you're a fucking liar https://t.co/CJvrx9P5Db
— John Cole (@Johngcole) December 9, 2019
Republicans have learned over the past few years that they can simply lie about everything and there is no penalty. The media won’t correct them, and if they do, they will just go to friendly media outlets. Their followers won’t punish them- they will just repeat the lies. Their peers are out there lying with them. And the voters can’t correct the situation, because the Republicans have rigged their districts to the point that you can be charged with multiple felonies and you’ll get elected anyway (see Duncan Hunter).
I honestly don’t know what can be done about this.
Just Chuck
Welcome to post-truth America, where only your Facebook feed matters.
Ryan
Weren’t the swears driving away ad networks? Weren’t we admonished for that?
Eural Joiner
The eventual result is the same as the last decades of the Roman Republic – increasing hostility, everyone starts breaking accepted rules and norms and eventual cataclysmic civil war. The GOP has fallen prey to the very human condition in which short term gains outshine holding to long established norms that force everyone to share power.
Oddly, we don’t even have a long, slow political fall to look forward to – looks like climate change is going to do a number on everyone in the very near future.
What a time to be alive!
chris
Apparently so.
geg6
I don’t know what to do either. I have an old, good friend who works for the Dems in the PA House. He is always trying to be the reasonable liberal with his old GOPer friends and they just walk all over him. He’s a great guy, with all the right values and policy positions but just seems to always capitulate to these idiots and find some nugget in their unhinged rantings on his FB page with which he can agree or say they may have a point. Fuck that shit, at this point. I want them all to be hit with a tactical nuclear bomb. I can’t understand why he is always trying to make them see reason. It’s not fucking possible. Why bother? Told him just that this morning.
Betty Cracker
I don’t know either. The liars will “exonerate” the liar-in-chief, who will surely take that as a sign to escalate the lying and cheating. Only an across-the-board walloping at the polls could check the liars, but between gerrymandering, voter suppression and Fox News beaming stupid nonstop to recruit people into a self-flattering alternate reality, that’s not going to happen.
VFX Lurker
Duncan Hunter’s CA-50 isn’t rigged. California passed and implemented at least two anti-gerrymandering efforts since I moved out here in 1999. Look at that district’s shape — it’s mostly straight borders save for where it hits a mountain range.
I can think of other reasons CA-50 barely fought off the blue wave last year (ex: racism against the non-white challenger, incumbent advantage, older white electorate in that area, the power of Hunter Sr’s legacy), but that district was as fair as our geography allows.
WereBear
Can’t fix stupid.
But we can get rid of Fox News. Which helps make people stupid.
JimV
There might be a technical solution for the deliberate liars. We are getting closer to reliable lie detectors. Imagine if every candidate and elected official had to submit to questions of fact while connected to reliable lie detectors.
But of course what will happen is that those in power will make such uses illegal, and reserve the lie detectors for themselves to check for loyalty among their subordinates.
Ferdinand
I’m becoming increasingly cynical about American politics, primarily because of the cycle of lies and corruption that John highlights. I’m in my early 50s, in a happy marriage, and the youngest of our kids just turned 20. My wife and I have long talked about moving out of the country, semi-seriously since 2016, and as hard as that would be I’m sorely tempted some days to pursue it. It’s not that I feel life in another country would necessarily be easier. Just different. And I’m worn down from feeling continually powerless to communicate with the American Right, much less figure out how to find some kind of common national identity and direction. I’ve always had a strong “global citizen” streak, and I’m tired of feeling trapped in my own country. It’s a big world out there! Maybe it’s time to live in more of it. I’m in tech and publishing, my wife’s an English teacher, we could probably figure something out. We shall see.
Omnes Omnibus
Vote. Every election, every race. Encourage others to vote. Work with groups fighting voter suppression. There are more of us.
CarolinaDave
Preach it, Brother John! First time back in comments on the new site. Love the new look and features.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@VFX Lurker: Yup, I was going to point that out, we don’t let politicians choose their voters here in California. CA-50 also has a lot of military(and retired military), so tends Republican.
Jay
On the bright side, this should piss Hair Furour off some more:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/oslo-ahmed-nobel-prize-1.5390520
Kent
This is part of why I think the biggest job of the next Dem president will simply be to restore the executive branch. I have little hope that any meaningful legislation will get through any next Congress, even if Dems take the Senate. But a president armed with top people in executive branch agencies can go a LONG ways towards purging out the utter vandalism Trump and his minions have done to regulations, norms, and staff. That’s why I want Warren or Harris and not Buttigieg or Sanders or Biden. Because I want competent fucking people who aren’t going to try to “conciliate” and “collaborate” and listen to Republican lies about every damn thing as they go about restoring sanity to government.
Baud
If there was no penalty for lying, we wouldn’t have won in 2018.
There’s no quick fix to the problem, which is kind of what our side wants. We want a blitzkrieg victory instead of the toil of trench warfare, but the latter is the war we have before us.
taumaturgo
@Betty Cracker:
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. Aldous Huxley
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus:
@Baud: Yup.
sherparick
@Eural Joiner: The problem is that the Conservative Movement, which captured control of the Republican Party in the post-Watergate Era, does not consider the Democrats or the people who vote Democratic as legitimate opponents in a Democratic System where the polity shares similar ideals, but with different emphasis (such as existed in the U.S. from 1890s to the 1970s). They consider us the enemies of all that is Holy and that defeating us by any means necessary is fully justified because of our “corruption” (e.g. the belief of using the Government to combat and alleviate social and environmental evils) and evil plans (e.g. addressing massive inequality and environmental degradation with laws and common action) who are out to destroy Civilization in a rebellion against God. In the 1950s only a small group of nuts believed this, but many of them were rich nuts and then the Civil Rights Revolution and the Vietnam War happen and the popular reaction to those events, particularly among working class whites, created the current mass movement and mess. And no, it is not going to end well.
CaseyL
The GOP has weaponized ignorance for a very long time: look at (Joe) McCarthy-era politics. The biggest difference since then is Fox News and the Koch Brothers, who’ve purified and amplified a politics of lies and bile.
I don’t know if anything can be done at this point. The country is likely to pull apart at its regional seams, with people on the coasts living as ordinary and decent a life as climate change allows, and everyone in between careening from one witch-hunt/pogrom to another.
randy khan
It is kind of fun the read the comments on Scalise’s lying tweet.
The Moar You Know
Bad example. CA-50 is and always has been full of racist lunatics. Wasn’t gerrymandered and didn’t have to be.
They’ll get rid of Hunter once someone more corrupt and vicious comes along (Hunter could run from prison and win, and even if not he’ll come back after two years and win that district again unless Issa goes for it)
MJS
@Baud: Agreed. 2018 never happens if everything were truly lost. Yes, they’re all going to lie. And they’re going to get away with it to the extent that Trump won’t be removed from office. But they will brand themselves liars in the process and, God willing, whoever is the Dem nominee will hammer that point home in ads, debates, interviews, etc.
geg6
@CaseyL:
I sure hope those on one of those coasts are willing to take in those of us who live in the crazed parts of the country. I may be one of the few people left in Beaver County, PA who is still sane (the fucking shitgibbon is coming here today AGAIN), but Pittsburgh is full of non-crazy people. Same will be said about Chicago, Cleveland, Louisville, Atlanta and so on.
West of the Rockies
@Ferdinand:
I hear you. I’m a few years older, but Canada and Japan both seem like interesting places to live. My partner is Swedish/American, but has lived there. Scandinavia though… Too cold and dark.
mrmoshpotato
@JimV:
Wouldn’t be possible since all lie detectors would explode when they sense a Russthuglican in the same room.
Kent
To follow up on my previous post. Within the executive branch there has been a blizzard of lies and bad-faith arguments put forth for damn near every single thing the Trumpers have tried to do from opening up National Parks to drilling and mining to sabotaging the ACA. The administrative record they have laid out is just full of garbage and lies. This shit just needs to all be reversed and not accommodated. My fear with someone like Biden or Buttigieg is that they would put conciliatory ‘can’t we just find common ground’ types into power who would let all the bad-faith industry and right wing actors drag out the process for 8 years and water it down.
That is how you decide not to reward lies. By purging them out when you get the chance.
dnfree
@JimV: I don’t think lie detectors work if someone thinks they’re telling the truth.
Ksmiami
@geg6: I’m so done with appeasement- I hate Republicans and want them exiled/jailed
VeniceRiley
@Ferdinand: I’m tapping out next year. But until then, I fight the good fight. Moving to England is rather out-of-the-frying-pan and … But only 7 years until Mrs. can retire. At that point, we can move anywhere within reach of NHS.
The Moar You Know
@dnfree: This is true.
But lie detectors don’t work anyway.
Jay
@Kent
and as you unfortunately point out with the Named names, America is not even close to “being there” yet.
20 Democratic Party Senators refused to sign the letter demanding Kapo Steven Millers resignation.
30 seconds of symbolism they could not bother to undertake for “reasons”.
Gin & Tonic
Genocide denial has no penalty either, as Peter Handke is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in Stockholm more or less as I write this.
Kelly
@geg6: The coasts are blue archipelagos in the sea of red. Fortunately there’s plenty of room on the blue islands!
ruemara
@geg6: Last time I talked with a state rep about the collegiality shit, she said it was because she never knew if she’d need their vote. Tell your friend that the people he’s trying to play nice with and be better than, would happily drag him, his family and his pets out into the streets and shoot them all to have a pure, fascist Republican only America. And if they could resurrect them and do it twice, they would. Dems are nice. Very nice. They have a pollyanna outlook that really, it’s just a few bad guys leading the bad things. No, morons. They are really that evil, that bad and the sooner you understand that they’d off you for 5 cents, the better.
@Baud: As I keep saying, the attitude of people who need to fight is the worst thing and I’m glad my not being born a slave didn’t depend on them. You’re tired? Imagine how 400 years of enslavement and Jim Crow felt to people who had live, push society a micron forward towards decency and get murdered for it had to feel.
We’re headed to some level of civil war here, maybe 1-5 years time. The hard right have gained immense power and tasted blood. Nearly everything they’ve been working at for 60 years, has been achieved. Thanks to the left thinking “We won in court so that’s settled, off to sit back and fret about GMOs”. And if you think going to another country will insulate you from a fascist America, you’re either looking at very tiny undeveloped areas or fantasizing.
Matt McIrvin
The thing about moving out of the US is, I already live in a blue state. Horrible things are still done where I live by the federal government (e. g. ICE raids) but they’re not immediate dangers to me; if I just leave, how does that make anything better for anyone? Mostly, I’d be going to a country where the same political threats probably exist in some nascent form (the move to racist authoritarianism is global) but I have less knowledge and responsibility for them. It may be difficult to fight in any effective way, but voting with feet just makes things worse here.
If I wanted to be more politically effective I suppose I could move to a battleground state, which technically could be done by moving about three miles north of here, but I really don’t want to live there.
Kent
@Jay: That’s why I don’t want to see one damned effort at accommodation or conciliation from the next administration, at least when it comes to executive branch operations. Obviously you have to do some of that when it comes to legislation.
How much conciliation and compromise has Trump and the GOP done when it comes to executive branch operations? Can anyone point to a single example? In their rush to vandalize all the nations environmental laws, it’s protections for consumers, the function of the ACA itself, or foreign policy?
Yet the first instinct of a Biden or Buttigieg will be to try to find some middle ground “meeting of the minds” when it comes to rolling back all of Trump’s vandalism. In fact, the GOP is going to count on it.
I honestly don’t much care about things like M4A vs Public Option which aren’t going to happen anyway in the next Congress. I do care about how Dems actually use the power they will have should they win. And that is mostly going to be in the form of executive actions, not legislation.
Just Chuck
@dnfree: They don’t work, period. They are pseudoscience. They were invented by the guy who created Wonder Woman with her “Lasso of Truth”. I’m actually not kidding.
Chip Daniels
I’m old enough to remember back during the debate over Gitmo when people who argued that the FISA courts were merely rubberstamping requests were pilloried as muzzi-loving cowards.
But as ever, a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
Kent
@ruemara: This is where Dems get played for fools. In the past 20 years the number of GOPers in Congress or state legislatures who have “given their votes” to Dem legislation simply to return a favor or because they were nice is pretty much zero. They give their votes when it is in their self-interest to do so. Not because you are nice to them.
H.E.Wolf
@Omnes Omnibus: Vote. Every election, every race. Encourage others to vote. Work with groups fighting voter suppression. There are more of us.
Thank you.
Some options to choose from, none of which require devoting 40 hrs/wk to helping out:
local Democratic party office
local Democratic campaigns
your choice here (I’m big on http://PostcardsToVoters.org at the moment)
I encourage everyone I know to participate… specifically and especially, people who say they are convinced Nothing Can Be Done.
If anyone is *really* convinced NCBD, please read a paragraph or two about the civil rights movement, and then go out and volunteer. It is highly unlikely you will be blasted with a fire hose, beaten bloody, or set upon by police dogs.
dww44
@Betty Cracker: I know you’re right, but if we truth tellers work hard, perhaps, just maybe,we can still deliver a walloping next November, and if God is just, we’ll keep the House, take the Senate and the Presidency.
In the meantime, I’ll settle for VP Pence being elevated if that means Trump gets removed before the election, which is what should happen.
大芒果 Big Mango
The only thing we can do is get organized and get more people involved. We need to be registering voters, getting them to the polls, and pushing our positive agenda at every opportunity. Speak truth to power and the coming demographic shift will take care of the evangelical rump that is driving the GOP at this time.
Til that happens work work work
ET
Republicans have learned over the last few decades. While tRump has really revved that engine by proving to them over, and over, and over again, that the truth doesn’t really matter – at least to today’s conservative voters – as long as their overall narrative is maintained (regardless of whether some of the pieces make no sense at all).
It is all so depressing and I have to think that it isn’t sustainable in the long-term. tRump doesn’t care about the long-term because he only operates transaction by transaction, but the GOP may find that without him and his particular set of disgusting skills, it all falls apart. None of them are good at being tRump and that is all that holds that together. And there is no going back to the pre-tRump GOP. They jumped in bed with him, embraced him and all that he is and does, and now they own it.
robmassing
There is no penalty for
lyinganything.FIFY
CaseyL
@geg6: It would be great if mid-country refugees went to Georgia, West Virginia, and the Carolinas. Those are areas it would be nice to salvage.
(I’ve considered tactical relocation myself, but one person can’t make enough of a demographic difference.)
Frank Wilhoit
@taumaturgo: Huxley would not have said anything so pat; and if he had, “mad”: would have had its British sense of “insane”.
Citizen Alan
@sherparick:
There really are times I wonder what percentage of Republicans, if they were completely honest in a poll, would be fine with targeted assassinations of Democratic politicians.
jc
Trump has gall and chutzpah in spades, to call his impeachment “rank partisanship.” He’s no stranger to rank partisanship, that’s what is going to let him dodge the hook in the Senate.
He and his surrogates have mounted no defense on substance because they have none. Trump can claim innocence all he wants, but you can’t block your administration’s members from producing documents and testifying and then claim there’s nothing to see here.
But Trump’s whole game is to insist that the whole country accept his alternate reality, and too many of our fellow citizens foolishly play along.
All that can be done is to keep repeating the truth, bluntly, like Eric Swallwell did yesterday.
Just Chuck
@Chip Daniels: I’m old enough to remember yesterday. Which doesn’t really count for much these days.
Royston Vasey
@Ferdinand: Come and try Wellington, New Zealand. I’m also in tech.
RV in NZ
jc
@mrmoshpotato:
“Russthuglicans.”
The Putin Puppet Party
JaySinWA
@Just Chuck: The true sign of age is when you can’t remember yesterday. A few decades ago maybe, but yesterday?
Professor Bigfoot
Confederates.
They are now the wholly owned Republican Party, and treason is just another Tuesday to them.
mrmoshpotato
@jc: Thank you. I shall add “The Putin Puppet Party” to my list.
James E Powell
There is no penalty for lying if you are a Republican. Democrats get hammered for every misstatement, no matter how trivial.
Denali
I am trying to get a sign or stickers made saying: Impeachment without Removal = Complicity. Do you think people understand the meaning of complicity?
JaySinWA
It has been reduced to a “Punch and Judy” puppet show.
mrmoshpotato
@Denali: I’d argue that impeachment without removal is aiding and abetting.
Mrs. D. Ranged in AZ
@robmassing:
There is no penalty for anything if you are a rich white male.
FTFY2
SFAW
@Citizen Alan:
All of ’em,
KatieAlanSFAW
@James E Powell:
“We have to be better than they are”
or
“If we’re not letter-perfect, then we’re no better than the Republicans.”
Mrs. D. Ranged in AZ
@ruemara: In regards what you said to Baud, AMEN! I have complained on this site before how tired I am of waiting to be treated like a first class citizen because of my female master status and being told to be patient by white men, liberal allies though they may be. But then I remember POC and think….not so sure I have room to complain. So yes, I hear you loud and clear. I’m soooo frigging tired so how much worse are POC feeling?
That’s why I don’t want Biden or Buttigieg (sp?). There is no compromising with people who want to destroy you and are willing to destroy the country they claim to love to do so. Period. Full Stop.
Mrs. D. Ranged in AZ
@Just Chuck: They do work BUT only under limited circumstances. They only work IF:
Shorter answer: they don’t work enough to suit the purposes of justice.
geg6
@CaseyL:
If I can’t fucking stand living here in Western PA, there is no fucking way on earth I’m heading below the Mason Dixon line. When I hear a southern accent these days, I have to leave the room or turn the tv off before I murder someone.
Mrs. D. Ranged in AZ
@geg6: Now, now…I have a southern accent and I’m a liberal. Of course, I haven’t lived down there in 37 years so I don’t blame you for not wanting to go below the Maxon Dixon line.
geg6
@Mrs. D. Ranged in AZ:
The Mason Dixon Line is less than an hour from where I live. I hear too many southern accents around me as it is, between southeastern Ohio and panhandle West Virginia. I just want to retire and get the hell out of here. I know not where, but out of here is all I know.
Uncle Cosmo
You want a unicorn too? Shall I put it on the list? What color?
We’ve got to keep the focus on what’s important – what is crucial – right now. Getting rid of the current maladministration is Job 1 through 6 at a minimum. Probably not via impeachment, so via the ballot box. We should be registering everyone we can, making sure they have whatever ID they need; fighting gerrymandering & voting rights limitations in every state; & setting the strategy for getting them all out come November. (Which TBH is what most of you political naifs should have been doing instead of squeeing over your dream candidates.)
And after November we need to excise all the moles & saboteurs they’ve crammed into the lower ranks. It’ll be like removing bubblegum from long hair & will take years of diligent effort. Meanwhile we have to figure out how to reverse or at least mitigate the damage already done.
And then, if we have the energy, we can start prosecuting them. Meantime we mostly need to yank their hands off the levers of power & keep them off.
geg6
@Uncle Cosmo:
Well, considering that I have been doing all these things for about 30 or 40 years and never planned to stop, you can quit condescending to me and let me and others who have been doing the same have the courtesy of venting our true feelings. Jesus.
Uncle Cosmo
Then you should just admit you want Civil War 2.0. With the bad guys in control of all the police departments, a substantial chunk of the armed forces, and nearly all the gun owners.
IMHO that’s pretty damned Deranged.
How many hundreds of thousands of deaths are you willing to accept to achieve your (nebulous & unstable) dreams? The last one resulted in 620,000 – in a country with 1/10 the current population and weaponry far, far less lethal.
Truly, be careful what you wish for – you may get it, & it may turn out to be not only not what you wanted, but massively more horrifying than you could ever imagine.
ruemara
@Uncle Cosmo: We want it? Seriously, GFY. WE don’t. Our opponents do. And they are sniggering at folks like you think that they just need the right words to see reason. They have a defining purpose for their lives. To crush anyone different than them. They’ll do it first to us and then, to every kapo token they add to their party to pretend they’re not bigots.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@sherparick: The Jesus people also have a serious problem with gay rights, trans rights, and women’s rights. Those things undermine their view of the universe as an ordered, patriarchal structure ordained by God (i.e. natural law). They can see that society is changing, and they are becoming a minority. They are getting scared that their view of the world will start to limit their employment and other opportunities. So, the Jesus People really don’t care how morally corrupt Trump is personally, as long as he puts judges in place that will protect them.
Uncle Cosmo
@geg6: Well, geez, I didn’t think I was addressing you. (Checks post you replied to.) In fact I was not.
I was hoping to get the attention of the great number on this blog stanning for their dreamboat candidates who imagine that denying Agolf Twitler a second term will be a walk in the park – just like so many who couldn’t imagine that a candidate as supremely qualified as HRC could possibly lose to a vile, ignorant, immoral, criminal, hatemongering turd like him – & aren’t doing the hard, obscure, thankless work that is the only way it will happen.
If you’ve “been doing that for 50 or 60 years,” good on ya, & you are cordially invited to stop taking offense about some imagined “condescension” not directed at you & others like you.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@CaseyL: That oversimplifies. The breakdown is more rural / urban, than middle / coast. Illinois is only a blue state because of Chicago, for example.
LongHairedWeirdo
What can be done? Well, first, keep repeating that they lie, always, and casually.
More importantly, try to encourage more people to write to GOP congresscritters and tell them “stop lying to cover up the President’s crimes!” They want their base angry and energized, and think that will win the election for them – but if they see they’re energizing the wrong people, who are *angry*, two things might happen:
Ella in New Mexico
I’m firmly convinced that without a big “post-WWII Reform of Europe” type level of reconstruction we’re doomed in the long run.
My agenda includes getting a hold of Congress and the White House and keeping it for at least 8 years. And well likely need to overturn a shit ton of Trump’s pardons, so we’ll need some clever legal minds to come up with legislation for that task. Also to make it easier to indict a sitting president for actual criminal activities, not just because we’ve hated him for 20 years and we finally managed to burn him for lying about getting a blow job during a Republican government shutdown.
After that, reform and strengthening of voting rights and rules in EVERY state, a return to effective campaign finance laws, and shoring up the independence of the Justice Department from the President. We also need to look at ways to get rid of lifetime appointments for anyone other than Supreme Court judges, or at least qualify their retention at regular intervals. Better yet, find ways to get rid of clearly all the unqualified political hack-jobbers Trump put there to destroy the rule of law. And heck, can we pass a law that actually protects government Whistleblowers from any crud trying to out them for political purposes? Oh, and a big, BIG one for me is to reduce the number of political appointees in every agency in the Executive branch and instead restore those jobs to people who are career Federal employees with real qualifications and experience, protected by Civil Service laws.
A great place to start is looking at how Germany rid itself of the stain of NAZI dictatorship, and taking a whole lotta notes.
Uncle Cosmo
@ruemara: I do not doubt your sincerity in wishing to avoid bloodshed. I do doubt that those you want to take over running the country know how.
If the next Democratic POTUS begins her/his Inaugural Address with something on the order of We’re in charge now & we’ll be coming after all you bigots & hatemongers starting this afternoon! then WASF. Anything that stops short of that – that hopes to unite enough of the nation behind a return to sanity and comity (ETA: to drive the bigots & hatemongers back under their rocks for a generation) – will require some serious efforts at reconciliation, if not with the hard-core Trumpistas, at least with that fraction doubtful & skeptical as to the new regime’s motives and intentions.
If the government you want is not willing to contemplate that, then I suggest they plan in advance for disposal of the bodies – assuming the domestic situation doesn’t deteriorate enough for the armed forces to declare martial law, disband civil government & throw the new executive and legislative branches into prison in order to “restore order.”
CaseyL
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Yes and no. If the country does shatter along socio-political lines, it’s hard to think there won’t be some kind of regionalization, as people migrate to areas that believe as they do. If the country shatters along ecological lines, people will migrate to areas that are livable and agrible. Put the two together, it will be interesting to see where people go and why.
Just Chuck
@Mrs. D. Ranged in AZ:
I hear these arguments all the time, and I’d rather see a controlled scientific study that supported them than just take anyone’s word for it.
Miss Bianca
@Gin & Tonic: Peter Handke is a genocide denier?
I haven’t really kept up with anything he’s written since the 80s, but that still surprises me.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Uncle Cosmo: Wow, that’s an argument a Republican would be proud of.
Both of those candidates are calling for a return to normalcy, when there is proof positive that the GOP will gleefully cover up, and aid and abet, crimes committed by a Republican administration, and that they will gleefully trump up reasons to investigate any behavior that might drive a few news cycles favorable to them. That’s bad faith behavior, and it’s 100% correct to say you can’t compromise with that. You need good faith to attempt to make *any* sort of agreement, compromise or other.
It’s true that we are engaged in a sort of cold civil war; the GOP will use its official powers to restrict voters, investigate opponents, and cover up for the most blatant of crimes that really, honestly, *do* concern threats to US national security. (Face it: while Putin probably thought “that they solicited help from Russia is plenty enough blackmail material”, but do you think that’s the *only* way he has Trumpie’s (I quote Lyndon B.) “pecker in his pocket”? And given how Trump’s got lips loose enough to sink all the extra ships he’s enamored of, that should scare people.)
J R in WV
@Ryan:
No, not admonished. Cole just has to look for an ad placing group without juvenile language requirements. Modern political discourse requires adult understanding of adult political conversation!
Procopius
@ruemara: I don’t see how your rep can continue using that argument. I don’t know how things are in your state, but Obama/Biden were the same way, acting as if they believed the Republicans would give them a vote, just one vote, if only they conceded enough. Frankly, Obama’s term was astonishing. I don’t think either party ever achieved such unit as the Republicans did during those eight years. It was more like a parliamentary party system than the traditional American coalition system. It’s why I think Biden is seriously delusional (aside from just being a corporatist [family blog]). No, when she needs that vote she’s not going to get it, and I wonder if your rep is being honest with you when she hands you that justification.