what were obama’s character flaws, too decent and boring a father and husband? being an aloof dork? acting as if the GOP base was less revoltingly racist towards him than it really was? https://t.co/jFbHoI0fcx
— kilgore trout, tucker carlson’s mailman (@KT_So_It_Goes) December 6, 2021
If you normie Dems are gonna insist on electing n… EGROS, it’s no wonder we True Leftists are driven to vote for GOP racists!
the implication is that if americans had elected republicans for president in every election between 1992 and 2016, the republican party would have not become what it has become, and if you want to make this argument, you should make it clearly instead of tap dancing around it. https://t.co/qk99hliGK7
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) December 6, 2021
further, when it comes to character, i'm willing to put hillary clinton's soul on the scale vs. john "fucking trollop" mccain or bob "happily endorsed trump" dole, too.
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) December 6, 2021
"If you had just given us the unfettered power we clearly DESERVE, we wouldn't have had to take it by force"
— David (@CrookedKnight) December 6, 2021
“Why did you make me hit you”, but for politics.
— Stephen Raab (@OneTrueStephen) December 6, 2021
matt lewis has been insinuating for years that there was *something* inherently and uniquely flawed or insidious about barack obama *as a person*, not just as a politician, and i think someone at the daily beast should, perhaps just once, ask him to explain what exactly that is.
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) December 6, 2021
there were and are a lot of white men and women in media who couldn't qwhite put their fingers on exactly what they thought was wrong with the first black president, but knew they didn't like *something* about him
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) December 6, 2021
If there is one thing cool kids distrust, it is people who others see as cool for totally different, inaccessible-to-them reasons. That is a threat to the whole social cachet structure
— Vlad Oligarchsky (@OpulenceIHazIt) December 7, 2021
Kay
The consistent, daily effort to NOT hold Republicans accountable for their own behavior is really something.
It isn’t healthy. Media should resist the impulse.
prostratedragon
Months ago that particular byline at Beast became one of my touchstones for ludicrous but malicious inanity. Then recently I saw his picture. Why must the grace of disregarding the appearance of my fellows be so importuned of me?!
Parfigliano
@Kay: Resist it…they happily jump in head first without knowing the depth.
Old School
Since he’s not listed, I’ll also tout Al Gore as a man of character even if the press treated him as the biggest liar who ever lived.
Fair Economist
Both W’s and Trump’s presidencies saw severe worsening in the Republican party. It’s a bully party, and the only thing that will improve it is losing.
jonas
Shorter Matt Lewis: Because Republicans decided to cynically make hay out of Clinton’s sex life and turn a private affair into a federal imbroglio, it’s Clinton’s fault the hypocrisy of their attacks on him were laid bare when they all rallied around serial adulterer and repeat sexual assaulter Trump.
Roger that.
scav
Ah, the give the screaming child what it wants, always, and maybe it won’t scream theory.
Chief Oshkosh
And look at the “exemplars!”
Both Bush generations are absolute horrors of human beings. Pappy Bush just looks good when stood between Nixon and Shrub (and it is NEVER asked: what kind of father raises a shitheal as bad as that fuck-up of a son?).
And Dole? Good god, that withered shitstain endorsed tfg TWICE. He’s the perfect example of how shiny clean they can look, but scratch the surface, and it’s evil all the way down, Katie. Fuck ‘im, glad he’s dead.
Old School
Also, the argument that rewarding the party of Newt Gingrich would have changed the direction of the Republicans strikes me as a little suspect.
brendancalling
Matt Lewis: “I’m not going to suggest there is a perfectly straight line from Clinton to Donald Trump.”
Brendancalling: Good, because the straight line starts at George W. Bush lying about Iraq, and miserable twatwaffles in the media standing up and saluting whatever bullshit he ran up the flag. Which, BTW, <a href=”https://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-youre-reliving-your-craziest-iraq-war-fantasies”>Matt Lewis knows</a> because he’s written about it <a href=”https://www.thedailybeast.com/you-guys-im-starting-to-miss-dubya”>several times</a>.
Lewis is a real piece of shit, just nothing but bandwagon writing. When it was cool to criticize W, he went after W. But now it’s cool to go after Biden (for nothing) and so that’s what a soulless, principle-free, dishonest, piece-of-shit hack like Lewis does. Maybe he’s auditioning for Fred Hiatt’s old job—either way, he’s going to end up in the same place, and I hope he likes the smell of brimstone.
guachi
That Matt Lewis tweet is something Doug J would write as a parody.
Felanius Kootea
Hmm. I think Matt Lewis needs to read a copy of Isabel Wilkerson’s book, Caste. So do many other members of the media. On second thought, it probably wouldn’t do much good.
Betty
@Chief Oshkosh: That whole image of H. W. irks me. His invasion of Panama was never held to account. Who knows what he was up to as head of the CIA. His being out of the loop on the Iran-Contra deal was never credible. We eventually found out he was as much a cheater on his wife as Clinton was. Why none of this ever gets attention tells us volumes about how the Washington game is played.
Betty Cracker
Wait, Matt Lewis is a leftist? I thought he was the Daily Caller and Clown Hall guy.
Felanius Kootea
@Kay: It’s utterly predictable though. Shameful but utterly predictable.
prostratedragon
Happy Birthday New York Philharmonic, debut this day 1842.
patrick II
They didn’t “reject” good men like Dole, HW, McCain, and Romney — they picked better men in Clinton and Obama.
waspuppet
Pretty sure McCain was rejected in at least a couple of Republican presidential primaries before 2008 when he became the “Fck it, we’re gonna lose anyway” candidate.
Woodrow/asim
Someone, I think here, once pointed out that rising up in Journalism more and more depends on being able to manage unpaid internships that formerly would have been entry-level jobs at a newspaper, or the like.
And that’s on top of the “easy” passage into social media fame, via being published with a by-line. And how poorly people are trained to deal with pushback/engagement, online, even on-point and honest discussions.
If so: That explains a lot of what we see, today.
Betty Cracker
@Betty Cracker: Okay, I looked it up, and I was right — Lewis wrote for Townhall and The Daily Caller and has never been a leftist of any stripe, at least according to his Wikipedia page. Stoller and Bruenig are the idiotic leftist Matts, not Lewis.
MisterForkbeard
Jesus. Not to mention that at the time of his election, there weren’t any known character issues for Clinton.
So Dems run “good character” consistently for the general. Republicans consistently run assholes, racists, cheaters and misogynists.
Seems pretty clear cut. Maybe he should chastise Republicans for obvious moral failings.
Kent
Evangelicals are the fucking worst. And I’m related to a bunch of them. You endlessly hear bullshit like how Trump is a flawed instrument of God’s will or some such. Anything and everything is excused if he waves a bible about and talks about “two Timothy”
Cacti
The media has battered wife syndrome with regards to the GOP.
They just don’t usually articulate it so clearly.
Felanius Kootea
@Betty Cracker: Oh – that explains a lot. How’d he go from Daily Caller to Daily Beast?
Kent
As for being morally upright? The last morally upright Republican was probably Eisenhower.
Betty Cracker
@MisterForkbeard: LOL, I remember the 1992 election, and there were plenty of known or at least strongly suspected character issues about Clinton. In that unenlightened time, they were referred to as “bimbo eruptions” and damn near tanked his campaign. Not that this undermines your point about the hypocrisy of Lewis (a conservative). Just saying.
Kay
@Parfigliano: ‘
It’s hysterical. If not-Republicans had just dragged Republican candidates over the finish line Republicans would be better. I didn’t even know this was my job!
PJ
@jonas: And it’s not as if the DC press was unaware that George HW Bush had a mistress, they just chose not to write about it, I guess because he was a “good man.”
Another Scott
@Old School: And Dukakis. Hell, even with his flaws, alternative universe Two Americas John Edwards would have been better than anyone the GQP has put up in my lifetime.
Grrr…
Cheers,
Scott.
Cacti
@Kent: If you’re willing to overlook the whole overthrowing democracies in Iran and Guatemala, then yeah, Ike was okay I guess.
Jeffro
I don’t know who Matt Lewis is, but he’s dumber than the soles of the sneakers I’m wearing.
H.E.Wolf
@Cacti:
Or perhaps they have Sympathy With Batterers syndrome….
Cacti
From the Twitter comments, actual AP headlines from 2018 vs. 2021:
“U.S. Employers added a robust 200,000 jobs in January.” (February 2, 2018)
“U.S. Employers added a sluggish 210,000 jobs in November.” (December 3, 2021)
Kay
@Kent:
Honestly? Their rules are a joke. They’re endlessly flexible to the extent that they may as well not have them. You can do anything and still call yourself an “evangelical Christian”. The rules seem to only function in terms of scolding other people.
I could see a genuinely rigorous religion with sacrifice. This thing they have is a joke.
MisterForkbeard
@Betty Cracker: Good point. I was… 10? I don’t remember that being a major issue, but I wouldn’t unless it was a huge deal and made it onto the evening news.
H.E.Wolf
@Chief Oshkosh: You have a point. All four of his sons were/are pieces of work.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kent:
Eh. He went ahead with the overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian government in 1954 and was apparently involved in efforts by the West German government to end denazification and promote the “clean wehrmacht” myth in the interests of national unity
PJ
@PJ: And I personally don’t give a shit whether or not any politician is “morally upright” in the conservative Christian sense, my MINIMUM request is that they not be venal, corrupt, or stupid, and that they actively work to protect the civil liberties and welfare of all Americans. They don’t need to be geniuses, but they do need to be decent people who believe in democracy and equality under the law, for everyone. Every Republican President of my life has failed that test, and every Democratic President has passed it.
Kent
@Cacti: Well yes. But that was more the institutional CIA and state department under John Foster Dulles rather than the personal pet project of Eisenhower in the same way that say the Iraq war was for Bush. He is, of course, culpable. but the same trajectory of US meddling overseas would have likely happened during that era regardless of who was president. Witness the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam which both came a few short years later. I don’t think you can posit an alternative history where if Truman had stayed president we would not have intervened via CIA coups in Iran or Guatemala.
Jeffro
I know, right?
All these Beltway pundits ever have to do, if they want to quit looking like idiots by promoting ridiculous double standards, is put it in the reverse and see how absurd it sounds to them:
“What Republicans need to do is…vote for Democrats, so that the Democratic Party will be better/field even better candidates.”
So. Stupid.
PPCLI
@Chief Oshkosh: Not just Trump. Dole also endorsed Oliver North in the 1994 Virginia Senate race.
What’s a little law-breaking underground arms sales to a terrorist state when control of the Senate is at stake?
mary s
Don’t even know who Matt Lewis is. But the notion of Dole and HW and McCain being “good men” is suspect. Dole was a hack who actively supported Nixon to the bitter end and was all in on “own the libs” Republicanism. HW worked with Lee Atwater to get elected. Enough said. McCain was erratic, to say the least, and never saw a war he didn’t support. He was also pretty darn mean (remember that joke about Janet Reno? I do). As for Romney . . . I’m not sure what makes him a good man — but I guess anyone the media has designated as a Republican daddy is automatically a good man.
Ruviana
@mary s: No link but Loomis at LGM did a truly scathing obit for Dole yesterday.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@mary s:
To add to this: Dole also endorsed Trump twice. Yup, even in 2020. He didn’t have to, but he did. So, fuck that guy
Cacti
@mary s: Bob Dole wept openly at the funeral for crooked ass Richard Nixon.
columbusqueen
Shall we talk about what a complete bastard Dole was to his first wife & two daughters, after he took up with dear little Libby? He dumped her & refused to pay child support at first. And yet his first wife devoted herself to getting him through rehab for his war injury. What a prince (not).
Brantl
@Kent: And the only reason he didn’t leave his wife is because Harry Truman threatened to bust him to private, if he did.
Chris
@Fair Economist:
GOP history is really tragic, in that you start with a party that was the better faction in the country on almost literally everything, and it’s… almost entirely just one, long, downward spiral. Already between Lincoln and Grant the drop-off is sharp and noticeable (Grant is when the GOP became Wall Street’s PAC, and it never really shook that); then after Grant you have the original devil’s bargain with the segregationists (with Northern Republicans agreeing to leave the South and throw its black population under the bus in exchange for Southern Democrats kinda-acquiescing to their domination on the national level); then the twentieth century comes around and you watch them continuing to spiral downwards until the eventual fusion with the segregationists, and then full-speed downwards into eventual straight-up fascism…
There are occasional attempts to right the ship, but they don’t tend to last very long. It’s hard to see at first because for decades, even if the GOP was getting worse, the Democrats remained so, so much worse than they were. But on the whole, it’s pretty much one long spiral from being the best of America to being the worst of America.
Alce_e_ardillo
@Kent: Since when does he know “two Timothy.” To him that is probably a street address.
Brachiator
@MisterForkbeard:
I don’t think this is true at all. Clinton was always a junky man with junky appetites, and he had haters early in his political career.
But he was still better for the country than any Republican.
Chris
@Betty:
HW’s blanket pardoning of all the Iran-contra folks is one of the biggest contributors to how badly and how quickly politics deteriorated in the next three decades, and it doesn’t get nearly enough attention.
Gary K
Headline from an August 1995 New York Times:
Kent
@Alce_e_ardillo: Of course he doesn’t. The fact that he actually said “two Timothies” rather than “2nd Timothy” was the giveaway. Or maybe it was “Two Corinthians”. Either way the fundies apparently found it charming. Or yet more evidence that God is using a flawed man as “his instrument” or other such bullshit.
There is no horror to which a GOP candidate can sink that the fundies will not excuse and hand-wave away as long as he gives them judges.
Gary K
@MisterForkbeard: Remember “bimbo eruptions”?
The Pale Scot
Since Tom isn’t a predictable poster, I’ll leave this here and see what pops up
DARPA FUNDED RESEARCHERS ACCIDENTALLY CREATE THE WORLD’S FIRST WARP BUBBLE
Seems like they’ve formed a cavitation cavity in the quantum foam, I’ll have to do some
LSDSpicetake more time to understand it if I can.Quantum foam, “pop”, get it? Sometimes I kill myself
Chris
@Cacti:
That’s one way to put it.
The analogy I’ve used is that the mainstream media is like a stalker with a crush, who simply refuses to stop chasing after the same woman (in this case, the Fox News viewer base) even after years and years of failing to attract her interest, and even after she’s screamed herself hoarse explaining to him that she is NOT INTERESTED she does NOT WANT YOU OMG GET AWAY FROM ME YOU FUCKING CREEP.
A sensible and rational person would have concluded long ago that 1) hey, this woman isn’t interested in me. Oh well, her loss, 2) hey, you know what there are a lot of in the world? OTHER WOMEN, ergo 3) hey, maybe I’d do better if I went around trying to get one of them’s attention instead?
The entire media ecosystem is chasing after a demographic that only wants Fox News and is now increasingly thinking even Fox News is too much like the others. As a result, no one gets news that’s geared towards them except old white men riddled with racial and cultural anxieties.
catothedog
I can’t imagine a more stupid line of reasoning than this..
Apparently, the thing about Republican policies and plans having no market – that did not get across from those rejections.
For them, it’s all a fixation about daddies.
Cacti
@Brachiator: Poppy Bush had a mistress for decades, but not a peep about that from the “librul media”, because he was the right kind of people.
Redshift
@patrick II:
The basis of conservatism the world over is that there is an aristocracy who are naturally entitled to rule, and that belief is sometimes forced to squeeze into some democratic process and try to make it produce the right result. It’s never a contest of equals, just whether the commoners are unruly enough to reject their betters.
Also, doesn’t “it was terrible how voters rejected these good men” sound awfully incel-ish? (Not a coincidence…)
Kent
@Chris: I think part of it is because the FOX news demographic leaves their fucking TVs on FOX news all fucking day long. I have an aunt and uncle who live in the same retirement community as my parents who do this. It is always fucking on. My parents, by contrast, don’t have cable and so barely ever even turn their TV on except to occasionally watch McNeal Lehrer on PBS (or whatever the news show is now) and the occasional NOVA and Frontline episode.
Your typical MSNBC viewer might catch a half an hour of Maddow on occasion if someone tweets that the show will be good tonight. And then probably on TIVO so they fast forward the commercials. Your typical FOX viewer gets 10 hours per day of that filth live so they catch every damn commercial
So I get why networks seek the FOX news demographic. It is because those people mainline the filth all day long and so are 100-times heavier consumers than the typical person who views liberal news.
PPCLI
The Republicans have this way of repeating false things over and over again until the press gets tired of correcting them, (or don’t bother correcting them at all) until they become accepted talking points. (Witness the relentless effort to portray opposition to Trump as just a matter of being “offended” by “mean tweets”.)
Thus it is with the whitewash of Romney. “OMG they made fun of him for saying “binders full of women” — the monsters!”
To be sure, compared to Trumpers and most of the Trump-enabling Republicans Romney looks pretty good, despite his earlier craven toadying to Trump. He is showing at least a minimal backbone and concern for democracy now. But this was also the guy who:
Defended taking away support for unemployed mothers because they needed to be introduced to the “dignity of work”. While at the same time defending rich mothers like his wife for performing such a demanding task as raising children. (Perhaps motherhood is only “work” if you employ nannies and cleaning staff?)
Played footsie with the racist efforts to deny Obama’s American birthplace. (“No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate.” “his foreign ideas”, …)
Making a speech to a select group of wealthy supporters in which he asserted that it “wasn’t his job to care” about the “47%” of Americans who are so poor that they don’t pay Federal taxes, and suggesting that such Americans are lazy, spongers, with “no skin in the game”.
Of course, I could go on…
Chris
@Kay:
The problem is, the only rule they have is “have you accepted Jesus as your personal lord and savior.” Literally everything you do is forgivable, as long as you’re Joined The Tribe.
Obviously, every religion falls prey to this “treating religion like it’s just a membership question separating The Good Tribe from The Bad Tribe.” But not every religion has it literally printed into its instruction manual like evangelical Christianity does.
GoBlueInOak
@Betty Cracker: He’s not – his own wiki page states he’s a conservative talking head. Somebody is getting all their Matt’s confused.
Matt Bruenig is definitely of the Left, but he’s also a bit orthagonal as he’s positioned himself as this weird social democrat/democratic socialist in the streets / suburban trad-dad in the sheets. Which probably explains why he married a Trad-Cath like Elizabeth Bruenig.
I wouldn’t describe Matt Stoller as a Leftist. He’s got one foot in progressive/left politics but he’s also got one foot in a kind of weird liberal libertarianism/neoliberalism. But he’s mostly defined by his obsessive focus on making the answer to every issue be “monopolies”.
I’d say what unites all the Matts with respect to Obama is a deep seated sense of underachievement these white bros have when looking at their own CVs vs Obama. Lewis is the proud alum of some small state school in WV nobody has ever heard of and whose career is of a middling right wing blogger. Bruenig is an Sooner who had to settle for BU Law and got fired from his PT blogging gig for basically being a total douchebag & had to set up his own “think tank” because nobody else would hire him. Stoller is a Harvard schmuck who never managed to get a grad degree and got fired from CAP for going after Google, a CAP funder (ok, that one I kinda will give Stoller a point for…)
But compared to Obama? Mass feeling of inadequacy amongst the Matts.
Hoodie
@mary s: Dole could be funny at times, but was an asshole and Nixonian hack through and through. This Lewis twerp is just another college republican dude who thinks guys from his frat house are presumptively respectable unless they do something like shit on the sorority carpet and embarrass them a la Trump. However, they have the same basic asshole values as Trump, namely, their dudes have first dibs on plum jobs, nookie, you name it.
cmorenc
Matt gets criticized for not including any failed-but-of-good-character Democratic POTUS nominees, but the problem with that is that aside from Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter, there really aren’t any good examples since Adlai Stevenson in 1956. And both the Mondale and Carter examples don’t work very well because they both ran against Ronald Reagan, whose appeal to the vast majority of people who voted for him was his genial relatability and seeming success as Governor of California (yeah, so we don’t buy that or see Reagan in a positive light, but a vast lot of folks did) – rather than his sociopathic asshole side. And so, neither 1980 or 1984 presented voters with the perception of a binary choice between a strong sociopathic asshole vs the admirable Mr.Deeds. OTOH, both Nixon and Trump were seen by GOP voters as tough assholes and won, and on the D side the slippery venal draft-dodging horndog Bill Clinton beat genial war hero Bob Dole. And so the proposition (as seen by GOP partisans) that voters don’t choose who to vote for based on good character is quite understandable.
Chris
@Kent:
With regards to Iran, the British actually tried to get Truman to commit to the overthrow of Mossadegh, and he told them to go pound sand. It wasn’t until Eisenhower took office that they found a willing ear in Washington. It’s certainly possible that Truman would have relented and gone ahead with the coup eventually if he’d been reelected, but as it is, you did in fact have a change in policy that came with the Democrat/Republican changeover.
Kent
@cmorenc: What about McGovern, Kerry, Dukakis, and Hillary Clinton? We’re they not of earnest good character?
eclare
@columbusqueen: Didn’t McCain do something like that also to wife #1, who helped him with his injuries? Once he met Cindy, it was “later, thanks.”
Eunicecycle
@eclare: yes, yes he did. Cindy worked in his office when his wife had breast cancer, I think.
Chris
@Kent:
One of the worst things about the Hillary-bashing was how all the sleaze from Bill’s indiscretions got transposed to her by association, in a combination of “Bill was cheating trash, so she’s probably cheating trash too; like marries like,” and “Bill was cheating trash, so she must have been doing something wrong; men don’t cheat unless their women are failing to do their part.”
trollhattan
Now they tell us.
The Trumpiest thing ever is his attempted rape was not a disqualifying event in Trump’s estimation (But, “I like rapists who don’t give up.”) but rather, li’l Brett likes beer and acts like a pussy under pressure.
Leto
@The Pale Scot: the physicists/scientists covered this last night in a previous thread.
eclare
@Kent: Good point. I never watch Maddow, Hayes, or the guy who comes on later. I occasionally watch the first 20-30 minutes of Morning Joe, and that’s it.
LongHairedWeirdo
Now, here, I have to protest gently. Republicans *are not* the cool kids. They’re the powerful adults who bask in unearned fame, by insisting that conformity will make us all much happier. They’re bullies with an army of volunteer haters who cheer the pains, and even deaths, of their fellow citizens.
It’s true, they’re a powerful, and even dominant, clique. But the real cool kids? They went on to become more than their high school selves.
Betty Cracker
@MisterForkbeard: I was in my 20s when that happened, and trust me, it was a HUGE deal. Poor Hillary had to go on “60 Minutes” immediately after the Super Bowl and vouch for the lout.* That’s where she got in trouble with the “I’m not some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” line, which allegedly sent millions of people swooning onto fainting couches nationwide. She saved Bill’s ass but immediately became target #1 for sexist jerks everywhere.
*I voted for Bill Clinton twice and would do it again because the alternative was worse both times, but he was deeply problematic in the character department. Hillary deserved better, IMO, but she seems to love the old rogue, so that’s their business, not mine.
ian
@Kent:
Except that isn’t the alternative history. The man you are looking for is Adlai Stevenson. Would he have overthrown Mosaddegh? We don’t know, but he was very different on a moral and political scale than either Eisenhower or Truman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adlai_Stevenson_II
Chris
@PPCLI:
Ultimately, Romney and Trump really have a lot in common:
Both of them have “being born” as their single greatest accomplishment. Specifically, being born to a family of rich people, from whom they were able to inherit everything.
Both of them, rather than at least trying to give back a little to the community that enabled their lifestyle, started shirking their civic obligations by dodging the draft as soon as they became adults, and basically never stopped.
Both of them had a long career in business where, instead of at least building something worthwhile – say what you want about Amazon’s exploitative employee practices, at least it provides a service that’s useful to millions of people – their business model was entirely parasitic, Romney with his Bain Capital gig of essentially destroying businesses, sucking them dry of their profits, and then moving on to the next victim, Trump more overtly by simply refusing to pay any of his debts as he ran one new company after another into the ground.
And both of them, of course, eventually looked at the Presidency and said, hey, that looks important. I’m important. Why isn’t that me
Even before you get to their politics, far more in common than not.
Betty Cracker
@GoBlueInOak: Okay, that makes sense. I don’t pay any of them any mind, but I had the vague impression Stoller and Bruenig were in the Bernie or bust camp and was pretty sure Lewis was always a conservative douchebag, so the leftist Matt trio framing confused me.
Kent
@Chris: It all started with the “Truman Doctrine” of containment. Truman and the British intervened in Greece in 1948, and of course applied the doctrine in Korea. I’m a Democrat but I’m frankly not convinced that Democratic rule in the 1950s would have been some sort of period of non-intervention and support for Democratic leftist change in the 3rd world. Kennedy was just as interventionist as Eisenhower.
This is all a sidetrack from the original proposition that Eisenhower was the last reasonably decent Republican. Which I think he largely was despite all the Cold War stuff that happened then.
PPCLI
@Chris: Also Romney fought tooth and nail not to release his tax returns, before finally relenting and issuing just one year’s worth. (Presumably the activities of the prior year had been carefully regulated so that nothing embarrassing would come up in the one year he did release.)
Fun Fact: it was his dad George Romney who began the custom of presidential candidates releasing tax returns. (And not just a single year, either.)
Kent
@ian: Yes, but Adlai Stevenson only ran because Truman decided not to run for a second full term in 1952 largely because his poll numbers and that of the Democratic Party were in the toilet. He stood basically no chance against the highly popular Ike.
dmsilev
@The Pale Scot: We talked about this in one of the threads yesterday. To put it in the context that we’re all familiar with: That story has all of the accuracy and pertinence of a typical Politico hit piece on let’s say Kamala Harris.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kent:
Well, there also was “Operation Wetback” during his administration, though enforcement actions had been increasing for the past decade under the Truman and FDR administrations
PPCLI
@Chris: Oh, and also:
“Romney with his Bain Capital gig of essentially destroying businesses, sucking them dry of their profits”
Indeed, it’s amazing to me that Romney and the Republicans managed to skate on their opposition to government support for GM and Chrysler during their financial catastrophe.
Romney, of course, insisted that everything would have been fine if there had been regular bankruptcy proceedings instead, which is Bain-speak for “if legal maneuvers had allowed lawyers to drain the pension funds and funnel them into the pockets of the bond-holders, and cancel all the health-care obligations to retirees”.
Kent
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): There is a difference between Federal policies that may have been misguided or outright bad. And the personal failings and corruption of the president in office. Nasty shit has happened during every presidency, Democratic and Republican. Obama’s immigration policy was problematic as well, as he ramped up deportations to record levels, and he did the pointless surge in Afghanistan. And let’s not get started with the wreckage that was his Department of Education under Arne Duncan. Or his white glove treatment of Wall Street. But it is mostly only the Republicans who have been personally corrupt and vile.
sdhays
@Fair Economist: I think the only election in the last hundred years where the Republican Party got “better” after winning was 1952 because Eisenhower forced them to accept most of the last 16 years and move on. Maybe 1956 falls in that bucket too, although they ran Nixon in 1960, so I doubt it.
But I don’t see improvement since then. It’s all down hill.
Geminid
@trollhattan: I think it was Ruth Marcus who first reported the story about trump wanting to bail on Kavanaugh, in her book about the nomination. The way she told it, White House Counsel McGahn stopped the stampede. When he heard trump was getting cold feet, McGahn wouldn’t take his calls. At one point he told his secretary, “Tell him I don’t talk to quitters.” McGahn eventually talked trump down and the nomination squeaked through.
Kent
@eclare: That is probably also why FOX gets higher ratings. The TVs in many FOX homes are just left running all day long as background noise. So all the programs get higher viewership numbers just by virtue of the TVs never getting turned off. While in liberal younger households they don’t get turned on unless someone wants to watch a specific show.
laura
@PPCLI: Romney and Bain Capital is the reason you can no longer flip your mattress over, reducing the lifespan by 50%.
cain
All I know is that Matt Lewis has one – because it’s all about raging about his column and boy how many clicks has he gotten from all that outrage? He’s probably sitting back and enjoying everything right now while liberals rage and conservatives chuckle.
We’ve built an an entire apparatus of reacting to right wing noise.
I think this is apropos:
https://twitter.com/magi_jay/status/1466805685912485894
ETA: OMG #90! I don’t recall ever getting this – hallelujah !????
zhena gogolia
@jonas:
Beautifully put!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It must must just burn mediocre while bois like Matt Lewis knowing a guy like Obama is a better man than they are.
Kristine
@Kay: .
I once worked with a particularly odious EC who stated that it didn’t matter what they did in this life. As long as they accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior, they would be forgiven. It was a get out of hell free card.
Kent
@Kristine: Of course if heaven is all full up with toxic evangelical Christians like him, how will it be distinguishable from hell?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@jonas: They were just making hay out of Clinton being a hound dog, they made up some bullshstory of him being a rapist.
Brachiator
@Cacti:
Political reporters often know exactly who cheats, who is a drunk or a drug user, who is gay, etc. In the past, they were usually more discrete, no matter what political party the politician belonged to.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Bill beat GH Bush, who the Right viewed as a wuss. It’s also worth noting that the it was the Right who chose Ronald Regean, the actor who played tough guys in the movies in WW2, over GH Bush who was a Navy Aviator in WW2 and did combat missions. Even Newt mocked GH Bush for not being the Right’s vision of a Hollywood war hero.
oatler
Chucky the T is now hosting a story about how Both Sides don’t want to raise the debt ceiling, while calling Dems “beyond irresponsible”.
Chris
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I really think there was a watershed moment in 1980, when the American public channel-surfed past a war veteran in the primary (HW) and a former military servicemember in the general (Carter) in favor of a phony who spent the war making movies and lied about having liberated Auschwitz. It’s the moment where the whole chickenhawk phenomenon really goes through the roof, and you can see it in effect later with Dubya, Romney, Trump, and most of a whole generation of Republican politicians.
Not that having served in the military and/or war makes you virtuous – Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay were career military, Goldwater was a veteran, etc. But I still think there was sort of a moment when people decided, fuck it, the real thing isn’t cool enough, we need the phonies.
Soprano2
@PJ: Again I’ll repeat, the D.C. press and pundits (and New York too) pretty much all hated the Clintons from the moment Bill started running for president. Sally Quinn famously wrote an editorial about how Bill Clinton came into D.C. and “trashed the place”, and it “wasn’t his place to trash”. They saw the Clintons as nothing more than elevated trailer trash from the very beginning, even though Hillary came from an upscale family in Chicago! These people don’t really admire self-made people – they admire the old money “elite” like the Bushes. As for “character”, at least Bill Clinton was honest about his desire to avoid the draft and service in Vietnam – George W. got his daddy to get him a slot in the “champagne unit” and then lied about it.
Omnes Omnibus
@cmorenc: Who are Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton? Chopped liver?
Soprano2
@Kay: One good thing about their total embrace of TFG is that I never have to listen to their moral scolding seriously again, because I know they absolutely don’t mean it. These “moral absolutists” who sneered at “moral relativism” completely cast their morals aside the minute they thought it would get them control of the Supreme Court.
CaseyL
@Chris: It was during the Reagan Admin that “perceptions” became a thing in political reporting, because God forbid anyone call out that Administration’s obvious bigotry. Instead, we got a never-ending torrent of articles that referenced a perception of the Reagan Admin being bigots.
Kent
@Omnes Omnibus: Not to mention McGovern, Humphrey, and Dukakis.
Jinchi
I keep reading headlines that Dole was a “Giant of the Senate”, and maybe I don’t know enough history, but I can’t think of a single policy he was central to.
How did this giant change American life?
Brachiator
@Soprano2:
Bill Clinton had enemies even as governor of Arkansas, but you are right about the disdain of the Beltway pundit crowd.
I’m not sure. Didn’t they also hate Carter because he refused to play up to the Beltway social snobs?
But this was always part of Washington, as soon as it became the capital. Andrew Jackson’s wife was snubbed by the society dames.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: They know what they did.
Another Scott
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: IIRC, GHWB was the youngest WWII fighter pilot (or youngest in the Pacific).
McGovern had an amazing war record as a bomber pilot in Europe as well. (Distinguished Flying Cross, etc.)
And we all remember what happened to Max Cleland.
It’s a crime that we let the political operatives construct these stupid narratives about people who actually did put their lives on the line for the country. But they know that “gut feelings” matter much more to voters than actual facts and evidence, so they’ll keep doing it as long as it continues to work for them.
Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
GoBlueInOak
@Betty Cracker: Yeah Matt Stoller and Matt Bruenig were both Bernie supporters, but coming from different angles. Or rather, Bruenig is more within the four corners of Bernie’s platform – while Stoller is just more a monopoly obsessed windbag with a history of problematic positions who will latch onto whomever the latest contrarian is. Like he’s right about our weak antitrust enforcement vis a vis over-huge concentrations of financial power being a BIG problem – and he’s right about China being an equally big problem we never shoulda opened the door to free trade with (and in that a lot of progressive labor economists agree)…but then he writes stuff like “Cryptocurrencies: A Necessary Scam?”
lowtechcyclist
@Chris:
Everything except not having evangelically correct right-wing politics, or being a generally questioning sort with respect to one’s faith, or questioning in particular whether Pastor’s conduct squares with the Bible (especially if he’s sexually assaulted you and you have the nerve to actually speak up about it), and probably a bunch of other things that I can’t recall right now.
It’s not the being ‘saved’ that gets you into their tribe anymore, it’s a combination of the politics and willingness to recognize their authority. I’ve known the Lord for fifty-one years and counting, and while they have no problem with Donald Trump, I’d be persona non grata with them.
Another Scott
@Soprano2: You’re thinking of David Broder – not Quinn.
HTH!
Cheers,
Scott.
Jeffro
In other news…Dan Crenshaw is getting dinged for calling other GQPers “grifters” and “performance artists”. Yes really.
Jess
@Chris: Yes. I think it’s obvious that if you’re going to embrace policies that support the 1% at the expense of everyone else, you’re also going to have to lie, cheat, brainwash the masses and undermine democracy in order to seize power. There’s no other way to do it, and I don’t get why that’s not obvious to everyone. It’s like how everyone has played Monopoly, and yet very few seem to understand how unfettered capitalism works. Doh!
Gravenstone
I like mine better.
Ken T.
@columbusqueen:
Jeez, sounds like our GQP Icon the teletubby Newton Gingrich. Why do so many of them treat women so badly?
Soprano2
@Another Scott: Nope, it was a column by Sally Quinn. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/quinn110298.htm Reading through the list of things “official Washington” supposedly revered, like telling the truth, is unintentionally hilarious now.
UncleEbeneezer
Anybody want to vomit? Steve Bullock can help:
“I take no joy in sounding the alarm, but I do so as a proud Democrat who has won three statewide races in a rural, red state — the Democrats are in trouble in rural America, and their struggles there could doom the party in 2022.
The warning signs were already there in 2020 when Democrats fell short in congressional and state races despite electing Joe Biden president. I know because I was on the ballot for U.S. Senate and lost. In the last decade and a half, we’ve seen Senate seats flip red in Arkansas, Indiana, North Dakota, and more. Democrats have lost more than 900 state legislative seats around the country since 2008. And in this year’s governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, we saw the Democratic vote in rural areas plummet, costing the party one seat and nearly losing us the other. It was even worse for Democrats down ballot, as Democrats lost state legislative, county, and municipal seats.
The core problem is a familiar one — Democrats are out of touch with the needs of the ordinary voter. In 2021, voters watched Congress debate for months the cost of an infrastructure bill while holding a social spending bill hostage. Both measures contain policies that address the challenges Americans across the country face. Yet to anyone outside the Beltway, the infighting and procedural brinkmanship haven’t done a lick to meet their needs at a moment of health challenges, inflation and economic struggles. You had Democrats fighting Democrats, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and desperately needed progress was delayed. It’s no wonder rural voters think Democrats are not focused on helping them.”
Another Scott
@Soprano2: She was quoting Broder:
“He came in here and he trashed the place,” says Washington Post columnist David Broder, “and it’s not his place.”
Cheers,
Scott.
Ben Cisco
@UncleEbeneezer: Bullock’s whole piece sounds like a squid cloud of butthurt b/c HE lost.
Citizen Alan
@Betty Cracker: I will say this about Bill Clinton. While I thought and still think that he never should have been impeached over a consensual affair–and especially by the likes of Newt Gingrich!–for him to have engaged in an extramarital affair while in office after narrowly winning the race despite bimbo eruptions(!!!) demonstrated an appalling lack of judgment bordering on narcissistic stupidity. And it is particularly galling that, in the end, Hillary was was robbed in 2016 in large part due to the investigation into Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal. Which means the greatest feminist icon of this era was denied the White House because her husband and the husband of her closest advisor (Huma Abedin) were both unable to keep their fucking pants zipped up!
Citizen Alan
@Chris: I knew a woman back in law school (I got my JD during the impeachment era) who was more angry at Hillary for not divorcing Bill over cheating than she was at Bill for cheating. It was bizarre.
Citizen Alan
@PPCLI: If I ever have the opportunity to speak to Mitt Romney, I swear I will tell him right to his face that George Romney would be humiliated by the man Mitt grew up to be. And he’d also be a Democrat!
louc
@Chris: It started with Nixon and McGovern. Us olds can remember how Nixon made McGovern into a pinko commie peacenik coward for opposing the Vietnam War. The press never bothered to report that McGovern was a bomber pilot in WW2 who flew at least 30 missions and won the Distinguished Flying Cross (tbf, McGovern, like so many WW2 vets, never talked about his experience).
James E Powell
@Brachiator:
Yes, they did. Especially the Democrats. Remember when he announced that the White House would serve no liquor? Nothing stronger than wine?
James E Powell
@Citizen Alan:
I have heard this “Why I hate Hillary” explanation from several Democratic leaning, college educated women I know. I confess that I do not understand it.
Hob
Just to beat a dead-or-at-least-should-be-dead horse: Lewis’s argument is even more nuts than it would be if he’d only said something like “Democrats should’ve shown more appreciation for Bob Dole’s [alleged] good character.” He’s saying that “the public” shouldn’t have “rejected” Dole, McCain, et al. In other words, it was the duty of all American voters to elect a candidate they didn’t really want to elect, as long as an argument could be made that he was an OK guy, at least as compared to a total nightmare like Trump. By allowing those guys to lose, for trivial reasons like “they didn’t run a good campaign” or “their policies weren’t popular”, we all gave the Republicans no choice but to go full monster! True, Clinton facilitated this outrage by having the gall to actually campaign against Dole and disagree with him, but the real culprit is all Democratic voters and also all Republican voters. I’m kind of impressed that someone found a way to go beyond the stupidity of “only Democrats have agency”.
J R in WV
@Ruviana:
Thanks for the tip, I’ll have to take a look. Loomis is a fav when it comes to scathing obits!
Ella in New Mexico
Matt Lewis is desperately trying to be fresh, cheeky and relevant, and is DB’s current resident hater of Dems. Everything we do that’s good should be seen through the lens of “ACTUALLY , contrary to popular wisdom, the Dem of concern or all Dems suck”.
Not really caring what the fuck he says. He’s annoying, and looking at his Twitter profile pic apparently trying to grow a man bun for some reason which is extra annoying.