If they had any guts, the "Rise of Skywalker" would be Kylo winning and installing a Skywalker bloodline on the imperial throne and set up the next trilogy as Rey setting up an underground Jedi order to resist him.
— Starfish Who Sold Out Botswana to the French (@IRHotTakes) December 17, 2019
Next trilogy is about the Jedi learning to play towards their own strengths and convictions instead of playing the Sith's game and losing.
— Starfish Who Sold Out Botswana to the French (@IRHotTakes) December 17, 2019
Also, much as I hate to give Politico‘s Jack Schafer any credit whatsoever, he’s right about the hand-wringing pundits — “Trump Fatigue? Spare Me”:
You can barely taste the opinion pages anymore without being drowned in the carping and moaning from the commentariat about how President Donald Trump’s endless Twitter devilments, preposterous executive orders, and steady, mendacious haranguing at political gatherings and in the Oval Office have rendered them fatigued and exhausted…
Short of ushering them all to the nap room and tucking them in, how should we respond to their dramatic expressions of fatigue and exhaustion? To be charitable, they’ve had a tough slog of it… According to the Washington Post’s fact-checkers, Trump uttered twice as many false or misleading claims in 2019 than he did in 2017 and 2018 combined. Swimming in such a rising flood of hogwash would discourage anybody.
But columnists aren’t just “anybody.” It’s true they have a special license to express their moods and feelings, saying things openly that news reporters are forced to keep bottled up. But that gives them no right to fall to their knees and pound the earth in frustration. Quite the opposite: They have a responsibility to be resilient. By assuming a surrender crouch in which he confesses his fatigue and exhaust, the columnist forfeits his sense of outrage and becomes a pathetic, mewling sight. And he makes himself the story, which is the cardinal sin of journalism, opinion or otherwise…
… If they can’t appreciate the fact that they’ve been dealt one of the most consequential assignments in the history of political journalism, the columnists should surrender their pens and make way for writers who don’t need Adderall to remain vigilant. No matter how spent they feel now, they still have the upper hand. Trump hasn’t abolished the First Amendment; he hasn’t instituted prior restraint; he hasn’t sent any of the scribes he considers “enemies of the people” to jail; he hasn’t shuttered any news outlets; and readers aplenty await the commentariat’s findings…
Truth is, the sorry hand-wringers Schafer cites are mostly trying to avoid getting attacked on twitter and/or by their journalistic peers at the better media cocktail parties. Some of them are actively trying to normalize ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ as just one of those normal, to-be-expected events like a named weather event — not exactly predictable, but something about which nothing can be done.
And all of them — to use the kind of sports metaphor they love — are like star athletes announcing they don’t wanna play in the finals, because it will be disruptive and it might damage their win/loss record. Suck it up, butterflies; own your agenda, however toxic, or tittup away and let more assertive reporters take your highly-compensated media gigs.
piratedan
carried over from the previous thread…
as a budding teenager, I watched the Nixon impeachment. Understood that even in my fledgling mind that bugging and sabotaging the campaigns of political opponents was essentially a line that shouldn’t be crossed. You should make your pitch to the voters, convince them that your ideas and stands on the issues were ones that mattered to you but also being willing to listen to the other side and be open to new information….
Then the Clinton impeachment came along and I understood how fraught this was… on one hand, we have a man, being unfaithful to his wife, and then lying about it when confronted with it because he happened to succumb or seduce (depending upon your POV and perhaps there were elements of both) a naive woman who was attracted to him and yet was not exactly wise in the ways of politics to know who she was disclosing her secrets to. Which then fueled the ambition of a political party to score points against a popular President. Did I like that he lied, no… did I understand why he did so… yes, yes I did. Did the investigation about possible land fraud from a decade before wander too far afield… arguably…
and now we have the same bad faith actors back on the stage again, this time with a cast of characters without any seemingly beneficial qualities, engaged in voter fraud, treason, campaign finance violations, extortion, bribery, perjury, obstruction, emoluments violations, sexual assault and violation of international laws in regards to asylum and refugee status. In thrall to a foreign dictator who feeds them money by which they turn to control all aspects of legislative and judicial power. This time the issue isn’t just the administration but an entire political party that aids and abets his behavior, when its not committing its own illegalities and “self-serving” interpretations of the laws and the Constitution itself.
I look at what has changed in these last 45 years and I keep cycling back to two things…
The GOP apparently believes that when they are in charge, they are justified in anything that they do while in charge and that anything that they do to be in charge is also justifiable…
The New York Times, and media as a whole, apparently never got over being scooped by a couple of dudes who really had been incredibly lucky, tenacious and fortunate to work where they did to both follow the story (and the mistakes made along the way) and in getting it published and a media that when reporting on their coverage were forced to realize what had been uncovered and did so in such a fashion as to let the facts unfold for those that could watch and summarize accurately what took place for those that could not.
Since that time, the GOP has decided that the best way to cope with the events that brought it down during the Nixon years were to make a mockery of the impeachment process itself via the Clinton Impeachment and to control their own media outlets and destroy the fairness doctrine that allowed dispassionate accurate reporting to be made available to anyone who cared to watch and listen.
IMHO, this can’t be repeated and restated enough… the GOP is no longer an American political entity, it is a fascist political movement, and the sooner we come to grips with this fact, the sooner we can remove this tumor from the body politic.
NotMax
Excess of chum in the water for too long makes for rotund, lazy, parochial sharks.
Villago Delenda Est
J.J. Abrams? Guts? It is to laugh!
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
funny how they never were “fatigued and exhausted” when it came to smearing Hillary
mrmoshpotato
@David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch: Yes, hilarious. (Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean).
Fuck ’em.
prostratedragon
Musical accompaniment to a late-night twitter eruption:
Mary G
That is one hella good last paragraph, AL.
hervevillechaizelounge
Re: the previous thread about Hoarse Whisperer’s assessment of Trump’s current dangerousness.
We are in great peril right now not because of Trump’s narcissistic breakdown. We are in trouble because Trump is surrounded by bad actors who will seek to weaponize his breakdown to harm America and/or jockey for power.
Trump is especially vulnerable to bad advice at this moment so we as a country are especially vulnerable. Trump is an ordinary narcissist but his situation is absolutely extraordinary; people are right to be worried.
Patricia Kayden
Rusty
It’s Advent, and one theme of Advent is the stripping away of illusion. We are seeing that our supposedly sacred Constitution is really a bunch of ragtag kluges that only work if everyone acts in good faith. Under any form of sustained assault from those that run it and it fails. Another illusion is that our noble press will save us, but they are really just bored children. Same for the sacred freedom of speech as the saviour, but the freedom to make false speech can easily overwhelm truth. The real failure are the actual people in charge, and we elected them , or chose to read them, listen to them. We have met the enemy and they are us.
Betty Cracker
This day is gonna be LIT!
Betty Cracker
Did anyone see Maddow’s interview of Lisa Page? We had a huge storm last night, so I missed it in real time but watched the YouTube a little while ago. That poor woman is in the most surreal situation. I’m glad she’s speaking out, and I hope her lawsuit against the DoJ succeeds.
Amir Khalid
It’s Keef’s 76th birthday today. Happy birthday, you old pirate.
Elizabelle
@Amir Khalid: Keef! Good to know. I hope the dude makes it to a century.
Betty Cracker
@Elizabelle: Seconded! Keef is an international treasure.
JPL
Good morning and Good day. Just maybe they will have to heavily sedate the madman in the white house.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Debate starts in 2 hours and 53 minutes, but who’s counting.
Raven
@Betty Cracker: I can’t shake this URI and I’m waiting on a biopsy report, I’m glad something is happenin.
columbusqueen
@Elizabelle: he’s lucky to make it to 76, for God’s sake. I just remember how Keef insisted in his memoir that he’d survived his drug habit by only doing the very best quality heroin & coke.?
Elizabelle
@columbusqueen: @Betty Cracker:
Living well is the best revenge.
Kristine
::recalling the joke that at the end of the world all that will be left are cockroaches and Keith Richard::
Noah Brand
I feel like this post is a bit unfair to the exhausted journalists. The exhaustion, it seems to me, comes not from being expected to do their job, but from four years of doing their job to no effect whatsoever. They have researched, written, published, denounced, done everything they can. They’ve brought all the power they can muster to bear on exposing this disgusting, rotten fraud, they’ve unearthed stories that should have buried him fifty times over.
And the fucker’s approval rating hasn’t budged. Not up, not down. It’s as though they’d done nothing at all. Think about how demoralizing that feels.
They were, indeed, dealt one of the most consequential assignments in the history of political journalism, they rose to the occasion with all their might, and were promptly informed that nobody cared and they might as well have stayed home. That’s a hell of a thing to wake up to every morning.