A woman attended a Democratic rally, was appalled, and wrote about how awful it was. I’m thinking we ought to pay her to attend more rallies and publish her reactions, because dang, this is great stuff.

But then Ocasio-Cortez spoke, followed by Bush, and I saw something truly terrifying. I saw just how easy it would be, were I less involved and less certain of our nation’s founding and its history, to fall for the populist lines they were shouting from that stage.

• I saw how easy it would be, as a parent, to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education.

I saw how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends meet, to accept the idea that a “living wage” was a human right.

Above all, I saw how easy it would be to accept the notion that it was the government’s job to make sure that those things were provided.

If you’re like me, your first thought was that this has to be satire. No one could be this oblivious. But no, this isn’t someone mocking the right-wing’s inability to grasp elementary civics, this woman is an associate editor at the Daily Caller, and went on Fox & Friends to repeat her gasp of horror.

I was listening to them talk – to Ocasio-Cortez and also to Cori Bush, who she was stumping for in St. Louis – and they say things, they talk about things that everybody wants, especially if you’re a parent, the writer said. They talk about education for your kids. They talk about health care for you kids. The things that you want. If you’re not really paying attention to how they’re going to pay for it or the rest of that, it’s easy to fall into that trap and to say, ‘My kids deserve this,’ and, ‘Maybe the government should be responsible for helping me with that.’

It’s revealing. The mole people have so thoroughly absorbed the ideas that government is bad and the ethos of libertarianism that they’ve lost the ability to recognize that government is a social structure specifically intended to provide for the well-being of its citizens. It’s right there in the preamble to the US Constitution.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Providing for the health and education of our children is what government is for, among other things…but I suspect this person is one of the fearful ones who only sees “for the common defense”, and imagines that justice, peace, and the general welfare are things that detract from the military.

This is an excerpt from a longer conversation about Israel and Palestine.

Waters is one of those too rare rock musicians I can respect for openly expressing humanist ideals (another is Peter Gabriel). He claims there is a growing movement to end our unquestioning support for Israel in the US; I don’t know, the right-wing propaganda seems to silence everything.

You can find details about the incident of Palestinian footballers being shot online. Expect the usual noise: “Do you have any sources that are not Palestinian?”

Michelle Goldberg elegantly slams the pundits.

In November, several outright Nazis and white supremacists will appear on Republican ballot lines. Arthur Jones, a founder of a neo-Nazi group called the America First Committee, managed to become the Republican nominee for Congress in the heavily Democratic Third District in Illinois. The Republican candidate in California’s 11th District, John Fitzgerald, is running on a platform of Holocaust denial. Russell Walker, a Republican statehouse candidate in North Carolina, has said that Jews descend from Satan and that God is a “white supremacist.”

Corey Stewart, Virginia’s Republican Senate nominee, is a neo-Confederate who pals around with racists, including one of the organizers of the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville last year. The longtime Iowa Republican representative Steve King has moved from standard-issue nativist crank to full-on white nationalist; he recently retweeted a neo-Nazi and then refused to delete the tweet, saying, “It’s the message, not the messenger.”

Clearly, the time has come for a serious national conversation. And so political insiders across the land are asking: Has the Democratic Party become too extreme?

We do not have a liberal party in this country. We have a conservative party, the Democrats, and a far-right looney-tunes fascist party, the Republicans. I am not going to pay any attention to the nattering nitwits who want to play Liebermanesque games and express shock that people don’t want the Democratic party to drift farther to the right, to cater to the assholes.

It’s time to swing back to reason.

I watched two episodes of Sacha Baron Cohen’s show, Who is America? the other day. It made me feel icky and uncomfortable, and I don’t know if I’ll watch it anymore.

The problem for me is that he’s really good at making people expose who they really are, and when the wrong kinds of people drop their masks, you discover how ugly human beings can actually be. It’s distressing. It’s like being Roddy Piper in They Live, discovering the glasses that allow you to see the horrible reality behind the illusion. It’s also interesting because you discover that some people are actually who they present themselves to be, or at least, are much better at keeping the mask on (Congressman Matt Gaetz, for instance, is a gun nut, but he managed to sidestep saying anything that made him look stupid. We should worry about him — he might be a bit smarter than your average Republican).

The Baron Cohen ploy didn’t work on two relatively intelligent, liberal people he tried to trick: Bernie Sanders and Ted Koppel. Sanders just looked exasperated and impatient (but that’s how he always looks), and Koppel tried to pay respectful attention before giving up and ending the interview. You can’t con someone into being someone he’s not, I guess, and a man playing a lunatic right-winger isn’t going to tempt them. One wonders if there is a role outside of Baron Cohen’s range that could trip them up.

But the real horrors are the people who cheerfully and willingly go along with his schtick, especially since blithe brutal strongman Erran Morad seems to be most effective. Trent Lott, Larry Pratt, Dana Rohrabacher, Joe Wilson, Joe Walsh, and Dick Cheney were obliging, and seemed to have no hesitation about endorsing torture or arming toddlers. That’s who they are. It took little prompting to trigger them to sign on to an evil agenda.

Worst was Georgia state representative Jason Spencer, who was eager to bare his buttocks and run around screaming racist and homophobic epithets with only a little direction. He has now resigned. His excuse was revealing.

“Sacha Baron Cohen and his associates took advantage of my paralyzing fear that my family would be attacked,” Spencer said, adding that the techniques he demonstrated were meant to deter “what I believed was an inevitable attack.”

A Republican motivated by baseless, foolish fears. Who would have thought it? It’s not just fear, it’s ignorance, because he was willing to believe that an Islamic terrorist with a gun would be so terrified of being turned “homo” if he was touched by Spencer’s butt that he’d throw his gun away and flee. That excuse is a non-excuse. It’s an admission that bigotry is built into his core assumptions about the world. It’s further reason that he shouldn’t have run for office in the first place.

Of course, he got elected, which tells you much about the electorate that I didn’t want to know. That’s also exposed in the segment where Baron Cohen visits Kingman, Arizona. He plays a rather clueless, wimpy, liberal developer who wants to build a $385 million mosque in the town, at a kind of town hall meeting (I do wonder how he recruited attendees, though — they don’t seem entirely representative. Or if they are, I’m even more horrified.) This leads to all kinds of angry words and bigoted rhetoric — not only do they hate Muslims, who are all terrorists, but they’re afraid it will attract black people, who aren’t welcome there. The townsfolk are quite willing to shout all kinds of racist things when angry.

Which is why I’m not exactly a fan of the show. Maybe it’s an education we need, to learn how many of our fellow Americans are both dumb as a stick and full of hate, but I don’t have to like it. Aren’t I cynical enough yet? This show keeps telling me no, that I have to dive deeper into the bleak darkness.