Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

…and a burning sense of injustice to juice the soul.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Trump makes a mockery of the legal system and cowardly judges just sit back and let him.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

Cole is on a roll !

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Accountability, motherfuckers.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

If you are in line to indict donald trump, stay in line.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

The jury literally has a bell they can ring to force Trump to show up on command. Greatest thing ever!

You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2020 / GOP Stupidity Open Thread: Erin Go Bragh to You Too, Ronna

GOP Stupidity Open Thread: Erin Go Bragh to You Too, Ronna

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By the end of 2019, the FEC will be asking O’Rourke to declare GOP gotchas like this as free in-kind support…

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86Comments

  2. 2.

    zhena gogolia

    I think they’re being too clever by half. The (Repub) joke is, he pretends to be Latino, but he’s really Irish! Har har har

  4. 4.

    SFAW

    So is it bigfooting when you’re doing it to the blogfather?

    That aside: as Cole would say: these fucking guys.

    I don’t know if Tom Perez has some attack-dog-like person in the DNC, someone he could unleash to go after the Party of Racist Traitors when stuff like this occurs, but if he doesn’t, he should consider it. Someone who could combine dramatic irony, metaphor, pathos, puns, parody, litotes and… satire. But be a real gentleperson about it.

  9. 9.

    tobie

    AL/JC: Can you please combine your posts? I don’t want to see any diary sparring on my favorite blog! Thank you.

  10. 10.

    Jay

    “It’s a measure of how much has changed in a year that, last month the UK, parliament published an official report that called Facebook “digital gangsters” and said that Britain’s electoral laws no longer worked. It was a report that drew on hours of testimony from Cambridge Analytica directors, Facebook executives and dozens of expert witnesses: 73 in total, of whom MPs had asked 4,350 questions. And its conclusion? That Silicon Valley’s tech platforms were out of control, none more so than Facebook, which it said had treated parliament with “contempt”.”

    Snip

    ““I was asked by a journalist to sum up the story in a minute,” he says, “and I was like: ‘No’. It goes from Trump to Brexit to Russian espionage to military operations in Afghanistan to hacking the president of Nigeria. Where do you even begin?”

    He’s referring to the fact that Cambridge Analytica was part of a much bigger company, SCL, which had worked as a defence contractor for governments and militaries around the world, then branched into elections in developing countries, and, only in its final iteration, entered western politics. That’s one of the things, he says, that “frustrates me about how dominant the Facebook angle of the story was, when there’s so much fucked-up shit that Cambridge Analytica were doing in different parts of the world. But if you go to a developing country and do grossly unethical things, that’s not ‘newsworthy’.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-year-on-lesson-in-institutional-failure-christopher-wylie

  11. 11.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    As I said downstairs. Are they stupid? Do they think alienating the Irish is a sound political strategy? Really? Do they know how many people in the US identify as Irish? WTF?

  12. 12.

    Kraux Pas

    @Litlebritdifrnt:

    As I said downstairs. Are they stupid? Do they think alienating the Irish is a sound political strategy? Really? Do they know how many people in the US identify as Irish? WTF?

    On St. Patrick’s Day, everyone is Irish.

  13. 13.

    Brachiator

    @zhena gogolia:

    I think they’re being too clever by half. The (Repub) joke is, he pretends to be Latino, but he’s really Irish! Har har har

    Yep. As with Trump’s insipid mockery of Elizabeth Warren, the GOP likes to present itself as the party of white racial purity.

  14. 14.

    lollipopguild

    @Litlebritdifrnt: We are dealing with people who are living in their own alternate universe and do not think about all of the Irish that they just offended. These are people who are not capable of thinking outside the bubble that they live in.

  16. 16.

    SFAW

    @Doc Sardonic:

    Téigh Dtí Diabhail, a thóin mór

    I like it.

    Mrs. SFAW, a lass of extremely Irish heritage, was always partial to: póg mo thóin

    She said she was taught that by her grandmother, of all people.

  17. 17.

    J R in WV

    @Kraux Pas:

    On St. Patrick’s Day, everyone is Irish.

    Well, I actually do have Irish ancestors, way back. But they were originally Scottish, exported to Ireland by the British overlords. So, Orange, not Green.

    I’m not particularly proud of the Orange Irish, which in Northern Ireland were terrorists who brutalized the minority Catholic Irish who were trapped in the British colony of Northern Ireland.

    On the other hand, I do like Irish folk music, in properly sized doses, as well as Irish whiskey, of which I will have a nip of later on.

  18. 18.

    Brachiator

    @Jay:

    And its conclusion? That Silicon Valley’s tech platforms were out of control, none more so than Facebook, which it said had treated parliament with “contempt”.”

    Given the idiocy of the government’s handling of BREXIT and other issues, I would suggest that parliament deserves to be treated with contempt.

    I also think that they should be looking closer to home with respect to corruption and Cambridge Analytica rather than pointing a finger at Facebook and Silicon Valley.

  19. 19.

    WaterGirl

    This photo is worrisome. After Beto lost those two votes in the fall after they posted the photo of him in the metal band, I’m not sure we can afford to lose another two from this one. :-)

  20. 20.

    Mike in NC

    Mick Mulvaney whines that Fat Bastard isn’t a white supremacist, all evidence to the contrary. Of course, Mulvaney was elected to Congress running as a Tea Party scumbag in South Carolina. So really no difference between the two of them.

  21. 21.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    @Baud: who would joke about Kevin Pollack. He’s a good character actor and runs a compelling podcast

  23. 23.

    debbie

    I guess Boston has changed since I lived there. Dorchester is where the Orange march would have been ripped to shreds. Nevertheless, wherever it happens, I’d pay just to watch the wicked carnage!

  24. 24.

    Brachiator

    @Litlebritdifrnt:

    As I said downstairs. Are they stupid? Do they think alienating the Irish is a sound political strategy?

    They think that the Irish are stupid, and will be too busy hating blacks and Hispanics to worry about being insulted.

  26. 26.

    Yutsano

    You know…it’s better when they stop pretending. It makes us lefties look less hyperbolic.

    OT: I’m home.

  28. 28.

    mrmoshpotato

    Wow. Talk about trying too hard.

    Hey GOP! We know you’re a racist shitpile. We’ve known it for 40 years. You can give it a rest.

    (Though we know you really can’t.)

  30. 30.

    Jay

    @Brachiator:

    The whole article is well worth reading.

    The British Parliament is ignoring the Brexit rigging, Russian influence, Cambridge Analetica, SCL, Facebook, because quite simply, they don’t have a clue on how to deal with it.

    ““The thing is that there was such a huge weight of evidence which has now all been proven,” says Wylie. “Vote Leave broke the law. I can say that out loud now. Vote Leave broke the law. But nothing happened. It’s insane to me that people get more upset by doping in the Olympics, when the consequence of this is an irreversible change to the constitutional settlement of the country.”

    Perhaps what the scandal has really revealed is a situation that is too embarrassing, too disastrous to acknowledge. We know that Facebook has been used to undermine elections all across the world, including our own. But we’re in this strange historical moment where we’ve realised it, but we don’t have the power, currently, to do anything about it.”

    Snip

    “He points out that every previous transition on this scale has been followed by war and upheaval. “And I do worry about increasing polarisation that we can see happening everywhere.” He’s talking about the stories we see reported every day: gilets jaunes in France, neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, Tommy Robinson’s antics in the UK. But they’re rarely understood to be connected by the same deep technological undertow. Just days after I file this story, a mass shooter opens fire in a New Zealand mosque and live-streams the massacre on Facebook. A killing designed as a viral video. Which immediately goes viral. At times like these, it’s almost impossible to keep the despair at bay.

    In the meantime, while Robert Mueller in the US painstakingly sets out the evidence of how Russia subverted Facebook during the presidential election, we know almost nothing about what happened in Britain. Collins’s parliamentary committee – citing Arron Banks’s covert meetings with Russian embassy staff that were first revealed in the Observer, and the role of Russian paid-for propaganda – has called for an independent investigation into foreign interference, but it’s a call both the government and the leader of the opposition have utterly ignored.”

  31. 31.

    sukabi

    GOP is on a roll today, bigotry and fear mongering…in other words a day ending in “y”…

    Nick Knudsen ??
    @DemWrite
    RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel sent out this mailer to the GOP hordes. Instead of laying out a Republican vision for American policy (why bother?), it speaks of Democratic “sabotage” and predicts our “rioting mobs”.

    Dangerous rhetoric. Fear-mongering & gaslighting is all they’ve got.

    Link to the flyer

  32. 32.

    B.B.A.

    Meanwhile, a 2020 candidate who a few months ago we would have considered “major” officially threw her hat in the ring today, and nobody gives two hoots.

  34. 34.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @B.B.A.:

    Meanwhile, a 2020 candidate who a few months ago we would have considered “major” officially threw her hat in the ring today, and nobody gives two hoots.

    You must be right about that, because I have no idea to whom you refer. Depending on who she is, I might give one, two, or even three hoots.

  36. 36.

    Catherine D.

    I love this. My racist, Trumpist, Irish-American family will still not believe that they will go under the bus. My father was bitching about immigrants and I pointed out that three of his four grandparents were immigrants who never became citizens. Sputter, sputter.

  37. 37.

    sukabi

    @B.B.A.: I figured she was already running, not just “exploring”. She’s been giving speeches and doing campaign events.

    Also, she doesn’t have dangly bits between her legs so the media is more focused on the will he or won’t he white guys.

  38. 38.

    banditqueen

    The GOP hacks were very concerned that we not blame a man for his ‘youthful indiscretions’–the ‘good man’ Bret Kav knows this well–but the GOP hacks now have strong views on youthful indiscretions and the way that no one ever can overcome them, no matter how much someone acknowledges the mistake and atones for it.

  41. 41.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Litlebritdifrnt: Exqueeze me, but wasn’t St. Ronnie of the Morning in America of Irish descent?

    The GOP has gone this fuckin’ far?

    “We’ll take the ni*CLANGS*, we’ll take the Chinese, but we WON’T take the Irish.”

  45. 45.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Jay:

    but it’s a call both the government and the leader of the opposition have utterly ignored.

    They’re far too busy sitting on their collective asses to do something, anything, about Brexit.

  46. 46.

    Brachiator

    @Jay:

    Collins’s parliamentary committee … has called for an independent investigation into foreign interference, but it’s a call both the government and the leader of the opposition have utterly ignored.”

    I wonder why this might be.

  47. 47.

    Brachiator

    @Baud:

    Lots of different peoples are in fact that stupid

    Today it’s the Irish. Other groups will get their turn.

  48. 48.

    MisterForkbeard

    @B.B.A.: To be fair, I had already assumed Gillibrand was campaigning and in the race.

    The ‘official rollouts’ don’t really mean all that much, most of the time. Given her reception thus far in 2019, I don’t think she has a big chance here. :(

  50. 50.

    Jay

    @Villago Delenda Est:
    @Brachiator:

    The thing is, it ain’t just Brexit. Quite simply, the internet and social media are tearing apart our democracies, our communities, out societies and the Brits arn’t even trying to do anything about it.

    At least in Canada, the Government is looking into it.

  52. 52.

    B.B.A.

    @Jay: The conventional wisdom is that if a second referendum were held, lots of Remainers would jump to the Leave side because what’s done is done and no use going back on it now, stiff upper lip, keep fucking that chicken, etc.

  53. 53.

    Patricia Kayden

    Republicans certainly have a weird sense of humor because nothing about that Beto “drink responsibly” tweet is funny to me. They love them some stereotypes which will eventually be their downfall.

  54. 54.

    Jay

    “Charges against the remaining J20 protesters with no plea deals who were awaiting trial were dropped Friday with prejudice—meaning proscecutors can’t try them again for the 2017 protest.

    Hundreds of anti-Trump protesters were arrested on Jan. 20, 2017, for protesting the inauguration of President Donald Trump. The prosecution of the group—using felony charges against protesters and journalists—has been criticized by rights groups and failed miserably in court. Friday’s ruling by D.C. Superior Court Chief Judge Robert Morin, which ordered the charges dropped with prejudice, shuts the door completely on the case.”

    https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/03/15/case-finally-over-charges-dropped-against-all-remaining-j20-defendants

  56. 56.

    Jay

    @Patricia Kayden:

    The article isn’t about Brexit as the main subject.

    It’s about Big Tech and others destroying our democracies, societies and communities and “nobody” in the British Government wants to even look at the issue, because FaceBook and others are now more powerful than Governments.

  57. 57.

    hedgehog mobile

    Wish I could say I’m shocked or even surprised by this. Sadly I’m not.
    (my maternal grandparents were literally off the boat at Ellis Island from County Cork)

  58. 58.

    Brachiator

    @Jay:

    The thing is, it ain’t just Brexit. Quite simply, the internet and social media are tearing apart our democracies, our communities, our societies

    Quite simply, this is nonsense. The Internet is not going away.

    The trick is how best to regulate it, and to prevent abuse by tech companies, foreign actors and also from those in our own governments who would love to use tech tools for their own benefit.

    I note that politicians love to get big bags of money from corporations, and the problem has been that they look at the tremendous profits booked by high tech companies and think that they should be getting a bigger cut. Meanwhile, they pretend to be concerned about the evils of social media. It’s the same old racket. And some people fall for it every time.

  59. 59.

    JPL

    wtf is he even talking about now?

    What the Democrats have done in trying to steal a Presidential Election, first at the “ballot box” and then, after that failed, with the “Insurance Policy,” is the biggest Scandal in the history of our Country!

  61. 61.

    chris

    @JPL: He’s losing what’s left of his mind?

    The president is again retweeting nonsense-peddler Jack Posobiec, known for such things as spreading the “Pizzagate” lie and finding ways to tweet the white supremacist code “1488,” a reference to “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) March 17, 2019

  62. 62.

    Bill Arnold

    @Jay:

    The whole article is well worth reading.

    Yes, very good piece. Here’s another link just because: Cambridge Analytica a year on: ‘a lesson in institutional failure’ – One year after she broke the scandal, Carole Cadwalladr talks to whistleblower Christopher Wylie about the fallout for big tech, and the fight to hold the culprits to account (17 Mar 2019, Carole Cadwalladr(?))
    Another teaser quote:

    The Brexit angle of the Cambridge Analytica Files, the explosive revelations of a second whistleblower, Shahmir Sanni, fell inexplicably flat. Sanni revealed in the Observer how Vote Leave deliberately broke the law in the way it funnelled money to the data firm AggregateIQ, an associate company of Cambridge Analytica. It’s believed to be the biggest breach of electoral law in a century, but it was given minimal coverage by the BBC and all but ignored by Britain’s political class.

    FBI agents need to be learn how to be better interviewers; this is just rude. A simple “we find it fascinating but are taught not to express our emotions” (or whatever) in a bathroom break would have been helpful.

    His FBI grilling, on the other hand, involved a “room full of men who were totally expressionless for hours on end. It was quite intimidating.”

  65. 65.

    debbie

    @WaterGirl:

    She announced she was forming an exploratory committee on Colbert. I Was surprised at how much applause she got for just that.

  68. 68.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @MJS: I think they think “Rum, Romanism & Rebellion” are the planks of their platform, not a rallying cry against the Untermenschen…

    (Edited for clarity)

  70. 70.

    Bill Arnold

    @Brachiator:

    Quite simply, this is nonsense. The Internet is not going away.

    Pretty sure Jay is roughly agreeing with you.
    I have extremely mixed feelings. (Some rough thoughts, need tuning.) The downside is that the internet can provide large political influence on a tiny budget if one is skilled, and regulation to neuter this means that much of this power moves back to corporate media (including stenographers and party organs like FNN) and their wealthy/corporate sponsors. Power diffusion is generally good for societies.
    One possibly helpful rule would be for well-funded influence operations to be legally required to have much more transparency about funding sources. Want to avoid in particular opaque operations that could be (no evidence, just speculation as examples) purely driven by greed, such as Brexit profiteering or social media operations stoking nationalist sentiments (e.g. india/pakistan) to manipulate the stock markets (fear of nuclear war).

  73. 73.

    Jay

    @Brachiator:

    “Quite simply, this is nonsense. The Internet is not going away.”

    Where do you think all these Nazis, mass shooters, anti-vaxxers, Brexiteers, 80,000 votes in three States, Yellow Vests Canada, Flat Earthers, Royhinga genocide, ISIL recruitment, the lists go on and on, are coming from?

    It ain’t books.

    https://sullyville.substack.com/p/pigs-a-million-different-ones?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy

    “The trick is how best to regulate it, and to prevent abuse by tech companies, foreign actors and also from those in our own governments who would love to use tech tools for their own benefit.”

    Yellow Vests Canada regularly violates Facebooks TOS and Canada’s Hate Laws. Canada can’t do anything about it and Facebook prefers to ban pages that point it out.

    Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others all have monetized hate, monetized hate so that the “content sellers” can make a living off it, and gamed their algorithms to push hate to the top of the searchs.

    The most they have been willing to do, ( ISIL, Royhinga Genocide. Anti-vaxxers, live streamed snuff films) is close the barn door after the horse is out, when they might be legally liable for damages.

    Most Governments arn’t even seriously looking at the issue. In some cases they don’t understand the issue. In some cases they feel powerless, and in some cases, they don’t have any issues with it.

    SCI was a MIC company formed to allow it’s clients ( Western Governments) “throw” elections in 2nd and 3rd World Countries. CA, a subsidary of SCI was used throw elections in Britain and the US.

  74. 74.

    Suzanne

    I suppose the Italians are next? Let me guess: a tweet about how we’re all Mafiosi and guidos a la Real Housewives? If they insult both the Irish and the Italians, will it dawn on the Trumpy assholes that they’re really anti-Catholic?

  75. 75.

    Bill Arnold

    @Bill Arnold:

    Power diffusion is generally good for societies.

    Off topic, but atypical economics books are your thing, A History of Wealth and Poverty – Why a Few Nations are Rich and Many Poor (Full text, John P. Powelson, a (deceased) family acquaintance, from whom I learned never to argue with a broadly educated economist and expect to win. Formerly “Centuries of Economic Endeavor: Parallel Paths in Japan and Europe and their Contrast with the Third World.”)

    Power diffusion in Japan and northwestern Europe was initiated in similar ways, and it continued in matching ways for at least seven centuries. In the next five chapters I will show examples of how both societies developed a growing balance of power among economic interest groups and how this balance led toward institutions that were both equitable and growth-promoting. Power diffusion also fostered liberal economic attitudes, along with parliamentary democracy, widespread ownership of assets, and decentralized decision making. These are what led to durable economic development.

    Imagine an institution as a balloon floating in many-dimensional space, sustained in its position and shape by interest groups blowing on it from all sides. Some breaths are stronger, some weaker. An institution is durable if, with many groups blowing upon it, the breath of any one or small combination is too weak to affect its location or shape very much. Durable economic development requires durable institutions. But even a durable institution may change character gradually as the groups or their relative powers change.

    Being largely elite-managed, they did not reflect the interests of the groups they presumably served, so they were not institutionally capable of negotiating the many positive-sum moves that were physically possible.

  76. 76.

    SFAW

    @Amir Khalid:

    Isn’t that the name of an 80s band from Ireland?

    I was going to make a smartass remark re: the Pogues, then I wiki’d them, and found out the source of their name (which I had heretofore not known).

    Well done, sir. I say Well Done!

    ETA: Of course, they’re actually from London, but “close enough for government work.”

  80. 80.

    Brachiator

    @Jay:

    Where do you think all these Nazis, mass shooters, anti-vaxxers, Brexiteers, 80,000 votes in three States, Yellow Vests Canada, Flat Earthers, Royhinga genocide, ISIL recruitment, the lists go on and on, are coming from?

    Yah, I remember how Adolf used Fuhrer Book to start WW2.

  81. 81.

    zhena gogolia

    @JPL:

    I think the “insurance policy” was something Strzok said to Page or Page said to Strzok. And if you remember who they are, then you must be a BJ reader.

  82. 82.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @B.B.A.: O’Helyeh!

    Heck. if the Thugs wanna drop acid, I’m buying. Red Fuming Nitric Acid, to be precise. Perfectly legal. Minimally potable.

    The problem with my misspent yoot is that it wasn’t misspent enough by half – if I’d known I’d live to be this old I’d’ve had more misadventures along the way.

  83. 83.

    Jay

    @Brachiator:

    Hitler used Billionaires, the Freikorp and Beerhalls, ( the chat rooms of their day) to come to power.

    Mein Kamph didn’t become a “bestseller” until the Goverment made it’s ownership manditory.

    Nice try.

  84. 84.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    So Trump as a penny pinching Scots is fair game now?

    So we have the same double standard for Jews with the Manly Israli Jews verses the week effeminate New York Jews nonsense with now with Irish? A mean they were beat their meat over St Brenbart the Celtic warrior all the time. These guys can even screw up hate.

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