The only thing this president has done alone is fail America. pic.twitter.com/Jx2FDe3bTe
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) August 29, 2020
We’re the ones who are *not* proudly Deplorable…
“He will go wherever he needs to go.” After spending a pandemic spring and summer rarely leaving his Delaware home, Joe Biden plans to take his presidential campaign to battleground states after Labor Day in his bid to unseat President Donald Trump. https://t.co/avym63AxPI
— The Associated Press (@AP) August 28, 2020
“What Trump knows or won’t acknowledge is a lot of these men and women have had brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, who have been victimized just because of their color,” Joe Biden responds to Pres. Trump calling the NBA a “political organization" https://t.co/AzxEhyz7hN pic.twitter.com/blztpdjg0L
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) August 27, 2020
Biden is running as the law and order candidate. He's the one saying that electing him will quell the violence. Trump is saying the country is falling apart under him because he's dogshit awful at politics and no one will admit it.
— Tentin Quarantino (@agraybee) August 28, 2020
he wanted to be president. he is the president. make sure it’s clear he got exactly what the fuck he asked for.
— kilgore trout, new tone haver (@KT_So_It_Goes) August 27, 2020
Biden said yesterday it seemed like Trump is "rooting for more violence, not less."
Trump today: https://t.co/Qcq3U51hE4
— Eli Stokols (@EliStokols) August 29, 2020
On The Road – Albatrossity – Sandhills of Nebraska – continued
Biff Baxter
Don’t take political advice from those who thought the “30% Solution” was a sound primary campaign strategy.
NobodySpecial
Good morning! I hope everyone else has the energy I can’t find…the past year has been exhausting.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone ???
mrmoshpotato
He’s also a Soviet shitpile mobster conman who’s actively destroying our democracy.
Spanky
Plenty of energy over here to fight the trump enablers, comrades.
Soprano2
“The country is falling apart under my leadership, vote for me to make things better” is the dumbest re-election message ever.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: That message kind of worked for Nixon in 1972. But then, there was a sense that the chaos had preceded him and hadn’t gotten generally worse (and the economy was still looking strong).
mrmoshpotato
@mrmoshpotato: Tentin could’ve also (too) just said Dump is dog shit and left off the rest.
Spanky
@Soprano2: So in that sense, Trump and his enablers are remarkably consistent.
germy
Kay
The NYTimes political team:
Then the stock market went down, and he sprang into action and saved the world.
Jeffro
@Soprano2: Runner-up: “Seniors, I know you haven’t been able to leave your house in six months, take a cruise, travel the world, or visit your grandkids…if you re-elect me, I promise you more of the same! Also, you sure as hell better vote in-person because MAIL-IN BALLOT FRAUD!!”
This guy…
germy
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Baud
We often have asked ourselves how the media would have reacted if a Democratic president behaved like Trump, correctly recognizing that it would not have been the same.
But it occurred to me the other day that, if almost all Democrats supported a Democratic Trump the way Republican voters back Donald, the dominant topic of discussion in the media would be about the moral degeneracy of Democratic voters. They will never talk about Republican voters that way.
Betty Cracker
Biden put out a pretty good statement on the unrest in
KenoshaPortland yesterday that got very little media coverage that I’ve seen. Here’s an excerpt:Emphasis mine. Will the Beltway gang hound Trump to respond to Biden’s challenge and point out that Trump is lauding the yahoos who drive into cities flying Trump flags from their pickups as they look for trouble? No.
Trump is in charge of the fucking country at the moment and is busily pouring gasoline on the flames. The troublemakers on the right are literally wearing Trump merch. But somehow it’s Biden’s obligation to answer for anarchist douchebags who are hijacking the legit protests, as if they are Democrats and ardent Biden supporters, which they are not. It’s maddening.
Baud
@germy:
We’re in the midst of the quadrennial Great Excusening, when millions of mostly white voters who do not consider themselves right wingers search for excuses why they just cannot join Democrats in opposing fascism.
Much of GOP campaigning is directed in finding excuses for those people that will stick in sufficient numbers to enable them to eek it a win.
rikyrah
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
A couple of us asked the same question a thread last night. Keep bringing it up.
rikyrah
lowtechcyclist
Yeah, it’s “politically correct” to call it “assault and battery” and expect police to obey the laws they enforce
rikyrah
Baud
@rikyrah:
1968 called. It wants its realization back.
rikyrah
Jeffro
@Betty Cracker: yup. Rubin has a great column up at the WaPo right now, “It’s Time to Challenge the Cockeyed Reaction to Violence” about this.
I guess many of us know what ‘accelerationism’ is already – did not know there was a term for it, though.
Baud
The Today Show is airing Biden’s statement, including the challenge to Trump. Good.
TS (the original)
I worry about Biden/Harris out campaigning in the midst of this pandemic. I hope they are not influenced by the media screaming that they should be out campaigning. They are doing well letting trump open his mouth & talk nonsense to the same group of deplorables who wander from state to state.
Jeffro
@rikyrah: that really ought to be one of Uncle Joe’s go-to campaign slogans. “Wouldn’t you like to never think of this negligent clown ever again?”
Four years of non-stop worrying for my country: hell YEAH I want to quit thinking about that goon.
Baud
@TS (the original):
They’ll do it as safely as possible. It won’t be like Trump events.
lowtechcyclist
@Betty Cracker:
At the very least, the media has to be aware that there’s been quite a groundswell of support on the right for Kyle Rittenhouse, the butcher of Kenosha. Have they been asking Republican officeholders, candidates, and other bigwigs to disavow Rittenhouse and those who excuse or even praise him for having murdered protesters?
rikyrah
swiftfox
Biden cannot wait until after Labor Day. He has to go to Portland or Kenosha right now.
debbie
What is this “seemed like” bullshit? Trump is blatantly obvious in his delighting in the violence.
Jeffro
@rikyrah: I was with him up until the “Right, Left, doesn’t matter” part. It’s not that there are no racist Democrats, or that we all don’t have work to do, but the two parties have sorted themselves out pretty distinctly in this area.
debbie
@Baud:
Because they’re the ones with the guns.
mrmoshpotato
John Oliver’s piece about the RNC and Kenosha is well worth a watch.
Baud
@debbie:
The media isn’t afraid of them. They are contemptuous of us.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
There’s a lot of pushback to it this time, though, so much so that we’ve already moved onto media dismissing the criticism as Democrats freaking out. It’s not the same as 2016. People are really challenging them to explain the double standard and it’s so clear with this one it’s undeniable. There’s video of Trump supporters in huge trucks increasing their speed when they come upon people in the street. There’s a video where a guy drops his bike and runs because he doesn’t want to get run over. I don’t think he was even a protester.
prostratedragon
@Baud: The Slapicin resistant.
Patricia Kayden
Baud
@Jeffro:
Left doesn’t mean party. There are real anarchists who are classified as left who do property damage and some violence.
debbie
@Baud:
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
debbie
@rikyrah:
This is what he has wanted since the mid-1970s.
mrmoshpotato
@debbie:
Carefully chosen words to not set off the Trump trash Whiny Bully Bitches Brigade?
PsiFighter37
@TS (the original): Yeah, I do not love it either. But as long as it is small gatherings, held outdoors if possible, I don’t mind. But getting together to meet (at best) what will be dozens of folks doesn’t strike me as moving the needle that much.
Baud
@PsiFighter37:
It’ll help with local media coverage.
Betty Cracker
@Jeffro: She’s correct, and Biden’s statement from yesterday tells me he’s on the same page.
Raven posted a link in one of the threads from yesterday that I was reading in the wee hours when I couldn’t sleep. I don’t agree with everything the guy Raven linked wrote, but I do think he made a point that’s too often overlooked, i.e., that there are bad actors (not coincidentally, mostly white people) who glom onto the BLM protests because they get off on violence and mayhem.
I think most of us here get that. I think Biden does too. But it’s irritating how certain media figures expect Democrats to answer for people that aren’t even Democrats while their opposite number are explicitly Trump fans who are cheered on in their trouble-making by Trump himself, and this computes as “both sides” somehow. No, it’s not.
Patricia Kayden
Jeffro
@Baud: the tweet in question references white privilege and support for trumpov.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
Republicans embrace the radicals on the Right and bring them into the Party which then makes the Party more radical, but “works” okay for the next campaign because then they’re not just Q or violent Patriot group gun nuts, they’re “Trump supporters”. Democrats don’t bring them in which is a better long term position but also means they’re not “Democrats” so don’t vote for us and can’t be controlled by us. Biden isn’t going to claim anarchists as Democrats, partly because they’re not but partly because that’s how Republicans ended up so far Right. The thing consists of its parts. When they embrace Q or the 17 year old shooter they become more radical as a Party- they have to. Republicans believe they can embrace this for short term political gain (it’s always “the next 6 weeks”) and somehow retain “Republican”. They can’t. They couldn’t do it for the Tea Party, they couldn’t do it for Trump, and they can’t do it for Q or the violent extremists on the Right. The thing itself changes when they add radical factions.
germy
@Patricia Kayden:
Sloane Ranger
@lowtechcyclist:
They certainly were on The Lead with(out) Jake Tapper yesterday. They had Ron Johnson on and he tried to gish-gallop through the entire interview. The stand-in presenter kept pressing and Johnson sort off condemned all violence at the very end but I think that was by accident.
She also had the Head of FEMA on and tried to get him to admit to the reality of man-made climate change. He basically just kept saying that his job was dealing with disasters, the reasons for them happening was outside his remit.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
One of the problems the right has this time is that there are too many cell phone cameras showing us what’s really going on. It’s been noted before, but I still feel it’s underappreciated.
Kay
@Sloane Ranger:
What I think political media have missed, or are denying, is that it has gotten markedly worse since Charlottesville. Republicans outside Trump went to great pains to distance themselves from the Charlottesville murderer. They’re openly embracing the Wisconsin murderer.
The truth is the Trump Administration have gotten worse every month they’ve been in office and Republicans have gotten worse right along with them. The thing has never trended any way other than “down”.
Mallard Filmore
@Betty Cracker:
Trump is not the law-and-order candidate, he is offering us Revenge Porn.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: That’s the truth. The question is whether party affiliation is strong enough that Republicans stick with the GOP when it morphs into the Q party, or will it shed non-kooks in sufficient numbers to become a rump. The embrace of Trump — crimes, corruption and all — doesn’t make me super optimistic.
TS (the original)
@Baud:
That I can agree with – if they can have the events televised/streamed as well it would help – but the trump type rallies – they should make it so very clear that these are dangerous to the health of every person who attends.
Matt McIrvin
@Jeffro: He’s running for President. He can’t not say that.
trnc
@Betty Cracker:
I know it’s a stretch, but I wonder if it would be possible for the city of Portland to sue the DT campaign based on the candidate openly inciting riots there. He isn’t using (right now) any apparatus of the federal govt or making a legal appeal to action, so he’s clearly making these illegal appeals to his violent supporters for purely political purposes.
VOR
But that would mean Hillary was right when she used the term deplorables.
Matt McIrvin
The one thing that really keeps me from being confident that we’re going to prevail here is that every scholar of authoritarianism seems to say that when it gets to the point where we’ve gotten now, when you’ve got the leader openly allying with paramilitary groups, the good guys have already lost. Normal political processes are already gone and the authoritarianism can’t be beaten without a full-scale revolution or war to overthrow the regime, probably decades in the future.
But all I can do is act as if it can. I think there’s a very good chance that Joe Biden will be murdered or arrested by the end of this election cycle, and that the election itself won’t be remotely free or fair. But to make our case we have to open by playing by the rules.
germy
trnc
Unfortunately, for every place they visit, there will probably be a media amplification of the places they don’t visit or don’t visit enough a la Wisconsin 2016. I think they have a golden opportunity to do everything virtually to keep everyone involved safe and to preserve resources, so I’m not crazy about this idea.
germy
Gin & Tonic
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
won’t get buzz by being optimistic about the future of the United States. Fuckem’.
gene108
@Baud:
In my opinion, this is because the core of Republican support is white men. White men are the default group considered very serious people, people who should be in charge, and people whose opinions matter most.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: I could complain that you are off topic – not that I would want to – but I have to wonder if that could be us in a couple of months.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
It has worked for them so far. They bring in the radicals and that plus standard Republicans are enough to get them over the finish line. Once they win they make some weak distancing noises with the radicals but as the election gets closer, and they need them again, they embrace them. It’s worked. It has to stop working or they won’t stop doing it. They have this idea that “The Republican Party” consists of something other than the members. It doesn’t. If they embrace Q then Q IS the Republican Party. It can’t be anything other than what it is. What is IS now is a group of people who embraced and are promoting a profoundly disturbed and fucked up 17 year old murderer. He claims the GOP and they claim him back. What is the Republican Party? It’s whoever is in it. It can’t be something else apart from the members who make it up. That’s impossible. The Democrats aren’t the Dixiecrats anymore because the composition of the Party is different. It’s literally different people. How that came about is the history, but it had to HAPPEN. In reality. One group had to leave and another had to enter. If the Democrats had continued to kowtow to the Dixiecrats the Party would have remained racist, because it would have contained racists.
germy
Baud
There are a lot of problems we can blame on Republicans and their enablers, but the fact that disaster porn sells is all on us.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: We had to warn people. If they won’t listen, well.
Frankensteinbeck
@rikyrah:
As I think you’ll agree, Trump is a hardcore white supremacist and has always wanted a race war.
@Matt McIrvin:
The huge difference is that in all those examples, the paramilitary groups are vastly larger, more organized, and wider spread in scope of action. Trump wants to be Hitler. He always has. But the actual military said “Hell, no” and what he has is a very few hotspots of actual riot status. Portland is itself an unusual case where the cops have not stopped rioting since day one. And frankly, compared to episodes like the Zoot Suit Riots that fill American history, this is small potatoes. It’s not that this isn’t bad, but in ‘authoritarian takeover’ terms, the scale is microscopic.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud:
The closest thing we’ve had to that in modern politics was Bill Clinton, who was vastly smarter and more competent than Trump, left the country mostly in better shape than he found it, and was not a public provoker of hate (but who engaged in bad personal behavior), and they indeed did this.
rp
@Frankensteinbeck: Yes…it’s clear that the Trump campaign wants to create chaos and simultaneously push the message that “only Trump can save you!,” and the media seems eager to embrace this narrative. But the main problem is that only a tiny % of the country has been personally affected by the chaos. This isn’t 1968.
And then of course there are many other problems with this strategy, including the fact that Trump is the incumbent and that something like 60% of the country supports the protesters.
Gin & Tonic
@WaterGirl: It’s an open thread.
mrmoshpotato
@germy: He’s a horse’s ass who can suck an ass’s ass.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: You missed my point, I said i wished I could say that it was OT– that was my way of making the connection between where they are and where we are headed.
The only time I care if something is OT is when someone shits in the middle of a Garden Chat, or Celebration post, or a guest post.
gene108
@Kay:
The reason Republicans keep embracing the craziest ideas out there, or at best not denouncing them, such as birtherism, is because the other alternative is admitting they are wrong or their voters are wrong.
Republicans over the last five to ten years pushed for open carry laws, as well as allowing conceal carry without a permit. Admitting adding armed people to the tension in Kenosha means admitting open carry is flawed. Their voters have married themselves to the idea the GOP pushed that open and conceal carry are God given inalienable Constitutional rights that it will cause a backlash from their voters against anyone admitting open and conceal carry made things worse in Kenosha.
There is no changing course for Republicans. They have to get more radical, because the alternative is admitting they are wrong, and they cannot do that without alienating their voters.
Matt McIrvin
@rp:
Even in 1968, only a tiny fraction of the country was really affected. Most people lived far away from the chaos. It was larger, though.
The big news item lately has been that support for BLM is dropping rapidly in the upper Midwest, as the “scary rioters” narrative displaces images of peaceful protesters, and that’s the one grain of data behind a lot of the “Trump surging!” stories. But people don’t seem (yet) to identify Biden with any of it, as hard as Trump’s campaign is trying to make them do this. It’s just really hard to portray Joe Biden as a leftist radical; the association just sounds absurd.
Betty Cracker
@germy: That’s true about Moore, and I wish he’d go the fuck away already. People are like, “oh, but he knew Hillary was going to lose.” Yeah, but the election before that, he said Romney was going to win.
The only time Moore wasn’t saying the Democrats are doomed as fast as his flapping lips could form the words was when he assured lefties Gore would win, so it was totally safe to vote for a third-party candidate.
Immanentize
I guess I’m just thankful Trump hasn’t taken credit for eliminating school shootings yet
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Agreed. I wonder if the growing lunacy and gun nuttery makes Republicans vulnerable with seniors. Not all, of course — some of the worst frothers are older people. But it wouldn’t take much slippage with that group of extremely dependable voters to make a big difference. I keep hoping for some demographic to pull us back from the damned brink! :)
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: I just saw someone follow up to a tweet about the Daily Mail story on Moore by flat-out lying that Biden has lost the lead on 538. The disinformation wave is big.
prufrock
@Kay: A is A.
prufrock
@Betty Cracker: Especially in our state of Florida. Flip a couple of points in the Villages and some other retirement enclaves and Trump is toast.
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: Trump’s support among seniors is way down from 2016 because of COVID-19. That’s why he’s behind in Arizona and Florida. If he can’t win those states he’s toast (barring a coup or some such thing).
As I said over on LGM, I’m kind of amazed at the way so many right-wingers are coming right out and declaring that old people are disposable and they don’t care if they live or die. That’s their base!
The closest left equivalent I can think of are the anti-“idpol” fools who want the Democratic Party to abandon minorities, women and marginalized groups and go all in on a purely economic appeal to white guys. But they haven’t taken over the Democratic Party!
Gin & Tonic
@WaterGirl:
Apparently I did. Time for coffee.
Buckeye
I have a friend who posted Michael Moore’s FB rant from Friday, about how terrible it is that Biden isn’t campaigning where Moore wants him to.
Whatever, MM.
SiubhanDuinne
@germy:
I will regret for the rest of my life that I didn’t come up with that.
mrmoshpotato
@SiubhanDuinne:
What are we paying you for?
Kathleen
@Jeffro: Added bonus – I’ll gut Social Security and Medicare so you can be freed from your homes and food!
NotMax
Nine more Infrastructure Weeks until the election.
;)
Kathleen
Leto
@WaterGirl:
But isn’t that free-range, organic, self-composting fertilizer? :P
Geminid
@gene108: Virginia is an open carry state, and in the last few years was a push by some republicans for “Constutional carry”- their label for concealed carry by right. Of course that label begs the question, if it’s so Constitutional why do you need a state law to implement it? In the 2019 State Senate race, a republican primary candidate for my district pushed this issue hard. She was primarying Senator Emmett Hanger(R-Mt. Solon), who opposed “constitutional carry” but was otherwise solid on gun rights.(he was also one of 3 Senate republicans to vote for Medicaid expansion in 2017). I was interested to see that Hanger hit back on the issue in his campaign literature, correctly accusing his challenger of advocating concealed carry by people who had not passed the background checks and training required by current law. Hanger beat his pistol packing opponent easily. His district is based largely in the Shenendoah Valley. It votes republican, but people there tend to be what I call “small c” conservative, not radical. In other parts of Virginia, though, the radicals have people like Hanger on the run, and he probably would not have won his primary. And the Democrats would have a good chance to pick up that seat.
Kay
@gene108:
I think it’s more practical than that. The reason they keep embracing extremists is, they need them to win. Those people. That vote. Then the embrace of extremists means they need them MORE, every cycle. Democrats didn’t get into that cycle. Democrats could have said “my GOD, we’ve lost the south! Bring back the Dixiecrats! Embrace WHATEVER, just win!” But they didn’t. They found voters elsewhere.
Leto
@gene108:
And we all know that conservatives definitely admit when they’re wrong… I snark but these are good points. Not just limited to guns, but to a whole host of policy issues. The environment, foreign policy, healthcare, I mean you can take your pick and they’re basically wrong about everything. Part of the way we know they’re wrong is that we’ve tested their theories in practical application, and the results have been bad (putting it mildly). As many people have pointed out you can’t have one sane/functioning party, and the other an insane/conspiracy theory addicted party whose basic motto is: break everything, claim it was already broken, while advocating they should stay in charge to further break shit.
Betty Cracker
@prufrock: & @Matt McIrvin: Agreed. My anecdata from retiree relatives in Villages-adjacent 55+ communities gives me some hope on that front. Great point about economics-focused lefties, Matt. Any pol who wants to be a national force in the party has to emphasize the civil rights aspects of the party platform too, which is as it should be.
germy
Kay
If this whole panic turns out to be 1 or 2 points in national polls for 2 weeks I am going to be pretty mad at the people who incited the panic :)
Even the best polls for Trump have him down 6, and that’s after pulling out all the stops at his gross 4 day long “Celebration of the Trump Family” and inciting riots. If this is the high point of his strategy it’s not a great strategy.
NotMax
And now for something completely different.
Putting the wretched into wretched excess. (Emphasis added.)
Kathleen
@Leto: And Curated!
SFAW
@germy:
I don’t even want to ask, let alone know, what that is.
WereBear
@Baud:
What I see is how the Pandemic is causing a shift in “implicit assumptions” that hardened during the Sixties and have been lingering ever since.
These all have to DIE.
SFAW
@WereBear:
I’d also like to see “Republicans are better for The Economy” and “Republicans will keep us safe from foreign enemies” disappear as “common knowledge.”
Betty Cracker
@germy: Wait, WTF?
NotMax
@SFAW
Oddly enough, “secret Nazi torture porn empire” also sounds as if it could be the name of a Japanese game show.
//
Ken
@SFAW: “The Aristocrats!”
Jeffro
@germy: these are excellent tweets. Call it what it is.
Jeffro
This really is it for the GOP – no coming back from all this open support of violence, of excusing and enabling trumpov’s corruption, of just standing there while he completely punted on the pandemic response.
Brighter days are coming, that’s for sure.
Jeffro
@SFAW: that first one seems to be getting talked about more and more…usually in the context of stock market performance, unfortunately. But I’ll take it for now. It’s a start!
Subcommandante Yakbreath
@NotMax:
Two words in the links that explain it all: Damien Hurst.
Bleh.
Jeffro
@gene108:
All of this is true. Also, there’s the built-in dynamic where the modern-day Democratic party stands for the majority position on most every issue; the GOP’s only operating principle is wanting the opposite of what Democrats want, therefore, the GOP will be pushing for the minority or even fringe position on most every issue.
(Plus, they have been in the FoxBubble for almost 30 years now…they’re operating off of bad information, but rather than learn about why that is/how that came to be, they just get angry)
Kathleen
@NotMax: Or a team building exercise at an RNC retreat.
Kay
Jim Gaffigan’s follow up to his Twitter rant is genuinely interesting.
He doesn’t take it back or insist he didn’t mean it- he says he did mean it.
Gin & Tonic
Today marks 40 years since the founding of “Solidarity” – the first independent trade union in the Soviet sphere.
Omnes Omnibus
Bullshit. Clinton lied about having an extramarital affair. Approve or disapprove, it’s something powerful men have been doing since there have been powerful men.
Danielx
@germy:
Why do I feel like I’m always the last to find out these things? Echoing BC, wtf? Is this another pizzagate deal?
PPCLI
@Frankensteinbeck: Yes, the actual military seems to be one of the institutions that is standing up for the Constitution when others are eroding and corrupted.
In this regard, note the just-released poll from Military Times indicating near-majority disapproval of Trump and plurality support for Biden.
dnfree
@rikyrah: White Americans? All of them? Right, left, doesn’t matter? I don’t know who this is, but it sounds like Russian propaganda aimed at discouraging people of color from voting. How do you interpret it?
Emma from FL
@Kay: I don’t have the emoji but imagine the smallest piano in the world playing a four-handed version of Night on Witch Mountain.
Mr. Mnuchin jumped into bed with a guy whose skeevy financial maneuvers were common knowledge. He should have kept his hands off the federal kitty if he didn’t want to get splattered.
WereBear
@Matt McIrvin:
I don’t think we’ve seen an authoritarian regime overthrow a long-term successful democracy. Yet.
Most of what we know comes from countries destabilized from the Great War, who never had a democracy before, and then taken over by Fascism.
Most countries who got taken over were brand-new at it, lost monarchies, and were living in a patchwork of empire in any case. Or they were colonies who successfully emancipated only to fall into the same trap.
While I am as sad as anyone that our revered institutions turned out to be paper tigers, I think enough people are standing strong and fighting back to turn the tide. This is unprecedented. We’ve got that working for, or against, us :)
In the end, successful communist revolutions only happened in countries who were coming from feudalism. And they were long overdue for change.
danielx
Because it’s another grim Monday….
Every day is Caturday at Chez X!
Relaxation in operation.
dnfree
@Geminid: we formerly lived in an Illinois county where the far-right members of the county board passed a resolution allowing Constitutional Carry at a meeting where some of the more normal members of the board were absent. Even though it was illegal for the county to contradict state law, it was hard to get the motion rescinded until the county insurance company said they would not insure the county for any action brought against it because of this measure.
Geminid
@dnfree: My Virginia county board of supervisors voted to make Greene County a “2nd Amendment Sanctuary” this winter. But they haven’t passed any kind of ordinances to that effect. I think their insurance carrier may have cautioned them about premium increases, or even cancellation. And I think they know that the county deputies are not going to stand in the way of the State Police coming to seize someone’s firearms after a “red flag” hearing.
Kay
@Emma from FL:
I think it’s gross and a violation of reader’s trust to allow the Trump people to plant these stories where they distance themselves from the Trump Administration.
The NYTimes launders their reputations for them. Mnunchin is uncomfortable that he works for authoritarian, corrupt racists so wants to tell us he did it all to save the short term credit markets? That’s the price you pay, Mr. Mnunchin. Nothing is free.
There’s a whole cohort of these people now- the people who want to tell us they had some noble justification for working for Trump. Oh, bullshit. Sell it somewhere else.
Kay
Also, be careful of Never Trumper Tom Nichols election advice. I don’t know what he’s an expert in but yesterday he was linking to this insane Right wing account as legit polling info because it has “polls” in the name.
I know people follow Never Trumpers but you’re not supposed to accept their wise counsel as gospel.
Yutsano
@Kay: Ugh. The media have latched onto this Trafalgar poll like it was some kind of game changer showing Biden is DOOOOOOMED!!! and Dolt45 will cruise to an easy victory. They’re so lazy they don’t dig into the methodology that Trafalgar uses to come up with their numbers. Trafalgar uses a weight that assumes that Drumpf voters are undercounted. So it automatically gives him a kicker from the off. Bad methodology doesn’t even begin to cover it. But the media wants its horserace. So anything they can use to grab on to that they will take with an open hand.
MC
There is some powerful pre-2018 midterms mood here right now.
germy
@Kay:
I’m trying to imagine Republicans taking advice from Democrats, and I can’t do it.
zhena gogolia
@Kay:
I look at his tweets because they’re sometimes amusing, but I heard him speak in person (first year of Trump regime) about how “feckless” Obama’s foreign policy was, so I always take him with a kilogram of salt.
Baud
Miss Bianca
@dnfree: I look at white leftists I know who are too “pure” to vote for, you name it, Gore, Clinton(s), Biden…and who turned on Obama and were so “disappointed” in him…who embraced the Sanders “it’s the economic anxiety, stupid!” approach to class/race intersectionality issues…in other words, white leftists who don’t give a damn for political solidarity with POC, and I think the poster rikyrah quoted has a point.
Or as I’ve stated before: Trump and the BLM movement have both, in their ways, gone a long way to convince me that there isn’t a “right wing” and a “left wing” in dominant culture politics so much as there is a “white wing”.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
a link to the video if, for some reason, someone wants to watch, but…
Among other things: “efforting”. As twitter Nixon would say: Harvard.
I just heard on NPR that The Beast is planning to meet with “law enforcement” in WI tomorrow.
Miss Bianca
@Kay: I never accept Tom Nichols as gospel about anything. Certainly not on “expertise”, although he wrote a whole book about it.
The only Never Trumper I would accuse of operating in good faith would be Jennifer Rubin.
Betty Cracker
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I read that The Beast will tour burned out businesses (could have been the same article) and meet with cops. Maybe he’ll hold an upside down Bible up because why not?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Miss Bianca: some blue check I had never heard of– Jake Bacharach– was getting a lot of twitter play yesterday for a tweet about how Biden would be another do-nothing disappointment like Obama, or a third Bush term, so what difference is there really? It took me a while to figure out it was probably about dronze– they really are still carrying on about dronze. But the first thing I think of with those “Obama did nothing!” people is that these would-be champions of The People and Workers! have no idea what Medicaid is, don’t know anyone who is or ever has been on Medicaid. There are other issues of course, but that’s a big flashing light to me.
He later deleted the tweet because he was getting “hate”. The poor precious little thing.
Yutsano
@Miss Bianca: JRub has burned all the bridges. I’m sure she’ll go back to some sniping on Biden after the election, but right now she’s almost gone full DFH. The whiplash has me surprised. Hell there was a column (that I can’t find now) where she almost went in on single payer. She might be a conservadem, but she’s not going back.
Ken
As Nero Wolfe would say, “Pfui!”
rp
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: That alone is an impeachable offense.
Geminid
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’ve noticed a lot of men minimizing the danger of a second trump term, but not so many women. Women I know feel deeply about women’s reproductive rights in a way men can’t. I care about the right to choose, but I can’t say that I care about this the way my woman friends do. And trump is a clear and present to women’s rights.
Betty Cracker
@Yutsano: Yep. It was probably Rubin’s very positive column on Warren you’re thinking of. She’s done with the GOP.
Kay
@Miss Bianca:
I like her best too. She has so much energy!
One interesting thing I saw when following Nichol’s ridiculous link- there’s two UK polling outfits that are churning out pro-Trump narratives. They put them in UK media outlets and then Trump-aligned US outlets pick them up. They did the same kind of laundering to sell the Iraq invasion, the UK Right wing was a kind of pass thru.
Kay
@Yutsano:
It isn’t just the one poll. There’s a whole Twitter account that promotes Right wing polls and they’re all tied to the UK. I think that’s a way they get bad info into media- they put it out THERE and then it gets picked up HERE.
He didn’t read the link. That’s the thing about Twitter. The people who spread the links often don’t read the link.
J R in WV
@swiftfox:
And you have been a political campaign professional for how many years now? With a degree in what?
Amazing hubris!!
So certain you know more than people who have been professionals for 50 years, people with a plan…
Another Scott
The rule of law isn’t dead yet.
Cheers,
Scott.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Kay: So conservative UK pollsters are in on the grift now?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I have little in common with Tom Nichols politically, but as his fellow traveller in phlegmatic curmudgeon-itude, I appreciate his gimlet-eyed view of the reality we’re in to some people I’m more sympatico with politically but who have given in to a kind of angry Green Lanternism, people promoting the idea that Nancy Pelosi could bring trumpism crashing down if she really wanted to, and seem to be inching that way with regard to Candidate Biden. I’m not even talking about Berners, I’m talking about anyone who retweets an emo nitwit named Will Stancil. He’s apparently a lawyer whose righteous wheezing about politics in the Land Of Should-be seem to have great appeal to people who IMHO should know better.
taumaturgo
@Matt McIrvin: These anti-democratic hordes have no moral authority and all they have is to cling to outlandish conspiracy theories, fear, and hate. We, on the other hand, have the moral authority that is granted to all by having trust in the system, and if enough of us come to vote, we will peacefully prevail beyond any “malarkey” they pull.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Another Scott: I’m trying to follow this. So this means Sullivan can just ignore Barr’s post-conviction call for dismissal and sentence Flynn?
Also, this will probably go to the Supremes now, right?
Also, too, whatever happened to the notion that Flynn and his son were exposed to state charges in PA with regard to some scheme to kidnap a Turkish dissident and essentially perform some kind of vigilante rendition (if I have that right)?
James E Powell
@Baud:
Agree completely. Look at their reaction to Hillary calling brazen racists deplorable. Why do you think that is so
This is the component of Republican campaigns that get the full on support of the press/media. Al Gore is an inauthentic liar! John Kerry was a coward in Vietnam! Hillary Clinton’s emails are the worst thing that ever happened and the Clinton Foundation is her private slush fund!
The NYT and the rest of them never say no to the Republicans smear campaigns. The main reason that none of them have taken hold against Joe Biden is that they all decided that “the news” every night has to be what Trump says & does.
Brachiator
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I’ve noticed purity types returning to their default position, that there is no difference between Trump and Biden. And “why should I vote at all if my only choice is the lesser of two evils?”
As Geminid notes, the majority of people saying this are white men who believe that their own lives won’t much change if Trump is re-elected.
trnc
@Matt McIrvin: Absurd has totally been on the table at least since the day DT announced his candidacy.
Betty Cracker
@J R in WV: Well, it’s not a crazy or necessarily uninformed opinion to have, though I don’t personally agree with it. Plenty of long-time Dem pols have said the same.
Was just reading similar snippets on Twitter that all sourced back to a NYT piece. I read through that, and guess who is the source for much of the online BIDEN MUST GO TO KENOSHA RIGHT NOW assertions?
That would be Ed Rendell. Good God, I wish that dinosaur would lumber off to the fucking tar pit already. Anyhoo, Biden is to speak in PA later today, and that same NYT article has a snippet from the prepared remarks:
Boom.
gwangung
@Brachiator:
BECAUSE IT’S LESS EVIL, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!
Ahem. Excuse me.
Betty Cracker
@gwangung: Right? It’s really one of the dumbest questions ever. I mean, the answer is right there, contained within it!
James E Powell
@SFAW:
How do we get the press/media to stop repeating these things?
Gravenstone
Since this is the latest open thread not related to DA’s niece, headline on CNN just now – Flynn and DOJ just got cock blocked. Couldn’t happen to a more despicable bunch.
Kay
Say goodbye to Kellyanne, and never forget her last contribution to the country was to root for more violence and bloodshed because that helps Donald Trump and her future career. Then she headed off to her suburban mansion, where she’s completely insulated from any of the consequences of her actions.
Another Scott
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: No, I think this means that Sullivan can actually hold a hearing on whether the DoJ can drop the charges or not. The DoJ and their lackies can’t just quit and make Sullivan’s court quit just because. The process has to move forward.
At least that’s my reading – IANAL.
Cheers,
Scott.
Frankensteinbeck
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Yesterday they were trending ‘DO SOMETHING’ because everything is Nancy Pelosi’s fault because she won’t… uh… something. Seriously, just ‘something’. They didn’t know what she could do, but they insisted she fix everything Trump is doing immediately and she clearly does not care if she hasn’t done it.
Chyron HR
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
They really, really believe that normal human beings hate Obama just as much as they do.
Matt McIrvin
@WereBear: It’s happening in India right along with us, and I’d count India as an established, successful democracy by this point. We shall see how it goes.
Chyron HR
@taumaturgo:
Ha ha I get it, it’s funny because the only way to actually overcome Trump putting his thumb on the scale is to stay home so he wins legitimately. Checkmate, Republicans!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Matt McIrvin:
India was a British colony until 1947.
Citizen Alan
@Chyron HR: After all these years, I remain astonished at all the idiots who watched Obama campaign from his arrival on the national stage to the day he took office as president and were still absolutely convinced that once in office, he’d rip off his mask and reveal that he was actually Huey Newton the whole time.
Feathers
@Betty Cracker: I read it over the weekend on @xeni Twitter feed. Most of the new information came from @wokyleaks.
Glenn Greenwald has said that his involvement with neo-Nazis and porn companies was just as a first amendment lawyer. @wokyleaks tracked down those porn companies. Porn companies have to certify that all actors in the film are over 18. These are legal documents and must have an actual person and actual address. The evidence presented over the weekend suggests that Greenwald’s participation was ongoing as these films give Greenwald’s address and his husband’s name on their age certification documentation.
Much more sordid accusations of course, but those are the ones that can be readily traced and verified. If you are thinking that doesn’t sound bad, the other stuff is really bad, and Greenwald lied about the not so bad stuff, so… Greenwald was silent during all of this, despite normally jumping all over far less damaging posts.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Citizen Alan: and that Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson and Kent Conrad–along with at least a dozen others– would a) turn into Democratic Socialists if Obama yelled at them from the Oval Office crapper and b) be re-elected in landslides once The People! saw…. something.
Elizabeth Warren was on with the O’Bros last week talking about how optimistic she is because Young People (!) are so invested in policy! They talk about policy! They care about policy! (itself debatale) And all I could think of was, yeah, but they know jackshit about politics, either on the retail, electoral level, or how the US government as established by the Constitution actually works
zhena gogolia
@Chyron HR:
I thought taumaturgo was being serious.
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: You’ll find out the answer to that question, soon enough. You just wait.
zzyzx
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
What drives me crazy is when they say both:
1) Obama – who is clearly the most progressive president since at least LBJ – is a corporate centrist sellout who was really bad
and
2) There is a massive nationwide interest in electing a massively progressive Congress and president.
You’d think that if that were true, at some point people would have tried it.
WaterGirl
@Leto: ha!
tokyokie
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Aren’t most of the right-wing U.K. media outlets controlled by Murdoch?
Gravenstone
@Betty Cracker: The “666” should begin appearing under his elaborate combover any day now. The glowing red should complement the orange beautifully.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Good news for people who hate bad news:
Matt McIrvin
@zzyzx: They believe that there’s a cabal of centrists controlling the Democratic Party who have prevented truly progressive candidates from getting nominated nationally, and that’s why the Democrats lose all the time. There’s a kernel of truth in there: the party is historically keen on incumbent protection. But the secret majority of Berniecrats just doesn’t exist.
zzyzx
@Matt McIrvin: how exactly does this cabal prevent the progressives from winning primaries? That’s where the conspiracy theories lose me. The DNC can do what it wants but if the people vote, the people vote.
zzyzx
@Matt McIrvin:
And I don’t think you believe it, but you might know their answer.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@tokyokie: The UK has it’s own special brand of conservative crazy. But I am thinking the reason for the Republicans pushing these polls is to BS Trump that his campaign “reboot” is awesome sauce so he doesn’t fire his staff, again. lol
Chyron HR
@zzyzx:
“Superdelegates”
?BillinGlendaleCA
@zzyzx: The DCCC does promote incumbents in House races over primary challenges, which is surprising since the DCCC is composed of incumbent members of the House Democratic Caucus.
WaterGirl
@Danielx: I keep getting “tweet unavailable”. What are you guys seeing?
Kay
It’s all punditry speculation but if that’s true, that Biden wanted to reassure Democrats, I’m glad.
I don’t think Democrats do enough to talk to their base. Don’t all start yelling at me that it doesn’t matter, because it DOES matter. You have to talk to your people. You have to hold them together, not ideologically or on policy process but just as a huge group of people who already support you and are reliable voters.
mad citizen
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I thought this was going to be better news, like overall the military folk had turned a corner into sanity. But not really. The poll has Biden at 43, trump at 37 and some mythical third party at 13 %. All this tells me is half of these poll respondents ain’t very bright.
greenergood
@Matt McIrvin: yes – this is why I wake up every morning in dread – that Biden is killed – it’s so horrible, but so possible. I trust his Secret Service detail – it’s just that there are so many people out there who would happily assassinate JRBiden to ensure that their god-king/nutcase ‘president’ continues to rule.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay:
I don’t think the Dems have just one base, though, especially with the (apparent) re-alignment of college-educated whites. And it’s hard to break through the trump-generated noise and smoke to talk about things like health care and environmental policy. And the fact is that trump– his growing authoritarianism, his increasingly blatant corruption with an emphasis on minority voter disenfranchisement, his less and less subtle racism– is arguably the single biggest issue for one of the most reliable group of Dems’ voters
Matt McIrvin
@zzyzx: A lot of them seemed to think Debbie Wassermann Schultz was capable of rigging primary elections in Republican-led states.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
“Will we rid ourselves of this poison, or will we make it a permanent part of the American character”
“Trump has sought to remake this nation in his image: Selfish, angry, dark and divisive. This is not who we are”
Miss Bianca
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Y’know, I like it – I like that Biden is trying to appeal to the better angels of our nature.
But I really find myself wishing that people would STOP saying “this is not who we are” when it comes to the dark, bitter, divisive, racist, sexist, mean-spirited bullshit that’s part of the American experiment. Because it IS a large part of “who we are” – doesn’t mean we have to accept it, or not commit to changing it, but Donald Trump is as much America as, say, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Barack Obama.
I think it behooves us to acknowledge that to be a rich, racist, coddled white male fuck who gets to screw everyone else over and leave them holding the bag for his fuck-ups IS the American Dream for way, way too many people who voted for the SOB. But that the American Dream does not and should not be CONFINED to making life a nightmare for everyone who isn’t Trump or part of the Trumpenproletariat.
topclimber
@rikyrah: Thread is so dead it is awaiting Resurrection but there are NO small or large Congressional districts, population-wise. I suppose the tweeter may have been talking about geographic size, but c’mon…seems more like the SOS about how Progressives are the enemy.
On the other hand, since his tweet offers no context, maybe he is complaining about something substantive. That’s his job to prove, not mine.
Phoenix Woman
@Biff Baxter: The beauty of Joe Biden and his people is that the only person on Twitter who they probably pay any mind is G. Elliott Morris.