"All About That Base"

A popular 2014 hit by Meghan Trainor bears the title, “All About That Bass.”  An easy English language play on similar-sounding words brings us to my title, It’s All About That Base.  I would call it a homophone but too many on the political right would be reaching for their Bibles.  In this case, I am referring to a political base.  All politicians have one.  If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have gotten elected, and this discussion wouldn’t make much sense.  I might still meet that threshold, but I will Babylon.  Is that another homophone?  Babylon has two direct meanings.  One where it is a capital city in ancient Mesopotamia, and another that is used among Rastafarians to describe contemptuous aspects of a society that are seen as oppressive.  In my usage, however, I am using it in a more homophonic sense meaning to “babble on.”  But I digress down a rabbit hole of my own making.

The base to which I refer is the group of voters who will support a political party without regard to the specific views a candidate holds.  That works only when the selection is between candidates of different parties.  When choosing between candidates of their chosen party, many in the base will choose the person who most vehemently holds with their points of view.  This brings us to the tactics being used within the GOP electorate of today.

If we are to assume that these politicians are educated and not inherently stupid, we must acknowledge that their actions promoting anarchy and what is being called in the press, “The Big Lie,” are merely creating the illusion that they are so far RIGHT as to be out of sight.  By this measure, the GOP voter base is made up of a group of people who are mental zombies guided by their thirst for their opiate of choice.  That drug may be self-righteous religious extremism, racism, xenophobia, financial greed, unwarranted fear of the unknown, some other radical view that they find normal, or some combination of the above.

How else could you explain GOP leaders meeting with the President in the Oval Office in the fifth month of his term, continuing to support efforts to overturn an election certified by members of their own party and by judges they helped put in office?  They must know this isn’t possible.  No matter how hard one might want some other outcome, the sun still rises in the east, the tides still rise and fall, and Joe Biden is the 46th president of the United States.  

Other delusions include those who claim that Donald Trump had nothing to do with the Capitol riots of January 6th and that the whole thing is overblown by the leftist press.  One member of the GOP (Congressman Andrew Clyde) calmly stated that, if you didn’t know otherwise, those nice folks that walked through the Capitol on January 6th could have been with a tour group. 

This wild under-stated characterization of the Capitol riots reminds me of the scene from the 1967 film, The Graduate, where Mr. Robinson confronts Benjamin with the fact that he knows that Ben has slept with Mrs. Robinson.  That exchange went as follows...

Benjamin: Listen to me. What happened between Mrs. Robinson and me was nothing. It didn't mean anything. We might just as well have been shaking hands.

Mr. Robinson: Shaking hands? Well, that's not saying much for my wife, is it?

Ben and Mrs. Robinson; The Graduate, 1967

The reality disconnect in the GOP has been exemplified by the stripping of Liz Cheney’s leadership position and Mitt Romney receiving boos and shouts of “traitor” and “communist” at a recent Utah state GOP convention.  Their crime was to acknowledge that Biden won a fair election, as certified by their own party election officials.  So, in this fictional GOP-Utopia that is the promised land for political survivalists, pandering to The Big Lie that Donald Trump is the president in absentia, wins the day.  Kevin McCarthy, GOP House Minority Leader, first claimed that Trump “bears responsibility” for the January 6th insurrection, now says that Trump couldn’t have foreseen what would happen.

The Big Lie is a propaganda technique used for political purposes, defined as "a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the facts, especially when used as a propaganda device by a politician or official body."  The term was first coined by Adolph Hitler when he dictated his 1925 book, Mein Kampf.  In today’s world, the term is used to describe Adolph Trump’s, excuse me, Donald Trump’s claim that there was widespread fraud during our election and that he actually won the presidency.  GOP support for the ongoing Arizona debacle using cyber ninjas with UV bamboo-seeking flashlights and industry trade-secret fraud-finding technology to overturn that state’s results is an example of Trump’s Big Lie.  GOP promises to repeat the Arizona secret recount in other states, is just them playing to their base.  It really is All About That Base.  Privately these politicians know the truth, but publically it is in their best political interests to repeat outrageous lies that stoke the fires of conspiracy beliefs of that delusional base of voters.

"All About That Base"

For those GOP folks who may have read this far, if you haven’t looked up the word by now, just know that a "homophone" is just a communication device used by the LGBTQ community.  At least that is what my friends at QAnon tell me.