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You are here: Home / Politics / Biden Administration in Action / They Got Nothing

They Got Nothing

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So as I usually do, I trolled all my right wing friends from the Army’s fb pages to see what kind of stuff they would be bitching about, and apparently all they got is “DARPA didn’t discover the internet, they invented it.”

So Biden did pretty well, I guess. I also really like the full-throated defense of government, and rose twitter can now shut the fuck up about Biden and the minimum wage.

Reader Interactions

76Comments

  1. 1.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I edit you, Cole!

    and rose twitter can now shut the fuck up about Biden and the minimum wage

    AND THE WILLOW IS TOO CLOSE TO THE HOUSE!

  3. 3.

    West of the Rockies

    I thought Scott’s ludicrous claim that Biden is trying to divide us must have secretly choked him to say.  After four years of TFG and his jr. high bully act, Scott’s point was beyond foolish.

  4. 4.

    Chetan Murthy

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    Technically DARPA funded the research

    Where you prove (correctly) that DARPA has precisely as much claim to having invented the Internet, as Al Gore does.  *grin

  6. 6.

    Chetan Murthy

    @West of the Rockies:

    Scott’s ludicrous claim

    He’s a little man, in thrall to other little men.  Who remembers J.C. Watts?  Nobody.  Who remembers Carol Moseley Braun?  Or John Lewis?  Who will remember Aunt Maxine?  Or Jim Clyburn?  [the list could go on and on ….] A shit-ton of people will.

    ETA: and not to forget Thurgood Marshall and President Obama, either.

    ETA2: Barbara Jordan!

  8. 8.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    I have to confess I was really mad reading that “faculty lounge” thread. It came across as a lot of “hippy punching” imo. Maybe there’s a point to be made about better messaging when it comes to talking to voters, but I did NOT like the dunking on the use of terms like “POC” or the painting of certain segments of the left as pointy headed elitists who can’t talk to ordinary people without being condescending.

    I particularly loved the comment noting how Republicans tell blue collar workers that immigrants are coming to take their jobs. The comment’s summation of typical Dems’ response was like something out of r/theRightCan’tMeme:

    Dem 1: If you believe that you’re a RACIST!!!

    I mean, so what are we supposed to do? Cater to these people’s delusions? Pretend racism doesn’t exist?

    I swear it was like stepping into the Twilight Zone. I was waiting for some people to start spouting off about “SJWs”, “feminazis” , “identity politics”, and “political correctness gone mad

    I mean all that with the utmost respect. I had to get it off my chest

  10. 10.

    Kent

    Biden has been utterly masterful at proposing what is really the biggest reinvention of government and social welfare programs since at least the New Deal while expressing everything in genial common sense “kitchen table, lunch bucket” language that just makes you nod “of course” and that is turning out to be extremely popular.

    Looking back at the 20-something candidates who started out the 2020 primary, I don’t think any of them would have charted nearly as successful of a course as Biden has done so far.  Experience really does count for something, as does temperament.

    I just love how he gives the GOP no place to gain any traction anywhere so they are forced to literally make up bullshit like banning hamburgers or Dr. Seuss.

  12. 12.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Kent:

    I just love how he gives the GOP no place to gain any traction anywhere so they are forced to literally make up bullshit like banning hamburgers or Dr. Seuss.

    Whatever happened to that BS with Kerry? I haven’t anything about it in the last few days. It seems like that hasn’t (yet) gained any traction either in the mainstream

  13. 13.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I particularly loved the comment noting how Republicans tell blue collar workers that immigrants are coming to take their jobs.

    That’s the problem, the Republicans will tell those workers what they want to hear, not the truth.  Those jobs have been coming back to the US, at lest until Trump screwed that up with his idiotic trade war that only jacked up our production costs, but it’s all automated or high skill now.  The good old days of turning a screw on the assembly line while stoned out of you gord are long gone.

  16. 16.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Kent:

    Looking back at the 20-something candidates who started out the 2020 primary, I don’t think any of them would have charted nearly as successful of a course as Biden has done so far.  Experience really does count for something, as does temperament.

    recognizing that all counterfactuals is bunk, I wonder how many of them could have beat trump

  21. 21.

    Kent

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I think the Kerry thing was WAY WAY too much of an inside curve ball.   I bet 90% of the public don’t even know he is in the administration.  I haven’t heard a peep about it since reading about it here.

  27. 27.

    Ithink

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

     

    I said the exact same thing to the point where I couldn’t add a comment there it state an opinion besides this: Michael Moore, James Carvilke and the rest of the high-rolling working class white male pundits of nominal Democratic persuasions are free to dispense whatever advice to their side and beyond they want, but maybe they need to hop on and get a few more significant candidates and successful campaigns of recent times under their belts before we’re inclined to listen? Just my ten cents…

  29. 29.

    Amir Khalid

    I have seen the address to Congress. Hell of a speech from a hell of a president. It all remains to be done, of course, bur if Biden can marshall the forces to do it he will be a POTUS for the history books.

  36. 36.

    Vixen Strangely

    What Biden did effectively was promote Democratic policies in the language that was always where Republican grievance lies: Oh, well, we’re making jobs–don’t you like jobs? We’re making them for blue collar workers–don’t you like blue collar workers? We’re confronting Russia, North Korea and Iran realistically–don’t you think someone should do that? We want to lower drug costs and eliminate cancer–what, are you a fan of cancer? It leaves Republicans holding nothing but tax cuts, culture war, and straws.

  41. 41.

    Chetan Murthy

    @HumboldtBlue: I wonder how that trick is done.  Other mind-reading card tricks seem to be based on misdirection during the “cut the deck” phase; this doesn’t appear to be.  Or maybe it happened before the video.

  43. 43.

    Redshift

    and rose twitter can now shut the fuck up about Biden and the minimum wage.

    You wish. I immediately saw a tweet declaring “fifteen is a floor, not a ceiling.” ?

  45. 45.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Redshift:

    You wish. I immediately saw a tweet declaring “fifteen is a floor, not a ceiling.” ? 

    These slapdicks obviously don’t know the meaning of the word “minimum.”

  48. 48.

    J R in WV

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: ​
     

    We’re talking 7 years before that, September 1969. The first message was sent from UCLA to SRI, it sent the L and the O and then crashed.

    Typical Internet.

    We started out streaming MSNBC, but then had to go to ABC broadcast because our internet crashed because of a thunderstorm. Our only consistent broadcast network with a news department. Sat internet connections are frail fragile things.

    Joe did great last night. Will soon go back to sleep on it.

  52. 52.

    Lacuna Synecdoche

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: ​
     

    recognizing that all counterfactuals is bunk, I wonder how many of [the 20-something primary candidates] could have beat trump

    Trump’s Covid-19 response, and the accompanying economic fallout, probably guaranteed a Democratic win no matter which candidate ran against him. Trump was widely reviled by the time early voting started in October. And coming down with Covid himself didn’t do him any favors.

    That’s not to take anything from Biden’s resounding victory, and any other candidate might have had a closer race, but I suspect most of them would have won. Trump was simply too damaged by his own missteps and four years of his toxic personality in the spotlight.

  53. 53.

    Gvg

    @The Moar You Know: boy, you remember different polls than I do. I saw all polls saying all of the mainstream candidates beating Trump. Kooks like Yang and the coffee guy didn’t. Now I didn’t trust those polls to hold up because Hillary was supposed to beat him too, however it was NOT Joe is the only choice field. Trump was unpopular his whole term including at inauguration which is not normal and why I still suspect cheating at the polls. However we had a highly motivated voter base and Trump made a lot of citizen enemies in 4 years. The whole Democrat field had a very good shot because they were running against Trump.

    Biden just had the biggest poll margin. Black voters wanted the surest thing they could get. Actually, so did I.

  54. 54.

    Geminid

    @Lacuna Synecdoche: Joe Biden certainly won a resounding victory in the popular vote. But considering that the Electoral College still decides the winner, this was a close election. Not close as in having an ambiguous result, but close as in a Democratic victory was not inevitable. It was a good thing that Biden and his team ran a disciplined, ship shape campaign, because there was little room for error..

  55. 55.

    The Thin Black Duke

    If either Warren or Harris ran for president, they would have lost for the same reason Hillary Clinton lost. There’s a reason why Trump was terrified of Biden.

  56. 56.

    burnspbesq

    @Redshift:

    You wish. I immediately saw a tweet declaring “fifteen is a floor, not a ceiling.”

    True. I can’t imagine living on $30k/yr. or less. Can you?

  58. 58.

    marklar

    @Chetan Murthy: Do you know which Senator led the task of appropriating much of the funding for DARPA to work on the internet?

    Hint: he’s from Tennessee, and was a Senator from 1985 to 1993.

  59. 59.

    Geminid

    @burnspbesq: J.C. Watts quarterbacked the Oklahoma Sooners to an Orange Bowl victory around 1980. The N.Y. Jets drafted Watts, but not as a prospective quarterback,  so he went on to a successful career in Canada.

    Watts served as a conservative Republican Congressman from Oklahoma 1995-2003. Somewhat like Senator Scott last night, Rep. Watts was picked to give the Republican response to one of Bill Clinton’s State of the Union addresses. Tom Cole has held Watts’ seat since 2003.

    Watts grew up in Eufala, Oklahoma, where his father was the town’s first black police officer. The father may have had high hopes for his son, as  J.C. Watt’s given name was Julius Caesar.

  61. 61.

    trnc

    @Lacuna Synecdoche: any other candidate might have had a closer race, but I suspect most of them would have won. Trump was simply too damaged by his own missteps and four years of his toxic personality in the spotlight.

    I voted for Warren in the primary and was Harris curious, but 74 million votes for DT tells me that he might have won against either of them. What DT’s damaged personality did was help us see just how much lower the bottom of the barrel is for the entire republican party than we thought.

  62. 62.

    SFAW

    @NotMax:

    True to form, there’s no there there.

    JHC, if Cole’s going to adopt a nom de plume, he could make it a little less obvious. Also, did Doughy Pantload ever pay him the $1000 on the bet Pantload lost?

  63. 63.

    Soprano2

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I mean, so what are we supposed to do? Cater to these people’s delusions? Pretend racism doesn’t exist?

    Do you think you can win an argument by calling someone a racist? I sure don’t. You don’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, either. What you do is try to meet people where they are and persuade them that way. Not everyone is persuadable, that’s true. My father was both a farmer and a small school superintendent. When he talked to his teachers and the school board, he talked differently than he did to other farmers when they were hanging out at the Derby gas station. That’s the best way I know to explain it. We shouldn’t be like conservatives, who have created a whole world and lexicon that only they understand. Half the time when I see them talking on FB I don’t know what they’re even talking about! Go read some of the e-mails Josh Marshall is publishing, from readers who are liberal and yet are turned off by their employer’s efforts to be supremely “woke”. It’s not an effective way to get our message across to most Americans.

    I have no idea where you live; I live in a city where 65% of the people voted for Trump both times. Republicans win almost everything here, and our state legislature has a supermajority of Republicans in both chambers. There is one Democrat in a statewide office. What people like me are saying is that perhaps people who live in places where almost everyone is liberal should also listen to some of what people who live in places like I do say about how to get our message out there.

  64. 64.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    @Gvg: And that’s important, because the Democrats didn’t just need to win in 2020; they needed to win by a margin beyond the GQP’s ability to steal. That’s how Hillary lost in 2016 – not by being the inferior candidate, but by not having enough of a margin to overcome the dirty tricks.

    Biden certainly wasn’t the most exciting or progressive-appearing candidate, but he was able to neutralize and overcome those structural Democratic disadvantages, and his performance since taking office (has it been three months already?!) shows him as an exception to Douglas Adams’ comment about how anyone capable of getting elected President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

  65. 65.

    Salt Creek

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: And so ARPANET was born, The first demonstration of the triple network internet took place in July 1977.

    Zotts was important, but it was just two nodes sharing one link, three nodes with three links came a year later.

    Al Gore got a lot of grief for what he said, and they used email communications as proof that the Internet existed long before he entered congress. But that wasn’t the Internet, it was ARPANET over which those communications were sent. The internet was ARPANET on steroids.

    Al Gore was in Congress when the Internet was ready to be built, and he took a leadership role in procuring funding for it. That was all he was trying to say and he had every legitimate right to say so.

    The scientific community failed him, because they refused to analyze his words in the context in which they were spoken. They couldn’t analyze a piece of data and assign it a value. Shameful.

  69. 69.

    Denali

    What. Soprano 2 said. Sad but true. I was born in the South and I understand exactly what was said. I do hope that Biden can unite this country. We desperately need someone who can.

  70. 70.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Soprano2:

    I live in a county that voted 51% for Trump. I’m pissed at them for being idiotic, bigoted people. I’m going to continue to call out bigotry and not molly-coddle racists. I’ve already said that politicians need to speak plainly to voters, that’s not in question. To me, you’re simply engaging in right-wing framing. You’re not going to peel off a significant number of voters without also alienating many of ours

  72. 72.

    chopper

    @Salt Creek: 

    But that wasn’t the Internet, it was ARPANET over which those communications were sent. The internet was ARPANET on steroids.

    the internet was ARPANET with data fidelity and redundancy. i mean, ARPANET and the internet operate on two completely different protocol sets. just because you’re sending digital data from one computer to another doesn’t make it nearly the same.

  73. 73.

    Chris Johnson

    @burnspbesq: 
    24000 here. You’d be surprised what is possible. It was a lot harder before Mom and Dad died and left the kids some money, but the actual income is still well under $30k a year, always was.

  74. 74.

    Geminid

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I’ve also lived in Republican areas the last thirty years, and I think Soprano 2 is correct here. But this is not just an abstract argument. Next year you will have a Ohio Senate race to observe, maybe even volunteer for. Watch how Tim Ryan (or whover else is the Democratic nominee) speaks to voters. I expect his rhetoric will be closer to that which the other commenter advocates, and that this will not keep you from voting for him.

  75. 75.

    Medicine Man

    Rose Twitter will never shut the fuck up. Because the whinging isn’t about any particular policy or preference.

  76. 76.

    Salt Creek

    @chopper: Then I will refer you to Vinton Cerf, he was the one who stated that the first demonstration of the triple network internet took place in July 1977.

    He did an interview in 1992, “How the internet came to be” he very explicitly that the Internet grew out of ARPANET, ARPANET had to meet certain requirements before it could morph into the Internet.

    This didn’t happen until 1977.

    In 1964 Paul Berand was the first to publish a paper on packet switching technology, in 1965 Donald Davies was the first to send a packet from one machine to another. Like Al Gore neither one of them has received the recognition they deserve for the contributions they made.

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