Stop It. This Is Embarrassing.

Dear God, please stop appealing to hypocrisy when dealing with the far-right. You are embarrassing yourselves, but more importantly, you’re embarrassing me. I’ve said this repeatedly for damn near my entire life and it makes me feel like none of you are actually listening. 

The first and most obvious reason to stop appealing to hypocrisy is that they are not being hypocritical. Their position has, and always will be, “we will do anything within our power to maintain power”. When McConnell made up some bullshit about election year nonsense, he was not trying to create a precedent or make a fair point. He was lying. He made it all up. He pooped out a series of words plausible enough to make the dum dums on TV and in our government believe him and even agree with him that it was, at least, something to discuss as reasonable. Instead of it being what it was, some bullshit he made up to keep Garland off the court. For him to then abandon that nonsense when convenient is not hypocritical, it is perfectly in line with “we will do anything within our power to maintain power.” 

It would be hypocritical for him to continue pretending to believe he was making a good faith argument in the first place.

It is, however, hypocritical for Democrats to take up McConnell’s bullshit as something to hold him accountable to. They said, based on principle, that McConnell was wrong when he made that argument. If he was wrong then, based on principle, then the Democrats are wrong now to defend his bullshit argument.

If you are making the argument that McConnell is a hypocrite for trying to seat a justice then you are a rube. You are a rube for engaging him as if he was playing fair. You are, to put it bluntly, whinging. And it doesn’t look good. 

The second reason is that they absolutely do not care. They do not have shame. They don’t have anything to feel shame about. They lied to your faces, you bought it, and then they won. What would they have to be ashamed about? They won. “We will do anything within our power to maintain power.” They did what they wanted to do. To pretend otherwise is to ascribe a moral framework where it does not exist and it is naive and counterproductive to do so.

It is counterproductive, even, to try to stop the confirmation of whatever judge Trump nominates. 

The reality we lived in before, where the Supreme Court was less numerically corrupt - but only numerically - still required a reckoning. Should Biden have won in that now hypothetical reality, any major legislation would have gone to SCOTUS for years, essentially killing all momentum and delaying any action on climate change. It would have surprised no one if the Democrats, even if they had control of the legislative and executive branches, decided to punt on dealing with SCOTUS and wound up fucking us all anyway. 

The reality we live in now makes packing the court less academic and more imperative, most likely more popular, too. A 6-3 conservative majority is laughably corrupt and stupid. Some of the opinions written by the current right-wing nutjob faction might as well be written in crayon, they're so childish. Imagine what they could do if they didn’t even have to bother convincing one of the ones that has read a book. The only thing that makes this comically corrupt court function is John Roberts’ smokescreen of swing vote legitimacy. 

To load SCOTUS with another idiot and let them run roughshod over whatever’s left of the Constitution would essentially end the need for the court in the first place. Without even the appearance of justice, the court is just a rubber-stamp for fascists, one that’s appointed for life. 

If you are foolish enough to appeal to hypocrisy as a defense against it, they will win. More salient, though, is that attempting to block the nomination, turning it into a whole fucking pageantry of palace intrigue and political squalor, will not work. If you think failing nobly will help win the election, I am sorry.

The only way to win - and I’m not talking about fucking elections, it’s time to stop talking about fucking elections and start talking about winning; they don’t give a shit about winning elections, the most important elections of my life have been ones they stole; they give a shit about winning, period, and until we accept that is the reality of the fight, then we will maybe win elections, but we will always lose - is to calm... down...

Relax.

Honestly, crazy as it sounds, this is a huge opportunity. 

There is no way to hold the GOP accountable for their hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is their space. They act hypocritically at all times and they scream at people for being hypocrites until their veins explode. You can’t hurt them with the former, because they don’t care, but they can hurt you with the latter, because you do. You’ve lost before you’ve begun when you talk to the right about hypocrisy. It’s 2020, you should know that by now.

There is one trap that the GOP can fall into: saying something stupid that appeals to the warped sense of patriotism that Americans have for absolutely no reason. That’s what McConnell did with Garland. 

The line should not be, “Wah wah, the GOP is full of hypocrites,” the line should be a very simple If/then statement. “If you do not honor Ginsburg’s last wish, then we will pack the court, invalidating the choice of justice regardless of who is confirmed.” McConnell would, rightly, never listen to that bullshit - the leadership of the Democratic Party are cowards, who would expect them to do anything but whine - but this means the groundwork has been laid for packing the courts, which again, I should note, needed to happen even in our hypothetical former reality. Should Biden win and then pack the courts, it will at least be expected.

Is this nonsense? Of course. 

Will it work? Almost certainly.

What’s worse, though, in a dark reflection of our current situation, is that it will work to the point where, at our next election, the GOP (should we not already have lost ourselves to the fascists) will campaign on packing the courts being the right of an incoming president! (The Democrats will, of course, say that packing the courts is wrong because nothing matters, ever.)

In the end, the most important thing to point out is that everything that I’ve said prior to this makes sense within a system that we broadly agree upon but actually none of it makes any fucking sense at all! Reread that byzantine mess of arcane bullshit. What fucking morons would make up a system, let alone live in one, that relies on the type of shit I wrote above? The system we live in cannot work, even in the best of times, and is doomed to crumble with or without a liberal judge. 

Accept that.