-Lacewell at The Notion, the blog associated with the leftie magazine The Nation.

The gist of her essay is that the ObamaCare refuseniks are not just bad-tempered but positively seditious in their denial that the government has the right to force its idea of a national health care plan down our throats. The protesters might as well be the Ku Klux Klan disrupting “our new Reconstruction” with “the descent of a vicious new Jim Crow terrorism.”

That overblown and offensive metaphor (illustrated with a still from the movie Birth of a Nation in which a crew of Ku Kluxers are in mid-lynch), though it forms the central thesis of the rant, isn’t even the worst of it. (Nor is Harris-Lacewell alone with such exaggerated comparisons: a protester put a brick through the window of a congressman’s office? — It’s Kristallnacht all over again!)

For one thing, there’s the way Harris-Lacewell describes John Lewis, who “was severely beaten [by police] 45 years ago when he tried to lead a group of brave citizens across the Edmund Pettus bridge in an effort to secure voting rights for black Americans.” Now Lewis is a congressman, and an ObamaCare supporter. The papers quoted an unnamed colleague of Lewis as saying that a protester was heard yelling out at Lewis: “kill the bill, then the nigger.”

Which is worse? An active, ongoing, open conspiracy by government forces to brutally repress people trying to assert their civil rights, or an unhinged protester yelling racist threats as a Congressman passes by? The latter clearly! Why? “When [Lewis] is attacked by protesters, he is himself an agent of the state. This difference is critically important; not because it changes the fact that racism is present in both moments, but because it radically alters the way we should understand the meaning of power, protest and race.… John Lewis is no longer just a brave American fighting for the soul of his country — he is an elected official. He is an embodiment of the state.”

Amazingly, Harris-Lacewell bolsters this argument with this:

I often begin my political science courses with a brief introduction to the idea of “the state.” The state is the entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, force and coercion. If an individual travels to another country and kills its citizens, we call it terrorism. If the state does it, we call it war. If a man kills his neighbor it is murder; if the state does it is the death penalty. If an individual takes his neighbor’s money, it is theft; if the state does it, it is taxation.

This, mind you, is her argument for why the state is a good thing, and those who oppose it are wicked. It has all the charm of a sermon that begins “Satan wants to steal our souls and subject us to eternal torment to feed the selfish glory of his own evil,” and ends, “hail Satan!”

Still, a liberal friend of mine earnestly forwarded a link to this article to his friends, solemnly remarking: “Indeed, the Tea Partiers are dancing right around the borderline of sedition. They’re objecting to the lawful authority of the state.” If only they would!

Edward Tverdek, at his blog The Narrow Gate, writes about his drift into and then out from war tax resistance.

He was brought into the fold in under the influence of Kathy Kelly and Karl Meyer. They recommended that Tverdek increase his withholding allowances until no federal income tax was withheld from his paycheck, and then refuse to pay the balance at tax filing time. “This I tried,” Tverdek reports, “and it worked without a hitch for about three years. No IRS agent came knocking, no threatening letters arrived in the mail; I simply stopped funding what I believed to be an illegitimate government and put the money saved toward causes of which I approved.”

So what happened? Why did I return to paying my taxes after only a few years “sticking it to the man” and getting away with it? I fabricated a story to tell friends; my position as an Illinois state employee made it easy for me to target even as a small fish, and I was advised to cease even my relatively inconsequential silent protest and pay back taxes to avoid being “made an example of.” This was only a ruse, however, to avoid having to confess — and explain — an emerging ethical conundrum. The real reason I decided to return to the ranks of taxpayers was more moral than prudential: while I still supported the notion that tax resistance might be a viable political strategy when the recipient government is violating human rights, waging unjust war, exploiting foreign (and domestic) populations, etc., I was unsettled by the prospect of bleeding dry the things I believed in along with the things I detested. Yes, illegal, morally unjustified military excursions into El Salvador and Nicaragua would not be carried out on my nickel, but neither would projects subsidizing school lunches or Head Start programs. Evil was taken down an infinitesimally tiny notch by my political “statement,” but so was the good that our collective contributions make toward building a more equitable society, repairing the environment, and generally correcting the mess that free markets make. I could no longer look upon the newly paved public road that carried emergency vehicles safely to the distressed or the increasingly smog-less Lake Michigan sunrise and say to myself, “Yeah, I helped with that.” Sure, I had more cash in pocket to donate to social, politica, and charitable causes of my choosing, but I had withdrawn from the democratically accountable pool of funds that goes toward the projects of our choosing — you, me, and every other American who pays taxes and votes, indirectly at least, on how that pool will be divided. This started to settle in my gut as the unmistakable feeling of hubris.

I find his “ruse” more believable, but I suppose I should take him at his word. Did he believe that the federal budget was a “democratically accountable pool of funds” when he stopped contributing to it, and only later felt guilty about that; or did he only after starting war tax resistance come to believe that the federal budget was a “democratically accountable pool of funds” after all? It’s kind of hard to tell. I know that’s the bedtime story people tell about their tax dollars when they’re trying to convince other people to pay up, or when they’re trying not to feel so bad about how much their paycheck has shrunk, but it seems implausible to me that someone who had gone to the trouble of becoming a war tax resister would take the bedtime story very seriously.

But Tverdek is a liberal, and part of the ritual involved in being a liberal is to complain with righteous outrage at all of the watertight evidence that the federal budget is neither democratic or accountable, and then to insist that this undemocratic, unaccountable trough be filled ever higher — and if you ask why, you’ll be told that it’s so we can have accountable democratic control over the commonweal, even though we all know better.

In Tverdek’s case, either because he’s carelessly following what seemed like a useful justification to its logical conclusions or because he actually believes what he’s saying, liberalism is an explicit prioritizing of the collective over the actual flesh-and-blood human beings that make it up:

…society is a thing in and of itself — a reality sui generis as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim described it at the turn of the 19th century. There are facts about individual persons, and there are social facts, and the two categories need not overlap.…

…we can no longer think of morality strictly in terms of the duties of individual moral agents and the things they are obligated or permitted to do or not to do to/with other moral agents, much less in strictly Aristotelian terms of what constitutes the "virtuous" person. If we understand society as a reality sui generis, and if we thus accept the notion that there are goods that may be valued by that society that may not be valued in the same way by each of its constituent persons, morality can no longer speak solely of actions that are incumbent upon me, or even just the omission of actions that I should have taken for moral purposes. In the fancy language of moral philosophers, morality must be, at least in some respects, agent-neutral and best described in the passive tense: we can’t reasonably say that any particular person X ought to provide ‘public health,’ but we can reasonably argue that ‘public health ought to be provided,’ as should environmental integrity, general literacy, etc. What this means for individuals in that population remains open to moral discussion.

And this is what makes liberalism so dangerous. Because of course, when you design your public policy around such passive-voice freebies as “public health ought to be provided,” you find that you cannot actually implement them without turning them into active-voice “so-and-so ought to provide it”s. Which means either turning so-and-so into a slave, or taking enough resources from someone-else to make it worth so-and-so’s while (or, frequently, a little of both). And meanwhile the liberal insists that he or she is not putting a gun to anyone’s head but is merely repeating the unobjectionable passive-voice mantra.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

was the deadline to file federal income tax returns, which is traditionally a day for protesters with a tax-related message to get their rallies on.

Members of BAY-Peace perform a war tax protesting song-and-dance in front of the Federal Building in Oakland, California on .

In my neck of the woods, a number of groups including Northern California War Tax Resistance, BAY-Peace, CodePINK, Global Day of Action on Military Spending, Iran Pledge of Resistance, Courage to Resist, and Occupy Oakland, marched downtown and held a rally at the Federal Building. I showed up long enough to take a quick look-see and get some photos, but was feeling too sick from a head cold to stick around long.

Here are a couple more of the early tax day action reports that have been trickling in:

War tax resister Clare Hanrahan spoke at a rally in Asheville, North Carolina. Democrats and organized labor were hoping to make the rally a celebration of “the Buffett rule” and other “tax the rich” messages, but Hanrahan reminded them what tax money pays for. “My speech at today’s tax-day rally was a bit too seditious for MoveOn,” she writes, saying that group canceled their appearance at the rally when they heard a war tax resister would be speaking. Here’s what she had to say.

War tax resisters in Portsmouth, New Hampshire held their annual “penny poll” outside the local post office, asking passers-by to vote with pennies for their idea of what the nation’s spending priorities ought to be. This, then, is contrasted to the priorities reflected in the federal government’s budget.

Some would-be radicals are demanding that rich people and corporations like Starbucks and U2 pay more taxes, and they’re getting noisy about it. I can see why your garden variety liberal might trust the government with U2’s money more than they’d trust U2, but I don’t really get why the out-in-the-street direct-action crowd would waste their time on such silliness.

An author going by the handle “Szmonko” recently addressed my puzzlement in a post titled: “You Can’t Starve the Beast: Why we fight for higher taxes on the rich even though the U.S. government sucks”

Szmonko acknowledges a “tension” between “knowing that the U.S. government has [done] and continues to do a tremendous amount of harm, and believing that we still need to fight like hell for the parts of it that redistribute wealth and strengthen our ability to build up resilient and resistant community.” The question, Szmonko thinks, is this:

How can we move from an understanding that government is bad and we shouldn’t fund it, into an understanding that the parts of the government that are designed to hurt people are bad, and parts of the government that are designed to support people are deeply flawed, but can help us build power toward the world we want?

You will probably notice right away that this is a false dichotomy. The fact that there are parts of the government that are designed to support people and that these parts could be reformed and made better and can even be used as valuable tools in their present form does not contradict the fact that the government is bad and we shouldn’t fund it. Both of these statements can be true, and, indeed, have been true for every repulsive government that has ever been. I’m sure Nazi taxpayers were proud of the kindergartens they purchased along with their concentration camps, for example.

Szmonko looks at the problems we’re having, such as things that make it “harder for poor and working people globally to survive capitalism” and attributes these problems to a shrinking of government. But government has not been shrinking. It has been relentlessly, cancerously growing. Government expenditures have been steadily increasing in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars for decades. If infrastructure is decaying and social services are getting worse while prisons are expanding and the military is extending its global ambitions and Orwellian snoops are reading our email — this isn’t because government is getting smaller under the influence of some supposed right-wing plot to discredit government, but because the government sucks, and when you give it money you get crap in return: the more money, the more crap.

You already know that the government works on behalf of wealthy elites. It socializes their risks and subsidizes their gains; it underwrites their “corporate persons” and their economic transactions; it fights wars on their behalf; it twists the arms of foreign governments to give them free rein to extend their economic empires; its regulations restrict our opportunities, making many parts of the economy off-limits to people of limited means, and forcing most of us to beg to be their employees on their terms; and even its benign-seeming social safety net helps the biggest and wealthiest companies like WalMart get away with offering bargain basement wages and benefits nobody would accept if the government weren’t there to backstop them.

If the government really were about to go out of business, it would be the wealthy elites — including these so-called “anti-government conservatives” — who would be the first to howl. They are not enemies of the government — they depend on it. They wouldn’t last long without it.

Knowing this, why do you want to further empower the government by giving it more money? Do you really imagine that as you force the rich to pay more, you’ll simultaneously be able to force them to cede their power to the rest of us, reform the politicians into noble and good people, and rewrite generations of laws that have been written on behalf of elites — and all of this quickly enough so that this new money the government gets from the rich, thanks to your efforts, doesn’t get spent on the awful crap the government usually spends it on? Good luck with that. How about this: if you think it’ll be so easy, fix the government this year and start taxing the rich next year. Then I won’t be so skeptical.

If I learn tomorrow that the CEO of Oil Slicks and Sweatshops Unlimited has figured out some crafty way to avoid paying any income tax on his $34 gazillion salary, you know what I’m going to think? Good for him!: That’s what I’m going to think. Because I don’t care how many limousines he buys, how many golf rounds he enjoys, how many cigars he lights up with how many $100 bills — he’s not torturing prisoners of war, conducting wars around the world, encircling the globe with military bases, imprisoning millions of people, or blackmailing humanity with the everpresent threat of nuclear holocaust, the way the recipient of such taxes does. I hope he avoids his taxes next year too.

How can you complain about rich people who invest their money in things like “war, prisons, policing, surveillance, immigration detention, and extreme exploitation of the global workforce” and in the same breath demand that the rich pay more federal taxes — which is just another way of investing in exactly the same set of evils?

There are hundreds of organizations that need your support — the government is one of the worst-managed ones with one of the worst returns-on-investment. If you could wrest money from the rich to give to any project you could, you’d be a fool to choose the government. The difference is that the government, unlike other projects, really has the power to wrest the money away. But this violent, coercive power is exactly what we should be setting our sights against, not making alliances with or trying to bargain with! The government’s power to seize money from whom it chooses goes hand in hand with its power to assassinate people with drones, put millions behind bars, extend its empire, wiretap the world, and monopolize the economy. It is a violence and oppression that undergirds the rest of its violence and oppression.

Szmonko also argues:

If the government were providing for more of our needs, more people could focus their energy on organizing. Less people would be afraid to take risks because of tremendous personal debt. We could shift away from being on the defensive.

I don’t find this scenario very likely. Are people more likely or less likely to come together and organize against government corruption and evil if they depend on that same government for their livelihoods? Are people more likely or less likely to be afraid to take risks challenging the government the more dependent on that government they become? Szmonko’s position as a whole is itself a good example of how when people become used to the idea of being provided for by the government they become less willing to resist it and more willing to make excuses for it.

I would extend Szmonko’s advice: Resist the call to shift your focus from building grassroots power either to the non-profit industrial complex or to the government welfare system. Pleading for the government to help us is a project that distracts us from the crucial project of working together and helping each other to build a resilient and resistant community.

Turn your back on the government and its half-hearted social programs. They’re too covered with blood to be supported honorably. Instead of giving your money to the government and then fighting for a bigger slice of it to come back in the support of good causes — give to the good causes directly! Instead of hoping to convince the government to extract more from the rich and wishing for some of it to trickle down to good causes, turn your backs on the government and the rich and turn all of your attention instead to building the economy you want with the people around you.

Do you want more direct grassroots democracy? The Occupy movement showed how it could be done, from the grassroots and not by begging government to reform itself — so put your taxes and your loyalty there! Do you want more support for homeowners suffering foreclosure? Retire their debt yourself via the Strike Debt! project! You want the library to be open longer? Pay your taxes directly there, or use the hours you have stopped using to earn money for the government to operate a library of your own!

What if we were to stop pretending that we can mold the government into something noble and good? What if instead, we embarked on building noble and good institutions of our own and decided to pledge our allegiance (and our resources) to them — the allegiance (and resources) we used to give to the government before we learned that it cannot be supported any longer?

Remember when Jon Stewart went on Crossfire and, instead of putting on his usual jovial Daily Show clown persona, dropped the mask and attacked the hosts?

“So I wanted to come here today and say… Here’s what I wanted to tell you guys: Stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.”

What a wonderful Emperor-has-no-clothes moment. Stewart spat out the pretense the show’s other guests swallowed — that he was talking with journalists who were hosting a bona fide debate — and confronted them with how phony and pathological it all was: “I would love to see a debate show… To do a debate would be great. But that’s like saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition.”

But the Jon Stewart jester mode of political commentary may be proving itself to be a cure worse than the disease.

As an illustration: the other day some of my progressively-minded friends posted or forwarded sarcastically-annotated versions of the same “news” clip in which Heather Nauert, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, blah-blahed some banal spokesperson pabulum about U.S./German relations:

“Looking back in the history books, today is the 71st anniversary of the speech that announced the Marshall Plan. Tomorrow is the anniversary of the D-Day invasion. We obviously have a very long history with the government of Germany, and we have a strong relationship with the government of Germany.”

This was seized upon as a Gaffe (that is: How could the D-Day invasion of Germany be an example of our strong relationship with the German government! Ha ha!), and #Resist-ers across America began to fling it hither and yon.

First off, this is stupid. It’s no more of a gaffe to say that D-Day is an important milestone in American relations with the current German government than to say that Lafayette is an important figure in the history of French relations with the current American government. (Quick history lesson for those of you who came out of the U.S. public school system: The current German government is a direct descendant of the Federal Republic of Germany that was constructed after the Nazis were overthrown in the Allied invasion of which D-Day was a part. The U.S. was an important part of that operation. Konrad Adenauer, who would become the first leader of this new German government, got his start in post-war German politics when U.S. forces installed him as mayor of Cologne.)

That is to say, there isn’t even a gaffe here, really, unless you’re really stretching the term to mean “saying something that might be willfully misinterpreted by people who are already hostile to you.”

But secondly, and more importantly, this constant hair-trigger alertness for Gaffes and Gotchas — this reflex to play Daily Show: The Home Game — is a narcotic that acts as a substitute for effective action. Sharing a Gaffe is delightful comedy to those who are already inclined to laugh and who aren’t sick of the joke already, but it’s nothing but a pathetic blank cartridge in any actual battle against those in power.

If you are addicted to this narcotic, I have to ask: How many more times do you think it will it thrill you to post a clip showing that a Fox News anchor has biased double-standards, a politician is unprincipled, a #MAGA-zombie is ignorant, Trump lies, and so forth? I hope the answer is “many more times” because Fox News and the politicians and the #MAGA-zombies and the Donald are going to keep being two-faced ignorant hypocritical liars while they keep enacting their agenda while folks like you keep “destroying” them on Twitter. You’ll love it.

But when you act as though you’ve discovered a damning and damaging smoking gun every time you see Sean Hannity making an idiot of himself or catch Trump popping off falsehoods, you’re mistaking professional wrestling for athletic competition in a context that makes Crossfire look like the Socratic Dialogues.

Catching Trump lying and making a big deal about it implies that you are shocked. That you expected the president to be honest and he disappointed you. It means you’re either pretending to be a rube for comedic effect or, well, that you are a rube. And that joke’s been told, so it’s not a good look.

Pretend for a moment that you’ve won. You found The Final Gaffe that proves without a doubt that Fox News is a propaganda machine; that politicians blather in whatever way they think will make them look good and don’t give a damn for the good of the country; that Trump is a pathological liar and sociopath with repulsive ideas and dangerous, cruel policies; that the #MAGA-zombies are an authoritarian cult of incurious dopes with lynch-mob desires. It’s incontrovertible. You’ve proven your point. You win.

Tell me: What’s the next thing you’ll do?