Image: Vlad Yushinov - Getty Images
American flag with stone wall hole
The ugly Republican political violence that horrified Americans after President Trump was defeated in 2020 has come back with a vengeance to haunt Republicans in the midterms. It was a mistake for Republicans to falsely accuse Democrats of supporting violent crime after Republicans have spent two years denying that all those violent crimes we saw Republicans committing at the Capitol ever took place.
When Trump’s mob broke into the Capitol brandishing flagpoles and other clubs to stop Congress from certifying President Biden’s election, their most hated Democratic target was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Now one of Trump’s deranged violent supporters broke into Pelosi’s San Francisco home in the early-morning hours last week hoping for another crack at her. She was in Washington, but the intruder brutally beat Paul Pelosi, her 82-year-old husband, with a hammer before police tackled him. Pelosi was hospitalized with a fractured skull and injuries to his arm and hand.
Those injuries were an echo of the ones suffered by more than 140 police officers at the Capitol, many beaten with iron pipes, hockey sticks and baseball bats as well as flagpoles causing brain damage and permanent disabilities. That’s another awkward fact in the midterms for Republicans claiming to be strong supporters of law enforcement.
Delusional Fantasies, Hateful Rhetoric
An online blog by Pelosi’s assailant discovered after his arrest was filled with gory images, delusional fantasies and the hateful racist, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ screeds of a seriously disturbed mind. The worst part was much of it was the typical violent political rhetoric of Trump and other Republican candidates these days.
Clearly, defeating Trump wasn’t enough. Republicans won’t distance themselves from divisive Trumpism until it drives away more voters than it attracts. So, we need to keep the huge turnouts of 2018 and 2020 going. Suddenly, the midterms Republicans thought were in the bag are providing far more opportunities for Democrats to maintain or increase their control of the Senate than anyone expected.
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Democrats and Republicans are running neck and neck in toss-up races in at least a half-dozen states. It’s not just in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona. Strong Democratic candidates are in tight races in Republican Ohio and Iowa.
More Vicious Lies
As predictably as the sun coming up, Republicans spent the weekend flooding rightwing websites with a barrage of vicious lies accusing the Pelosi’s of making up the “alleged attack” as a Democratic “false flag operation.” The usual suspects quickly fabricated scandalous details based on erroneous reporting about the police arrest by a local Fox News affiliate that was later retracted.
Carl Cameron, a former Chief Political Correspondent for Fox News who retired in 2019, called his previous associates “merchants of misinformation” now using rumors and lies about a police report to build audiences. “They are creating a dystopia wherein lying and physical violence become part of our politics,” Cameron said.
The most important issues for progressive Democrats in the midterms will remain protecting our economy, fighting rightwing attacks on elections and removing “local political leaders” from women’s health decisions. Republicans seem to think yelling that inflation is high will improve the economy. It won’t, but they’ve offered no other plan to bring down prices. And they couldn’t care less about election rights or women’s reproductive rights.
Republicans Ron Johnson and Tim Michels and Democratic opponents Mandela Barnes and Gov. Tony Evers are on opposites sides of every issue important to voters in the midterms — violent crimes against democracy, the right of women to control their own lives and the delicate economic process of controlling inflation without throwing millions of Americans out of work again.
While trying to blame Democrats for violent crime, both Johnson and Michels refuse to do anything about the worst violent crime currently terrifying every parent in the nation. They adamantly oppose banning the military assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines firing hundreds of bullets that mass murderers can—and regularly do—take into schools all over America to slaughter children.
Johnson and Michels try to deny their repeated past support for no-exception abortion bans. That's because public support for no-exception bans has plummeted since the Supreme Court destroyed abortion rights. Americans saying all abortions should be illegal have now dropped from nearly 20% to 8% and among Republicans from nearly 25% to 11%. Johnson and Michels haven’t changed.
No surprise either, the only economic policies millionaires Johnson and Michels support to fight inflation are the usual Republican policies of more tax cuts for the wealthy and fewer Democratic programs to help working class people to pay for groceries and gas.
The toxic political atmosphere we’re currently living under also is on the midterm ballot. We can vote our way out. We know the source of the problem. If enough of us show up to vote, we can start moving back toward the democracy all Americans claim to love.
