I sat there in the bleachers watching my daughter play in her last volleyball tournament (indoors) of the year. I listened somewhat intently to the conversation next to me. It was hard not to at least catch bits and pieces of it. Admittedly, I was already a little annoyed.

The latest from the Lincoln Project.

You know, Republicans are just plain ole mean.

There’s a special election being held in the Texas 6th congressional district today. The district is bright cherry red. There’s no way a Democrat can win it, so 23 Republicans are clawing each other to death for a highly likely run-off. I call it a jungle primary.

All the polls show that the leading candidate is Susan Wright, widow of the late congressman who died of COVID earlier this year. But, while she may be leading, she does not have the 51% necessary to pull off a full win.  The race for second place is tight and could be about any one of five folks.

So, this happened …

Texas Republican congressional candidate Susan Wright is seeking help from federal law enforcement the day before her special election, after supporters reported receiving robocalls that accused her of being responsible for the death of her late husband.

Wright’s campaign reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice on Friday after discovering robocalls baselessly alleging that she had “murdered” her husband, the late GOP Rep. Ron Wright.

They are accusing her of purposefully contracting COVID and deliberately giving it to her husband. After, of course, she took out a million dollar life insurance policy on him.

That just seems like a whole lot of trouble when this is Texas and you can shoot people in the face and call it an accident. So, I think they are just being mean. On the other hand, Donald Trump endorsed her so she’s earned all the mean she gets.

And now there’s also this one.  Mark Samsel is a Republican state legislator in Missouri.

On Wednesday, Samsel, R-Wellsville, was substitute teaching at the Wellsville school district’s secondary school. Throughout the day, high school students began recording videos of the lawmaker talking about suicide, sex, masturbation, God and the Bible.

In one video shared with The Star, Samsel tells students about “a sophomore who’s tried killing himself three times,” adding that it was because “he has two parents and they’re both females.”

He also kneed a student in the groin and then asked as the student was on the floor, “Did it hurt?” He told the student he could go see the nurse and she’d “check it out.”

You know, that’s mean.

Just in case you were wondering what our country would look like if Trump had been reelected, just look at India and Brazil.  That’s exactly what would be happening.

The state of Telangana reported 10,122 new COVID-19 cases on Monday and it was the fifth consecutive day where the state saw over 6,000 cases in 24 hours. At such a time, when the health mechanism is grappling with the crisis, political parties in the state are contributing to the swelling number of cases by holding election campaign rallies and road shows.

Yeah, Trump would be doing that.

And this sounds familiar.

Dr Navjot Dahiya, the national vice president of the Indian Medical Association, on Monday called Prime Minister Narendra Modi a “super spreader” of the coronavirus for holding political rallies in poll-bound states and allowing Kumbh Mela to take place amid the second wave of the pandemic, reported The Tribune.

So, that would be us.

I learned a long time ago not to argue with my wife about matters of science. Science is just one of those courses I avoided in school. Maybe it was because my high school Chemistry teacher managed to suck any joy there ever was out of science. Maybe I just didn’t have the brain for it. I’ve always done better in English and Social Studies and that is why my school primarily puts me in those classes to support students.

We have seen this story in the comments on previous posts, so I will not belabor it here. A private school in Florida has chosen to bar teachers that have been vaccinated from working with students. I’m not much of a scientist and even I know that is the dumbest thing anyone has ever heard. That is until you hear the reasoning for doing it. I can just imagine the kind of teacher they get for their 30K bonanza of a salary.

Instead of poking fun at these people I decided to ask a serious question. How can we adapt our science curriculum to help our students and future voters not fall for junk science and alternative facts. The scientist in the house had a very simple answer to the question. The answer seemed simplistic to me and yet I went back to my mantra I mentioned in the first sentence. I should not argue about matters of science.

Her answer was one word. Christianity. Both of us are cradle Catholics and yet we somehow came down on the more liberal end of the Christian world. Mind you, she is more politically conservative than me, but I think she’s more fed up with the interference from the Christian community into science and the natural mistrust that is there.

You can’t paint anti-vaxxers with the same brush, but most come in with a Christian mindset. God will protect them. Of course, the irony is palpable. Much of the Old Testament is a recorded faith history of the Hebrew people. Included in that are the kosher laws. As a general rule we don’t follow those laws anymore, but these people seem to have a lack of historical understanding of the purpose of those laws. They discovered that certain foods or combinations of foods led to more deaths. Kosher laws were meant to protect them.

That is at least partially built upon the basic tenets of the scientific method. They made observations and changed policy and practices to fall in line with what they observed. Of course, we’ve learned more since then, but it was very much ahead of its time and built nearly entirely on science and not faith.

The funny thing is that God is not supposed to be in our public schools. Yet, we tend to avoid subjects like evolution almost entirely because it would tend to offend. The teaching of science becomes particularly problematic when knowledge itself becomes political. Experts become scorned and replaced with those without credentials on YouTube. Biologists with PhDs like my wife are replaced with celebrity anti-vaxxers like Jenny McCarthy and Rob Schneider. I know which one I will be listening to.

Biden’s speech last night was like a breath of fresh air after we all endured the verbal manure that flowed so freely from Trump’s mouth and Twitterfingers for 4 years.  Biden spoke of a rising America and introduced his trillion dollar American Families Plan that, after decades of decline and neglect, will attempt to make our lives better.

Predictably, the Republicans hate it, all of it, and it’s all predictable.  This morning on CBS News, Rick Scott was given a remarkable 5 minutes of national airtime to spew nonsense and childish attacks against  Biden and the GOP’s other favorite targets.  His lies came fast and furious, blaming Biden for all the ills HIS side caused.

Why are Republicans so opposed to anything that makes Americans’ lives better?  Because if people are happy, they won’t keep them in power.  The GOP has raised hatemongering to an art form because they know that if they can keep millions of Americans miserable and pissed off, they can then blame Dems for that misery and drive angry people to the polls.  And it works like a charm.  The GOP base is driven by adrenaline fueled anger, fomented by hate radio, Newsmax, OAN, Fox Noise, and the NY Post where the blame is regularly placed on “socialists, gays, Satanists, Pelosi, AOC, and Bernie.” Instead of focusing on real issues like education, income inequality, job security, and healthcare, they focus on bathroom bills, gay wedding cakes, and now the new target “boys pretending to be girls leering at your daughters in the locker room” accusing trans kids of trying to take advantage by posing as the opposite sex.

If the GOP had to actually face voters over their piss poor performance they would lose every time.  THAT’s why they are willing to inflict generational misery to the populace so they can keep everyone pissed off and insecure so their base will blame the rest of us.  That’s also why they are trying to push through voter suppression bills to make it harder to vote.  They know the truth and are really worried now because Biden rammed through the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill that helped to relieve some of that misery.  If we follow that with making airports, roads, and other public infrastructure once again usable, the GOP is terrified that their supporters will like their lives made better and the veil finally lifted on their scam.

And that’s why they have zero interest in doing their jobs and making Americans’ lives better.