Mister B dug his favorite ball out of the toy bin and played with it yesterday. He’s beginning to come out of the topor he’s been in since mid-May, when he contracted what we now know is valley fever. He’s been on a new medication for two weeks, showing small improvements day by day. Yesterday was the most exciting and encouraging improvement yet!
By the way, President Obama was on TV delivering Congressman John Lewis’ eulogy when I took these photos. I can’t help thinking Obama’s uplifting words contributed something to Mister B’s sudden spurt of playfulness.
I worry about Trump’s Big Lie propaganda, particularly the crap he and his enablers are spewing about mail-in voting in order to drum up opposition to it. Is there a danger people will start to believe this self-serving bullshit about voter fraud, which has never been a thing (and with the controls on voting by mail that have been in place for decades never will be)?
I try to have faith people will see Trump’s malicious lies for what they are. After all, from day one he’s claimed the only reason he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton was massive voter fraud, and no one has ever believed a word of that.
In the 1990s, though, the media credulously passed on outlandish tales of child sex abuse at day care centers, and for a while the utterly made-up fantasy that Satan-worshipping adults enslaved and sexually abused children placed in their care by trusting parents — the precursor to today’s QAnon hysteria — became accepted reality for many Americans. The media’s doing the same thing today with Trump’s voter fraud fantasy, and no doubt some will fall for it, but I don’t think that’s the real danger.
The real danger is the intentional crippling of the US Postal Service, being conducted in typical Trump administration fashion through the placing of a fund-raising crony, ideologically opposed to government programs in the first place, in charge of it. This is guaranteed to raise havoc with voting by mail and make at least one aspect of Trump’s Big Lie a reality: massive delays in the receiving and counting of mail-in ballots, keeping the naming of a clear victor in doubt for days, potentially weeks. You’d think Democrats in Congress would see right through these machinations and rise up in opposition, but as usual they seem inclined to do nothing.
Add gerrymandering, voter suppression, targeted voter ID laws, and the closing of polling stations in minority communities — not Big Lies but actual, in-place realities — and the Republican Party might just be able to keep its white racist base in power for another election cycle. God, I hope people realize what’s going on and vote!