This is the new version of "Look! Shiny object!" It's now all over Facebook. Here I'm going to try to connect the dots. Anyway, Project 2025. We are supposed to be deeply concerned, once again, about America becoming a theocracy, decades after Reagan put them into power and decades after the publication of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale.

In your formal educations, were any of you ever asked to discuss the three rhetorical appeals in Aristotle's Rhetoric? So there are three basic appeals, and this is taken from ancient Greek.

Ethos -- the appeal to character. You see this in celebrity advertisements.

Pathos -- the appeal to emotions. They lay this on heavy to get you to donate to charities.

Logos -- the appeal to reasoning. This is like when they tell you in a car ad that the car you're buying gets good mileage.

Well, my Facebook feed is in a panic, now, but it's not because of Joe Biden's mental state. I guess it's not surprising that there would be a "look! Shiny object!" given the dire state of Democratic Party politics right now. At any rate, the Project 2025 obsessives have a real problem with ethos right now. These are the people who did nothing while the Democratic Party forced everyone into lockstep -- through the pre-primaries and the primaries -- to support a President with early-version senile dementia if they didn't want to be personae non grata. That was the time when they all should have attempted to break the power of the Democratic Party. But they didn't do anything, while the team assembled behind Dementia Joe was busy screwing up Ukraine, Gaza, Europe and the United States. That should tell you something about the mental caliber of these people.

The round-up of it is that even if Project 2025 was this big threat to America, you wouldn't trust these people to do anything about it. Most likely what they'll do is to put all of their energies in a Democratic Party campaign that will be designed to lose. They don't even have the character necessary to say the word "dementia."

Moving on to pathos. The obvious emotional appeal of "omigod Project 2025" is that we are supposed to panic about an impending Trump victory which will catapult the Heritage Foundation into power. This brings up the obvious rebuttal to all this: that if the people who designed the Democratic Party's rank-and-file talking points were the least bit worried about an impending Trump victory, they wouldn't have run Joe Biden against him. I say "wouldn't have run" because the decision to stick with Biden until his impending brain death was made at least a year ago, and what you're seeing in the political scene now is the mere enactment of a drama that was planned out far in advance of the event. It would, however, be hilarious if Biden refused to drop out, ever, and if their forthcoming attempts to invoke the 25th Amendment failed too.

Thus the real pathos here, the emotion that I am filled with upon reading Facebook and the news feeds, is pity. I am really, really sorry that the rank-and-file Democrats couldn't have amounted to something more than what they are. These are people who borrow their notions of political organizing from a political party run by people who hold them in contempt, while the Heritage Foundation offers a much more effective model of political organization.

Lastly we have logos, the appeal to reasoning. These are people who, through their actions, have made a Trump victory quite probable. But they don't seem interested in any reasoned-through organizing against Republicanism through, and this is a basic prerequisite, disavowal of the Democratic Party. They certainly haven't announced on Facebook that they're all moving to swing states to flip said states to vote Biden, though it must be admitted that going door-to-door in superheated summer weather to discuss politics with people is probably not an effective approach. The obvious line of reasoning is that we might store a discussion of Project 2025 somewhere on our hard drives, and access it later if it comes up. It's probably not an unimportant topic.

Ultimately, "Look! Shiny object" is not really an effective line of reasoning. What would be effective would be looking at the situation squarely. The opposition to Trump will need a far more effective organizational scaffold than the one it currently has, given that he's in all likelihood going to be President again. I don't expect this organizational scaffold to come from the Democratic Party, much less a bunch of people posting on Facebook.