Yeah, but...

74 million people voted to re-elect Trump after he basically killed a quarter of a million Americans through gross incompetence and wilful negligence.

Why would they do that?

Why would the voters in Texas be any different?

I don't understand it either.

Outstanding post.

I go around and around in circles in my mind trying to figure out how we combat this.

Ezra Klein's book Why We're Polarized is one of a few books to attempts to make sense of what is happening. Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum have also approached this from different angles. Cult experts like Steven Hassan and psychiatrists have tried to deal with this too. It all helps contribute to some kind of understanding.

Trump voters, and many other Republicans, make decisions that appear irrational to us, but from their perspective, this behavior is rational and in their self-interest. That's something that is difficult for most people to comprehend.

The collective, or cumulative, radicalization of the supporters and the RW media is self-perpetuating, and people like Klein believe it can only increase in our current political environment. The immediate positive feedback they give to each other makes it self-reinforcing. They shut any information that conflicts with their world view out.

From the perspective of the radicalized politician: there is nothing to be gained by obeying norms or behaving ethically in the current climate.

There is that most important question you pose: What do we do as a party to counter what they are doing?

The trap they've sprung is a trap they laid several decades ago.

I'm bookmarking your post because it asks so many of the questions that need to be asked and answered.

This has been a growing concern, at least since Brenton Tarrant's

mass murder in New Zealand. Jason Wilson at the Guardian may even have been writing about this before that horrendous incident.

JOHN MENADUE. The crazed Brendan (SIC) Tarrant did not operate in a vacuum.
By JOHN MENADUE | On 18 March 2019

You're instinct is right. He's not a true germaphobe.

It's something else.

There's a famous producer in Hollywood, and when you go to work for him the first thing you are told is "Don't look him in the eyes or you'll be fired." And he actually has fired assistants for looking him in the eyes, even just to say "Hi" in the hallway. It only applies to people beneath him, though.

I think it really is some strange notion of what makes him feel weak or exposed. And he hates to be touched. It really seems like an excuse not to have to engage with other human beings and risk the feeling of vulnerability during a human encounter.

Based on everything I've read I've concluded he isn't really a germaphobe, just

somebody who hates to be touched, not because of germs but for other psychological reasons.

And it's further validated by a chapter in this book I'm reading now called Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power about the preparation for Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia.

All the planning is only about how not to get Trump into a situation where he might look foolish, and the secondary concern is that he not be touched by a stranger. SA wanted to present him with a medal and a major concern was would he allow someone to put it around his neck. They finally reached a compromise where the medal could be put around his neck but that he wouldn't bow his head.

Not a word about avoiding germs, etc...

Germaphobia is an excuse he's used when needed to avoid touching or being touched, especially by people he doesn't know, or just generally to avoid situations that make him anxious.

Quite interesting

I was trying to imagine how to explain why there are so many threads about this

person Rush Limbaugh to the few people who don't understand or don't want to see them.

All I could think is that it might be like when someone who has abused you for 30 years--or cost you friendships, or cost you to lose respect for people who were really important parts of your life--dies, you actually do feel the need to say something, to take stock of the damage that person did to you and your country.

He was on the air for something like THIRTY YEARS. And if you were a person that enjoyed local talk radio, or even serious talk radio, he was the bleeding edge of the movement that totally destroyed talk radio in this country.

So I think that is why people feel a need to speak out. There are a lot of pent up feelings about this person that have not been expressed, and now seems a good time to express them.

Nobody will tear you apart after you're gone because you're a good person.

I very rarely find myself in disagreement with your posts, but this time I gently and respectfully take issue.

His rhetoric irrevocably altered the neuronal structure of tens of millions of American minds, transforming them from free thinkers into lobotomized propagandists.

He attacked good and decent people, some of whom had nothing to do with politics whatsoever, and cultivated actual widespread hatred for them. He practically celebrated the suicide of Kurt Cobain.

There is also strong circumstantial evidence he traveled to the Dominican Republic on sex tours to take advantage of minors. So today I think about those kids too and wonder what has become of them.

And things that may now come to light now that he's dead.

Kurt Cobain belongs on that list...

that "worthless shred of human debris" and "junkie" according to Limbaugh, years before Rush admitted his opiate addiction.

By the way, that's this Rush Limbaugh:

Right. He was one of the principle architects who redesigned the Republican Party

from an actual political party that was for a set of ideas into an identitarian party that was only opposed to a set of ideas.

Gingrich probably deserves honorable mention here too.

I could see Limbaugh's influence on people I worked with in the mid 90s, and also on their spouses. I worked for a great guy who complained that his wife had become addicted to Limbaugh and that it was changing her. And he was a conservative Catholic, and even he was worried about it.