So the Senate used the nuclear option, and now the Senate is basically an unrepresentative House of Representatives, which is jarring, because the cocksuckers in the Republican party have gerrymandered the House so much that it is already unrepresentative. There was no reason to blow up the filibuster, but they did it anyway because they could.
If you learn anything from this, it is that there is no reason to play nice with Republicans ever. Fuck bipartisanship. Fuck the tone police. Fuck the no labels group. Fuck bipartisanship. All the Republicans and the retrograde assholes who vote for them is raw power and force. Do unto others, as those biblehumping hypocrites like to state.
For fuck’s sake Democrats, they just spent eight years calling President Obama a n****r and elected a white supremacist and his Stormfront coterie. When are you going to fucking learn? When you are trying to save your wife’s life by performing a late-term abortion at home because they’ve overturned Roe?
Politics as your daddy knew it is over. Fucking fight.
AND NO IT WAS NOT ABOUT ECONOMIC INSECURITY YOU JACOBIN BERNIEBRO BOOTLICKERS (and even when they are right the Intercept is still wrong- Democrats knew it wasn’t about economic insecurity, it was the fucking waves of douchecanoes with their Bernie tattoos who couldn’t figure out when to register in the primaries making excuses chanting Bernie would have won who never pulled their heads out of their asses.)
They fucking hate you. They want to destroy you and this country. And they’re fucking winning.
mai naem mobile
Well,JC, tell us how you really feel about the not so GOP.
Dev Null
Tell us what you really think, John!
er, ahem… preach it, bro!
Kristin D
Right. That Intercept headline should be “We Are Wrong” not “The Democrats Are Wrong.”
Also, yeah, fuck the Republicans. McConnell has to be the slimiest, most dishonest piece of garbage ever to exist.
debbie
Not only should the Dems stop playing nice, they should take to the floor at every opportunity and sprinkle all of their remarks with denouncements of Mitch McConnell.
Patricia Kayden
Democrats should have learned that lesson after Republicans tried to impeach President Clinton out of office for lying about sex. That was a hint right there.
Alesis
Ultimately I think it’s about activate and organizing the Dem base. Putting a ballot in the hands of every liberal and bringing home the message that all our arguments over UBI are moot in Democrats don’t hold office.
That said I’m also curious what wakes a republican up? How does a person realize that they are part of an explicitly anti egalitarian movement?
different-church-lady
I sense a Batlight being lit…
different-church-lady
@Kristin D:
Aren’t you forgetting about somebody?
Arcnor
There’s been quite a debate going on up here in Canada too.
…
I am so damned lucky to have been born just north of an imaginary line.
Roger Moore
Sure as hell there was reason to blow up the filibuster; there was no way they were going to get somebody crazier than Scalia through while it was still in place. You may not be happy with that reason, but it certainly is a reason.
Mezz
I appreciate this Cole, and that’s why this was the first stop a few weeks ago when I lifted my self-imposed banishment from all news and information. (I deliberately lived under a rock the first few months’ of this shit-show. The defeat of the health care idiocy was the point – I felt like maybe Democrats would stop being craven, and naive, and for once be unapologetic for being liberal. (We have here the good Senator Professor, so she sets a high bar.)
I’m not convinced that they will stop being craven, but I knew this would be the place to go for like a stirring trumpet call. Nicely done – I’ll take a shitty justice or two more Alitos if Democrats get through their thick f***ng skulls to stop playing nice.
Because there’ll always be more of us than them.
cokane
i miss your political blog posts cole, twitter has ruined you! but this was good and righteous, thanks.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
Speaking of “The Intercept”
Griftwald is blaming Trump’s proposed air-strike on Syria on….. wait for it….. liberals.(photo).
See, it’s always
Obama’sDems’ fault in Griftopia.lamh36
And I thought finding companionship would make you less “ranty”…lol. I’m glad to see the ranter in chief of BJ is still hanging in there…lol.
My reaction to all these white journos still writing these “be nice to Trump voters” articles…Fuq all u fuq’er
I totally agree with ya here..
NotMax
Notice to theatergoers: In tonight’s performance the part of Howard Beale will be played by John Cole.
Roger Moore
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch::
Shorter Greenwald: She made me hit her.
Kristin D
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch::
He’s in the running for slimiest, most dishonest piece of garbage, also.
? Martin
@Alesis:
Wake up in hell, I imagine.
AdamK
This right here is why I love John Cole.
hovercraft
I’d say excellent rant, but it’s not even a rant, just stating the fucking obvious. It’s past time to give a shit what the fucking media have to say, and just fucking fight back, give as good as we get. Forget the fainting couches, better yet burn them, the media are as responsible for this sorry state we find ourselves in, the normalized republican behavior. We let them get away with this both sides bullshit, no more, they want gridlock, we’ll give it to them, let them own Twitler and their failure as a party to produce any viable policy. They will all own the failure, they can bitch as much as they like about obstruction and we should just throw it right back at them.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kristin D: I’m not surprised, but still shaking my damn head over McCain and Graham and their public declarations of the vapors over this thing they’re being forced to do! Unprecedented! Death of the Senate! And we had to kill it! and the media still fawning over those preening mediocrities.
In the car today I heard Andrea Mitchell talking to somebody, I think a Dem Senator, and she was making the point that since this was Scalia’s seat, isn’t right that it should go to a conservative? I’d like to think that whoever it was, especially if it was a Dem Senator, said, “My goodness, Andrea, that’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. Would you like to explain which seat is Roger B Tanney’s and who we should keep his flame alive?” I had to change the channel, but I don’t think that was said.
mai naem mobile
Newt broke he House.McConnell broke the Senate and Dolt 45 us well onto breaking the Presidency.
geg6
Righteous rant, Cole. You don’t do that enough these days. ABC has mellowed you out.
Kristin D
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: McCain is the worst. “This is the death of democracy.” Five minutes later. “Well, of course I’m voting for it. Duh.”
And where do these theories like “it was Scalia’s seat” come from? It’s like whoever accused Obama of “court packing” because he wanted to fill a vacant seat.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
Bernie’s revolution coming after Obama became one great big white male supremacist tantrum. Gee, who couldn’t see that coming?
Roger Moore
@Kristin D:
I think we should take him at his word; he’s happily voting to end democracy.
geg6
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Wish I could remember which show and who it was, but I had MSNBC on the other night and someone said the same bullshit Mrs. Greenspan said and another person basically said that was total bullshit and there’s no rule that says any particular seat on the court should go to the same sort of person who is being replaced. There was much pearl clutching among the rest of the panel over it.
A Ghost to Most
Not another fucking inch to these assholes.
And a double fuck you to that goddamned goggle-eyed snapping turtle, McComplicit.
weaselone
@geg6:
It’s Merrick Fucking Garland’s seat.
Yarrow
Love your political rants, Cole. Please post more often.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@weaselone:
This.
Patricia Kayden
@Roger Moore: It’s the mavericky thing to do. Say something is awful and then a few minutes later vote for that exact thing.
Emerald
@mai naem mobile:
Truth. And more: our Constitution let us down. The Founding Fathers were scared of the hoi polloi, didn’t want a direct democracy, so created the Electoral College and had Senators elected from their state legislatures.
But the hoi polloi were right, and their fancy Electors were wrong. Not the first time it’s happened, either.
All we have left are the courts, which do appear to be doing their job, and ourselves. Frankly, I think we can still win. I still think this could turn out to be America’s finest hour. We stopped their destruction of the ACA, the courts have stopped the travel bans and are fighting back against their voter suppression and Twitler’s deliberate poisoning of our waters.
But about every other day I kinda want a new Constitutional Convention wherein we can just split up and let the Red States stew in their own poison, and the rest of us get on with making some good government.
Le Sigh.
SiubhanDuinne
So awesome.
Roger Moore
@Emerald:
The Constitution is just a piece of vellum. Expecting it to stand on its own is ridiculous. The problem is not that the Constitution let us down. The problem is that our news media sucks and a large fraction of our voters are assholes. No set of rules are going to make democracy work well when a substantial minority of voters aren’t willing to protect it.
gene108
@Alesis:
IGMFY is a philosophy that under girds a large part of the Republican base.
Makes being egalitarian sort of moot.
Timurid
Netanyahu might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but he can’t be this stupid… right? Somebody please tell me he can’t be that stupid…
Starfish
I was so annoyed by why Bennet was not joining the filibuster when I saw it this morning.
dm
Part of the attraction of the “it’s the economy, stupid” is that’s something the Democrats can do something about without betraying their principles. When it becomes an issue of racism, what are the Democrats supposed to do to make progress? Embrace the racism?
I’d like to think racism is a thing you sink into. If it’s “just” something you turn to in order to have someone lower on the totem pole to piss on (the “lower-class racism is the result of an upper-class divide and conquer strategy” school-of-thought), then, yeah, making the economy more fair might be a way to put cracks into the racist bloc. Give people something more attractive than racism to get through their day. I don’t know.
I heard Trump’s victory described the other day as the result of “the slave-holder arithmetic” of the Electoral College. So I suppose we could push to get rid of the Electoral College.
Roger Moore
@Alesis:
They see life as a battle between Us and Them. If We don’t win, They will overwhelm and destroy US. Egalitarianism is just another word for letting Them have Their way.
LAC
@Roger Moore: shorter shorter greenwakd: a hot guy played me in the Snowden film, sooooo….
dm
Another thing: “be nice to Trump voters” is another way of saying: look for the teachable moment with Trump voters. ‘Cause, Democrats are going to want some of their votes, and it would be nice if we could get their hearts and minds, too — without betraying our principles. At least until you can remove the Electoral College from the presidential inequation.
You draw more flies with honey than vinegar (though as Trump showed, to really bring out the flies, use bullshit).
raven
@SiubhanDuinne: Your FB is hacked.
Villago Delenda Est
John, you neglected to mention the vermin of the Village.
Wipe them out. All of them. Double wipeouts for Chuckles the Toddler and Mrs. Greenspan.
burnspbesq
@Timurid:
Oh, yes, he can be that stupid.
cckids
@geg6:
Good. This, the senators before the election with their “eight Supremes are just fine”, the many, many assertations made by & about Trump, all go to show that there is no, NO argument that is so bone stupid and insultingly illogical that the Republicans won’t make it and most of the media nod along.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore: EVERYTHING is zero sum with them. This is why they suck…they can’t imagine a situation where if the other guy gets something, it’s not a crippling loss for them. You cannot have peaceful coexistence with such creatures.
Mary G
I’m late to the internet today, and this is a dead thread, but I just have to say thanks, John. That is exactly what I needed.
Booger
Cole’s back, everyone.
laura
I’m intrigued by your insights and wish to subscribe to your newsletter Mr. Cole.
Righteous anger in support of justice and a call to action in opposition to fuckery -I’m all in with both feet!
Thru the Looking Glass...
Fantastic… per CBS, now Nunes’ behavior s/b part of the investigation…
schrodingers_cat
Where was this insight and intelligence when you invited Boring Freddie to be a front pager over here?
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
You are of course correct, it is just a piece of vellum. But that piece of vellum has far more weight to it than just a piece of fancy paper. It has been for quite a few years at least an ideal, something that we could aspire to, even if we had a few fuck ups along the way. But it’s two greatest failings was to think that the political power would work OK for ever and that while it talks a good game about everyone being equal, it really didn’t mean it.
Personally I think we are seeing the end of a government. It’s not interesting times, it’s horrible times. Because the rich not only now control us, they own us. And they know it. The only people who don’t are the assholes who voted for drumpf. I predict a war or major recession within a year. And all things considered, neither one will end even close to well. Within that year, most of our civil liberties will be gone. The ACA will be gone. The taxes on the those of us in the 85-95th percentile will raise dramatically, while the rest of the country will pay no taxes at all. You think life sucked during the last recession? That will be normal within a year.
Why do I say all this? Because this is what the fucking asshole conservatives want (along with a bunch of other shit you and I and those like minded, will not like) and they have just made all of it possible. This is their wet dream and they just spluged all over all of us.
efgoldman
@dm:
A unipony fantasy. Takes a constitutional amendment which no big, empty state will ever support because it would take away their influence.
brendancalling
@cckids: what’s coming will be an attempt to stack the court. Because if 8 is fine, so is 10, 11,12,however many it takes to tilt the court permanently to the right.
dm
@efgoldman: Could maybe do that national-popular-vote thing, where states with 270 electoral votes all agree to cast their electoral votes with the popular vote. That might be doable on a legislature-by-legislature basis.
Until then, what do we do with the rural Trump voters and their effective two votes for every one of ours?
gene108
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Then how the fuck did Thurgood Marshall’s seat go to fucking Clarence Thomas?
martian
Do these people flogging the economic insecurity argument never wonder why the black working class did not vote for Trump? Do they think that only white people vote their economic interests? Are there economic insecurities peculiar to the white race? What white insecurity might the Republicans be addressing that Democrats are not? It is a puzzlement.
West of the Cascades
@dm:
On less charitable days, I say “more opiods.” But today is not a less charitable day — the simple fact is that half the population of the whole country doesn’t vote at all, and that as recently as 2008 the Democratic Party held the House, the Presidency, and a 60-vote majority in the Senate. If the party and its supporters focus energy and money on just getting several thousand additional voters to the polls (or in Oregon the mailbox) in every congressional district to vote for Democrats, and run some good candidates, it can be 2008 all over again by 2020 (except maybe in the Senate). Other action and protest and resistance is essential, too, to keep the Trumpian horrors to a minimum, but getting people to actually go vote is the single most important thing anyone can be doing now and in 2018 and in 2020 and in all the elections in between.
Ksmiami
@hovercraft: I’ve been saying it for years- GOP is a fascist Confederate wrecking crew the only negotiation is how big of a board do you hit them with.
Ksmiami
@dm: let them die off from Oxycodin and lack of healthcare – sorry
Lavocat
Lighten up, Francis.
And you’re wrong.
Again.
But I love your attitude!
By the way, Donny Boy just bombed Syria. Let’s see what else he can destroy while he’s at it.
crawdad
I love this blog.
BBA
I’m ready to endorse #KillAllWhiteMen and I am a white man.
Anne Laurie
@gene108:
“Who can tell those people apart?” (/Repub)
dm
@martian: The black working class didn’t vote?
Though I live in a real bubble: the first professed Trump supporter I met was a black immigrant(!) Uber driver. He’d gotten laid off from his health-insurance job and was tossed into the gig econom, and seemed to blame the ACA for that.
It was…. disorienting.
@Ksmiami: All that does is turn their effective two votes to every one of ours into effectively three votes for every one of ours.
The US system sort-of gives real estate the vote: all those empty acres in Wyoming have three representatives in the two houses of Congress, while Brooklyn has over five times as many people yet has only five members in the two houses of Congress (and they share the two Senators with the rest of New York). [I think, I’m going on squinting at district maps here]
If half the people of Wyoming go away, they’ll still have three people in Congress.
(Personally, I think we should take the population of the smallest state and declare that to be the number of people who live in a House district. If that means 700 members of the House of Representatives, so be it.)
rikyrah
You are not lying Cole.
Tokyokie
My view is that now the Yertle has destroyed comity in the Senate once and for all, stop even pretending to be nice. Ignore the chamber’s presiding officer at every turn, and if he turns off the mic, have a lapel mic and portable loudspeaker rigged up and continue talking. Tell Yertle and every other member of the GOP that not one of the useless, gutless pieces of shit had the courage and character to defy the party line for the sake of the institution. And don’t merely imply that they’re useless, gutless pieces of shit devoid of all courage and character, say on the Senate floor, “Senator McCain, you’re a useless, gutless piece of shit devoid of all courage and character.” And do it every day the Senate is in session. And every Democrat needs to do it. And when the presiding officer starts ordering the sergeant-at-arms to remove the offending members of the opposition party, THAT will lead the news broadcasts, not the naughty language. (Then follow that with a lawsuit against the presiding officer based on the Civil Rights Act.)
These fuckers decided that putting a smirking fascist half-wit onto the court was more important than having a working Senate. So, as they want a broken Senate, I say show the bastards how a broken Senate operates.
Paula
@debbie: Yes!
Donna K
Love me some righteously raging John Cole!
Paula
No mercy and no quarter.
Ksmiami
@dm: I think things will get so bad under Trump and the GOP that things like the Constitution and electoral college will be discarded as relics. I am not being Pollyanna here.
Ksmiami
@dm: rip it up and start over… as I write this Trump has illegally started a war in Syria
martian
@dm: I think if you* have to first divide the working class according to race so that you can make the argument that the white working class is voting according to their economic insecurity (unlike the black working class because…?) and that racism has nothing to do with it, that your argument is just on the face of it, intellectually dishonest. Do any of the Jacobin Berniebro Bootlickers ever wrestle with that publicly? Serious question. I haven’t seen it. Just the squid cloud of butthurt over the terrible insult of bringing up racism as a factor in their votes.
I have a strong feeling that you’re wrong that making the economy fairer would put cracks in the racist voting bloc. I think the point of the racist voting bloc is that they want things to be *less* fair. Losing privilege is what feels unfair to them and helping them to keep it is what Republicans do promise and Democrats should never.
*General you, not you, yourself.
Van Buren
@geg6: So when Ginseng retires a liberal gets nominated, is that how it works?
RM
@Van Buren: She’s never retiring. She’s going to claw onto that seat until she dies in it.
Citizen Alan
@dm:
Actually, the intent of the Framers was 1 Representative for every 30,000 voters, but that Amendment never got ratified. If it had, the House of Representatives would have about 6,000 members. This would also greatly solve the Electoral College problem, since EVs would overwhelmingly be apportioned by population instead of acreage, as is now the case.
The Original First Amendment.
jake the antisoshul soshulist
@Alesis:
They are part of an anti-egalitarian movement because they truly are anti-egalitarian.
TenguPhule
And its only going to get worse.
Yes, the Republicans are literally going to try and kill us all for not being like them.
Theodore Wirth
As usual, I love this rant.
“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Subaru Drivng John Cole.” You can plug that name John Cole into vrirtually any Murkun legend. Give it a try.