As a description of where the GOP’s head is, it’s extremely accurate. As an excuse for where it’s head is, it’s insane.
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) January 3, 2022
Meijer’s being disingenous (because Chuck Todd is encouraging him):
… Meijer, who was one of 10 House Republicans who voted for Trump’s second impeachment following the Capitol attack, said, “There was no alternative. There was no other path.”
He pointed to the party’s pair of losses in the Georgia Senate runoff races and actions taken by President Biden during his first year in office.
“Given how President Biden, when he was elected into office, you know, said he would be moderate and look for bipartisan solutions. But then after, and, frankly, I blame the former president for this, after we lost the two Senate seats in Georgia and the Senate flipped, it became an exercise in trying to be an LBJ- or FDR-style presidency and enact transformational change in the absence of any compelling mandate from the American people to do so,” Meijer said.
“So that gave the rallying signal. That created a very steep divide. And at the end of the day, there’s no other option right now in the Republican Party,” he added…
If the Democrats are gonna use ‘winning more votes, more offices’ as an excuse for actually legislating, what can our poor little minority party *do* but turn to the Grifter King and his terrorist mob?!?
Slava Malamud — Russian immigrant, former sports reporter, current middle-school teacher — has a better take:
The reason Joe can't find agreement with ex-supporters is because US politics have long ago stopped being a discourse on nation improvement and turned into team sports.
And the reason this happened predates Trump by at least 3 decades. Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have made it so. https://t.co/09Q33n8uy1— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) December 27, 2021
Sports fans don't care who plays for their team. The guy can be a major asshole or a criminal, but if he can whack the thingy into the doodad and help beat the guys in differently colored clothes, he is good and opposing him is bad.
Sports fans are cultish, irrational and shrill.— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) December 27, 2021
Trump has merely exacerbated it. He has turned GOP voters from mere "My team til I die" supporters into "Us against the world" fanatics with a "League Conspires Against Us" self-martyrdom complex.@WalshFreedom can't win this argument because he doesn't inhabit the same world.
— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) December 27, 2021
In Joe's (sane, honorable) world, winning is important, but playing by the rules and preserving the integrity of the contest is more important. He would sacrifice a winning season in order to save the game.
Most Republicans, like most sports fans, would pick just winning any day.— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) December 27, 2021
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Going by O-anon they are way beyond Sports.
Jerzy Russian
Fuck that red-headed bearded dude. If the GOP had a majority in both houses and the presidency they would not hesitate to do what they want. It seems to me that not putting a complete asshole as the party leader is also a choice, although to be fair they are all assholes at some level.
lgerard
Unless you are Abe Lincoln, no politician should be allowed to have a beard.
It’s like playing for the Yankees ………. no facial hair!
Chetan Murthy
@Jerzy Russian:
The coward. He’s trying to have it both ways: if the GrOPers win, he wants to be able to argue that he was a loyal GrOPer, and if not, that he was loyal to the Republic. I don’t know that Cheney’s *that* much better, given that she seems all-in on voter suppression and such, but at least, she’s unequivocal about how seditious the Epiphany Coup was.
NotMax
@lgerard
Benjamin Harrison cut quite the hirsute figure.
And James Garfiled was no slouch in that department, also too.
;)
HumboldtBlue
Malamud is also horribly wrong about peanut butter.
There are some other questionable takes about sports uniforms and such, particularly hockey sweaters, where he is abominably off-course.
Does have some Russian insight, however.
Chetan Murthy
@HumboldtBlue: Do you remember when the last two words we’d associate with this guy Walsh were “sane” and “honorable” ? Boy do things change.
Ivan X
In light of the Holmes verdict, I’ve been bingeing John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood podcast, and even though I read his book and I know the story already, it’s still galvanizing listening, especially when he places tapes of interviews between Ken Auletta and E Holmes. It’s really just unbelievable, you can’t really believe this shit happened. Highly recommend.
NotMax
History alert.
Gustavus Vasa Fox of the Union Navy: A Biography by Ari Hoogenboom is on greatly reduced special for Kindle.
Liked the same authot’s biography of Rutherford B. Hayes. (Full disclosure: I was socially – and ONLY socially – well acquainted with his sister.)
West of the Rockies
@NotMax:
You were acquainted with Rutherford Hayes’ sister? How damn old are you?
smike
@NotMax:
Wow! Rutherford B. Hayes’ sister is still socializing? Amazeballs… /
HumboldtBlue
@West of the Rockies:
Pretty sure at this point that age is measured in spider webs.
Don’t ask me what that means, mind.,
Redshift
Weird how Republicans always have a ‘”mandate” even when they lose the popular vote, but Democrats never have one.
Asshole.
NotMax
Mmmm. Lifted the lid of the Instant Pot after venting was done and the house smells wonderful. Batch of Brazilian-style beef and sausage stew. Will let it meld flavors and thicken overnight in the fridge. Wintertime delight.
Of course, tonight is the first time in more than a week when the temperatures have not reached down to the mid or low fifties.
Starboard Tack
@NotMax: Condolences on the cold. Tomorrow I’m going to make mushroom stroganoff because tomorrow night it’s going to be 0° F.
VeniceRiley
By the sports logic, it’s weird that most golfers are Republican. I think I need a poll.
Edmund Dantes
The way you spot the true converts is whether they place the blame on trump or actually grapple with what the GOP has been doing since Goldwater.
Liz Cheney isn’t a true convert. She just wants to go back to Pre-Trump GOP. So she’s currently a valuable ally, but she’s the proverbial scorpion.
Shalimar
@Chetan Murthy: Liz Cheney would be perfectly fine with dictatorship as long as she or daddy were the dictator. She objects to Trump, not one-party rule.
Tony Jay
@Redshift:
No, no, no.
As I’m sure the NYT will be in like Flynn to contextualise, he accepts that Democrats have a mandate (so, not an election-conspiracist = a Heartland moderate and a bellwether of national opinion), he just understands that Democrats don’t have a compelling mandate, meaning they don’t have a right to make anything they got elected to do actually happen without winning the agreement and thus the votes of people like the aforementioned Heartland moderate and bellwether of national opinion.
Which they won’t get, of course, which just proves that Democrats are being partisan and extreme by not compromising enough. Only electing more Republicans can solve this problem, because then the Democratic Party would be back in the minority and thus be compelled to do the hard work to win Republican votes in support of their agenda.
Simple, innit?
Matt McIrvin
Amazing how Biden can simultaneously be this extreme, fanatic, practically Maoist transformational figure according to their side, and a do-nothing corporate stooge according to some of ours.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Everyone knows Corporate Communism is the greatest threat we face.
lowtechcyclist
No disagreement about Rush & Co., but the mainstream media deserve a huge chunk of blame as well. Their coverage is 98% about who’s winning and who’s losing, and how one party proposing X might or might not change that. And maybe 2%, if we’re lucky, on what policies the parties are actually proposing, and what their effects would be on the lives of actual people.
Obviously more recent entrants like Politico and Axios are particularly bad on this score, but it’s hard to look at the TV news or the FTFNYT and see much improvement.
Tony Jay
@Matt McIrvin:
Happens everywhere. Over here the previous Leader of the Opposition was simultaneously a Stalinist tyrant Brexiteer hell-bent on Jewish genocide and a scruffy, spineless Trot who wanted to block Brexit because of his cosmopolitan hatred for White British Culture. He couldn’t be both, or either, obviously, but somehow that paradox was never worthy of investigation.
When the News Media wants to support a public figure they interrogate the sources of the attacks on them with an eye to dismissing them as rooted in extremism, when they want to tear them down they megaphone all of the contradictory attacks and chinstroke about why, oh why is it this figure so very divisive?
SSDD, same as it ever was.
raven
Good ad to be aired on Fox
Geminid
@raven: That is a good ad, especially for that audience.
Matt McIrvin
@Tony Jay: In a US context, the key to unlocking all this is that Republicans have a solid majority among white people and have for a long time. It’s very easy even for self-described liberals who don’t think they’re racist, if they’re white, to think of the median white person as the median American and equate white support with legitimacy. It makes even an actual majority look like it’s not a majority. You see mainstream media analyses that treat dependence on non-white votes as if it’s somehow cheating, and Republicans will sometimes state that explicitly.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Agree completely.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: It is by no means limited to the right. Why is there a persistent intuition that Bernie woulda won in 2016, despite a notable lack of evidence? Because Bernie consistently draws votes from a lily-white constituency in a lily-white state. The assumption, whether it’s stated explicitly or not, is that Bernie Sanders has the secret sauce that could get the whites back if we only took that national, not that Vermont politics are highly unusual.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
So has Pat Leahy, for longer.
Everyone like to fight systematic racism when they think they are fighting conservatives. It’s a little harder to fight your friends.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: If anyone has the secret sauce to win white middle and working class voters, it’s Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Next door in Pennsylvania, Senator Bob Casey is a pretty good cook too.
Freemark
@Geminid: if Fetterman wins the nomination we will see if a progressive ‘average’ white man can win back some of the ^all important average white American vote that is the only real vote. ^
Zelma
@Matt McIrvin:
This position – that somehow non-white votes don’t count – reminds me of British politics in the late 19th century. When the Liberals won a majority in Parliament, the Tories argued that it didn’t count because after all, so many Liberal voters were Scots or Irish.
Interstadial
Interesting idea, that a president with a bare majority in Congress should not try to work major changes. Let’s look at G.W. Bush, elected with a bare majority of electoral votes and a minority of popular votes.
In his first two years the House was Republican by just 221-212 and in the next Congress 229-205. Meanwhile the Senate was more or less evenly divided during this period. Yet the Bush administration had no hesitation in putting through major legislation, not by negotiating with the Democratic leadership but by peeling off a few Democratic votes when needed. Various items on this agenda were intended by Karl Rove to work towards building a durable Republican majority.
Yet Bush wasn’t being trashed for acting boldly without a mandate. Because it’s different when a Republican does it.
The Oracle of Solace
I don’t even think it’s a team thing. It’s far too asymmetrical. Democrats have gradually been moving toward advocacy for a more just society, in which women and minorities and the LGBT community are no longer subject to arbitrary abuse. The GOP’s voters are motivated by a desire to hurt other Americans (specifically women and minorities and the LGBT community) to punish them for rising above their stations. Liberals and the left have basically asked that everyone be given the same respect previously reserved for straight, white, Christian men, and the right has responded with murderous violence.