National Review Republicans who understand that winning elections requires moving on from the erratic and embarrassing loser Trump but also desperately want the pro-plutocracy tax cuts, deregulation and judges Trump’s brand of extremist politics makes possible are lining up behind Ron DeSantis. The problem is that DeSantis rocketed to the top of the wingnut heart throb list by aping Trump.
So, Republicans who want to move on from Trump to DeSantis have to separate the DeSantis brand from the Trump version, but their challenge is that the differences between the two aspiring autocrats are mostly cosmetic. DeSantis boosters are afraid that fellow Republicans who rejected Trump will reject DeSantis for the same reasons, and they worry that mainstream pundits and/or political reporters will portray DeSantis as a continuation of the failed and discredited Trump strain of Republican politics.
Addressing the first audience, culture war bullshit purveyor Christopher Rufo put it like this on Twitter:
The test for “NeverTrump” intellecuals [sic] is where they stand on DeSantis. He should be their guy: elite education, military background, leadership experience, impeccable character. If they can’t get behind him, the takeaway is clear: it’s not about principles; they serve the Left.
Addressing the second, conservatives like Rich Lowry are saying Democrats should welcome a return to norms that DeSantis represents. Lowry and others assure us that DeSantis would concede an election defeat, even though the governor responded to Trump’s stolen election lies by further restricting ballot access in Florida and setting up an election police force answerable solely to himself.
Surprisingly, at least to me, Liz Cheney isn’t buying any of this nonsense:
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), whose criticism of former President Trump has alienated some Republicans, said in a new interview that the GOP is “very sick” and predicted it could take “several cycles” for the party to heal from internal strife and aggressive extremism.
Cheney told The New York Times a little more than a week before her primary challenge against a candidate endorsed by Trump that she is a Republican for life but not a supporter of the current state of the GOP.
She said the GOP is “continuing to drive itself in a ditch and I think it’s going to take several cycles if it can be healed…”
The Wyoming lawmaker told the Times that DeSantis has “lined himself up almost entirely with Donald Trump,” which she said could be “dangerous,” and also that she would rather serve with most Democratic women than Republicans like Greene and Boebert.
“What the country needs are serious people who are willing to engage in debates about policy,” she told the Times.
Good for her. American politics are so goddamn messy. There are so few bright lines or straight lines. Lots of Democrats firmly believe Cheney’s father and GWB stole the 2000 election. You can credibly make that argument, though Florida 2000 theories can get into grassy knoll territory pretty quickly. IMO, the best “Republicans stole it” argument involves the voter roll purges that took place prior to the election.
Unfortunately, we’re stuck with the anti-democracy relic that is the Electoral College, and there will always be corrupt and/or at least questionable shenanigans at the state level, so it’s likely future close elections will be affected by these factors. But one bright line even a debilitated democracy like ours should still be able to draw is that it’s unacceptable to lie about election outcomes, ignore court rulings on the legitimacy of ballots cast by the people or use violence to cling to power.
Since Republicans’ most recent standard-bearer corruptly attempted to overturn an election using all of those tactics, every single one of his would-be successors, including DeSantis, should be asked, explicitly and repeatedly, if they believe Trump lost the 2020 election. They should be asked, explicitly and repeatedly, whether Trump’s attempts to invalidate the election were a legitimate use of presidential power. They should be asked, explicitly and repeatedly, whether they agree with schemes to remove the people’s power to decide elections and invest it in state legislatures instead.
I wish I were confident the Beltway press will get this right. I’m not. But Cheney’s stand is potentially useful because it cuts through the bullshit about personalities and focuses on democracy. Republicans who are silent on these issues are dodging the most important question of our time: do they believe in the people’s right to choose their leaders or not? That’s the question. That’s the only question that matters.
Open thread.
Baud
Let’s test that theory this November!
randy khan
Ah, yes, a smart, well-educated guy who supported Trump, who tries to suppress Black votes, who actively pushed legislation to prevent teachers from mentioning the existence of LGBTQ+ people and to prevent social media companies from removing the worst bilge from their platforms, and who supported the overthrow of our government by the guy who lost the last election. He’s the guy who the NRO folks think is the principled choice.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’ve hoped for it in other races– GA most notably– and it’s probably the equivalent of hoping to draw an inside straight, but I really hope trump gets so outraged about De Santis stepping up on him that he’s willing to punish the R’s by going cannibal
MazeDancer
Every crazy thing DeSantis does, I think, surely, this is overreach.
But nothing happens. Where are the Black, Jewish, ex-NYer, and gay people? One hopes they plan to vote. The only person with who I am in touch who moved there is doing what she can to register people.
DeSantis is a monster.
lowtechcyclist
And I’m one of those. They stole it by running out the clock on being able to verify what the results really were, between legal stratagems and stuff like the Brooks Brothers Riot.
AFAIAC, it doesn’t matter whether they would have won anyway. While the real outcome was in doubt, they made sure it would have no bearing. If I break into your house and steal something, it’s still theft even if you’d fully intended to give it to me the next day.
Can’t argue with you there.
MattF
It’s good to have Cheney pushing back hard on that question. Otherwise DeSantis would surely be getting away with his Trumpoid-but-not-actually-psychopathic politics.
MazeDancer
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Trump is certainly not going to go quietly. And 69% of the CPAC straw vote chose him. So, maybe he’s not worried yet.
But, I, too, keep wondering what is Trump waiting for to stomp Ron.
West of the Rockies
I don’t think Republicans get how visceral the disdain is from non-Republicans for DeSantis. I recoil every time I see his sneering face. He is so joyless and full of himself. I mean, even Trump smiles. DeSantis perpetually glowers and scowls.
How does he go from the guy who shits in the soup to a reasonable, pretends-to-care guy? I don’t see the flight path.
Old Man Shadow
No, I think the Supreme Court stole the election.
Amir Khalid
So, Trump is the Coke of Trumpism, and DeSantis is marketing himself as the Pepsi?
CaseyL
I doubt any MSM interviewer will ask these questions, because if they do, the Heirs to Trumpism a) won’t answer, but instead will deflect; and b) won’t come back for any more interviews, thus depriving the interviewer (and possibly the network) of “access.”
I’d actually be surprised if DeSantis even bothers to appear anywhere but Fox. That is where his voters are; why should he care about any others?
Mike E
To push Liz’s analogy even further, GWB’s GOP drove her party and the whole country into the ditch, murdered the tow truck operator, drove the tow truck with the country hitched to it onto a busy interstate and opened fire at the passing motorists. She’s done yeoman’s work with the J6 committee, good on her, but she’s got miles to go for redemption. Sadly.
trollhattan
DeSantis and “impeccable character” shall henceforth not occupy the same
paragraphsolar system. Shut the hell up, stupid person.West of the Rockies
@Amir Khalid:
Isn’t he more like New Coke? I hope he goes over as well.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@trollhattan: I’m guessing that means he has not, as far we know, cheated on his wife.
trollhattan
@Mike E: Daddy and GWB’s GOP. Anything Dick touches, Dick ruins and Liz will never go there.
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Believe that to succeed in today’s GOP, you need three wives, minimum.
The Moar You Know
@Amir Khalid: We all know who the eternal winner of that contest has been.
People want the real thing, not a copy.
SoupCatcher
@Amir Khalid:
Pepsi was a surprise ending.
I thought it was going to be meth.
FastEdD
Rooting for injuries for the repubs. Massive injuries. Extinction event injuries.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
My two-bit guess (inflation and all) is the the Lizard Brain is at war with the Ego, the latter thinking that President De Santis would pardon him.
Wyatt Salamanca
The Trump toilet photos:
h/t https://twitter.com/CNNPolitics/status/1556649687628894209
Ken
So Ted Cruz was not just the Zodiac killer, but the second gunman? Yes, yes, it all makes sense, and at last explains the fluoridation levels in the Dallas municipal water supply. Hang on, I need to buy more push-pins and three colors of yarn to add this to my theory wall.
Jackie
I see DeStupid is going to start campaigning for Trump-endorsed governor-wannabes. That should help differentiate him from TFG!!
//s
https://flvoicenews.com/desantis-to-campaign-across-the-country-for-trump-backed-candidates/
West of the Rockies
It’s subjective, certainly, but Micro Rubio could at least briefly appear like he had some minor gravity. Cruz tries to be a stand-up comedian from time to time and has a fondness for some pop culture (ignore that his own children recoil at his touch).
But DeSantis and Hawley just exude judgment and disdain. They are junior high bullies in expensive suits.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Wyatt Salamanca: “Trump toilet photos” is a phrase from hell.
Ken
@SoupCatcher: I was expecting New Coke, and hoping the analogy extends to rejection by consumers who can tell it’s not the original.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@West of the Rockies: I’ve seen very little of DeSantis live (thank god). But I did see the press conference where he publicly scolded students for wearing masks. He didn’t think that was unseemly behavior in a governor. That’s all I had to see to know that he punches down.
Frankensteinbeck
I think this is important, though. As evil and often petty as DeSucktis’s actions as governor are, he does not capture half of Trump’s ‘your ranting racist uncle’ schtick. Trump oozed misogyny. He came off as a dumbass alcoholic domestic abuser. And his fans loved it. It was part of the validation, what made him stand out from lesser assholes like Ted Cruz. I don’t think Florida Man has that.
Wyatt Salamanca
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Hopefully, the 2024 election will be remembered as the moment that Trump was finally flushed out of our system.
SiubhanDuinne
Historian/biographer/documentarian David McCullough has died at age 89. R.I.P.
trollhattan
@Wyatt Salamanca: He takes the man out of man-baby.
trollhattan
@SiubhanDuinne: Aww. RIP sir, you did well for a good long time.
trollhattan
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I continue thinking he and Elvis will share the same ignominious end.
BruceFromOhio
The last three paragraphs of this post should be required reading for every single pol, journalist, voter.
Miss Bianca
@SiubhanDuinne: Aww. I just heard his mellifluous voice narrating parts of the movie Seabiscuit.
lowtechcyclist
@MattF:
Yeah, DeSantis is more of a sociopath. Persecuting school kids for political gain, just the sort of leader we need.
SiubhanDuinne
@trollhattan:
He sure did. His bios of Adams and Truman were wonderfully readable, apart from being informative. I’ve never read his book about the design and construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, but I think I will soon. And when he appeared on PBS programs, and occasionally on cable news as a pundit, he always was worth listening to.
MazeDancer
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Oooh, good guess.
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
Now I need to finish his Truman bio, which I read halfway about three years ago.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Amir Khalid: I thought you meant a different kind of coke until you mentioned Pepsi.
trollhattan
A death that was tragic, ironic and preventable. So sad.
Geminid
What Liz Cheney leaves out is that Republicans will have to go through several cycles of getting thrashed before the establishment Republicans can wrest the steering wheel back from the radicals. But I can see why she did not say this explicitly.
HinTN
@SiubhanDuinne: His writing was excellent!
SiubhanDuinne
@Miss Bianca:
For some now-obscure reason, I’ve never seen Seabiscuit, and didn’t know until I read the NYT* obituary that he had provided narration for the film.
*I won’t call it FTFNYT in this instance, because I think they have some of the best obit writers on the planet. I love reading them, whether I’ve heard of the obituee or not.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Trump would just pardon himself and invite his Supreme Court to confirm his ability to do that.
Wyatt Salamanca
@SiubhanDuinne:
I don’t recall the specific broadcast, but I saw an interview with McCullough in which he discussed the open letter he posted online warning of the dangers of electing Trump in 2016. He was a great writer and a terrific narrator of PBS programs.
waspuppet
I am fully confident they will not get this right. Before the Jan. 6 hearings began they were all “What’s the audience for this? What’s the point? What’s the new information?” It did not occur, and still has not occurred, to them that these hearings, more than anything, are FOR THEM. They are the ones who completely forgot that this attack happened, or at best filed it under “not as important as gas prices.”
Tom Q
@Frankensteinbeck: Totally agree. The DC pundit consensus is “a smoother, smarter Trump would be more dangerous”; I think it’s the opposite. Trump’s in-your-face awfulness is what gets rural hardly-ever-vote folk lining up on Election Day. They won’t have nearly the must-vote-for-him feeling about DeSantis or other Trump Mini-me’s.
Also, I think there’s general underestimation of how much Trump’s celebrity factor aided his candidacy. Republicans rail against show business, but have a decades-long history of going for celebrity candidates.
geg6
Completely OT, but I was today old when I found out that William F. Buckley was friends with a murderer. One of the podcasts I listen to in the morning while getting ready for work is Tenfold More Wicked and they had an interview with the author of a book about it. What an idiot.
If you’re interested:
https://newrepublic.com/article/165580/scoundrel-book-review-buckley-edgar-smith-conservative-murderer
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
I liked this snippet about him, from the NYT obit:
Ciotog
I have a connection to someone at the National Review, and apparently both the money boys and the evangelicals want de Santis to be the nominee in 2024. So that’s why NR is carrying his water.
Chris T.
Bosh! Totally peccable.
Geminid
@SiubhanDuinne: I read McCulloch’s most recent book, The Pioneers (2019). It tells the story of the settlement of the Northwest Territories and it’s pretty good.
Miss Bianca
@SiubhanDuinne: Seabiscuit is just an all-around awesome movie, imho. It’s got great actors, great action, great story. It works as a horse story and a sports story and a human interest story, too. Highly recommended.
This was a re-watch on DVD, I had seen it in the theater when it came out, and I adored Laura Hillebrand’s book that it was based on.
Betty Cracker
@CaseyL: That’s a good point, and it raises a question I’ve been pondering lately, which is if it’s possible for politicians to just stay within their voters’ media bubble all the time. Increasingly, DeSantis and other feral Republicans are only willing to appear on conservative media outlets like Fox so they won’t have to answer hard questions. If this trend continues, will the Sunday shows have to book Democrats out of sheer desperation?
MisterForkbeard
@lowtechcyclist: I can agree with all of this. Republicans ‘stole 2000’ legally, by kicking Democrats off the rolls, staging angry riots, working the media and getting their supreme court justices to stop the counting.
I don’t think any of that is actually deniable. They’ve been very open about it, and even the Supreme Court decision was blatantly terrible and the justices that voted for it said their work could never be used as precedent. That tells you how bad it was.
ETA: People can call this “stolen” or “cleverly evading the will of the people”. We can quibble. But it’s very VERY different from Trump trying to overturn an election in which he clearly lost (despite trying to rig it for his own benefit), and in which his own election officials and administration repeatedly told him he’d lost.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Miss Bianca: I’m currently reading Geraldine Brooks’s Horse. I’m really enjoying it. It cuts back and forth between the current day and the 1850’s as an art historian and a scientist who studies skeletons track down the origin of a painting of famous racehorse. The horse came from the south and an enslaved boy was its primary person.
artem1s
When Liz renounces what her father, Rove and W did suppressing votes, compromising SCOTUS, and instigating the Brooks Brothers Riots in FL in 2000 then I’ll give her credit. Until then, I’ll assume the GOP does not acknowledge there is no difference between what TFG tried to do on Jan 6 and what they have been actively and openly doing for the last 50 years. They were just better dressed and belonged to more reputable country clubs.
Gary K
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Mike E
@SiubhanDuinne: his 1776 was a fun read and made me want that year to have a 13th (14th, 15th) month so I could keep reading his account of it.
geg6
@Tom Q:
I sometimes wonder if the My Pillow Guy would get more votes from the Trumpentariat than DeathSantis. I kinda think so because he’s a superstar in their world.
different-church-lady
The amount of dis you packed into just five characters is mighty impressive.
Brachiator
These are very fair questions. A number of Trump election conspiracy nuts won their Republican primaries. We will see how things line up after the various November elections.
different-church-lady
@Chris T.: Repeccable, really.
Miss Bianca
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Ooh, that sounds intriguing. I just slapped that one onto my “ToBeRead” hold pile.
Betty Cracker
@Tom Q: Your point about the celebrity angle is a good one; I don’t think Trump would have been elected without it. That said, DeSantis has managed to build a cult of personality among the MAGA dopes in Florida that seems as strong if not stronger than Trump’s.
RaflW
The sort of ‘command economy’ DeSantis engages in (I command that Disney stop being Woke or I’ll unilaterally cancel a long-standing regional civic arrangement) should give big business pause.
Of course he’s not the only one. Abbott threatened to mess with American Air’s deals because they hard the affront to make pilots take a safe, effective and approved vaccine.
Nicole
@SiubhanDuinne: I loved that biography of Truman; I took it on a children’s theater tour of Charlotte’s Web I went on in my 20s. One of the other cast members took a photo of me, backstage, reading that book, dressed as a giant goose.
Geoduck
@Ciotog: What’s their reason for ditching the Shiatgibbon? Loser-stink?
Baud
@Ciotog:
@Geoduck:
IIRC, National Review only got on the Trump train after he won. I don’t think they ever liked him.
trollhattan
@geg6: I’m working “hypergraphic libertarians” into a conversation, hopefully soon.
Another Scott
Hey, BC.
There was some twitter noise a few days ago that Crist and Fried were going after DeSantis over the state property insurance system collapsing. Is there a hope that that will drive enough voters to “throw the bums out”?
Oh, https://www.floridadems.org seems to be broken – takes forever to load, is not responsive (Chrome on Winders). :-/ (Works fine on Brave on Android.) (sigh)
Cheers,
Scott.
artem1s
@MisterForkbeard:
Liz has no problem with TFG trying to overturn the election. She said as much during the hearings.
TFG’s offense was letting things get violent and turning a mob against his own VP and congresscritters like Liz. If J6 had gone as they planned that mob would have been curb stomping antifa and BLM protesters, not the DC police. I have a hard time believing Liz would give two shits if anyone had died that day if they stopped short of breaching the Capitol.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Will again recommend Obit., the very fine documentary about that department.
Suzanne
But this is really important. Trump’s aesthetics are really different from DeSantis, and that’s critical. Because, for the diehards who are really into Trump, what they love about him is that he represents their aesthetics/folkways. Trump is, like, super-trash, just with money. The whole line about “a poor man’s idea of what a rich man is like”. Also, Trump has the aesthetic of a family businessman. That used to be, and still is, a powerful aspiration for lots of people. DeSantis doesn’t bring any of that to the table.
DeSantis doesn’t scratch that same itch that Trump does.
Brachiator
@geg6:
I searched for info about Edgar Smith and ran across this NYT headline
It appears that Smith had a perverse ability to charm people…
Ugh.
Kent
This. I have a LOT of extended family who are basically white working class rural Trump voters. Somehow they latched onto Trump as representing them just like they did with George W Bush and all his fake rural ranching bullshit and poses. And of course Reagan started it all with his cowboy rancher nonsense.
I just don’t see DeSantis as having the same appeal. Maybe I’m wrong. But he is just a lot more smarmy. Of course I never would have thought that a NYC real estate fraudster would have so much rural appeal either. I think the key with Trump is that he spent 20 years building his “brand” before even running for office. DeSantis hasn’t done that.
James E Powell
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Christie yelled at a teacher. The press & the voters loved him for it. A lot of voters are assholes who are excited to vote for their own kind.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Amen.
Cameron
@Wyatt Salamanca: Isn’t that where all his policies wound up anyway?
H.E.Wolf
@Nicole: ”@SiubhanDuinne: I loved that biography of Truman; I took it on a children’s theater tour of Charlotte’s Web I went on in my 20s. One of the other cast members took a photo of me, backstage, reading that book, dressed as a giant goose.”
I hope you got to cheer! :-) (Hat tip to one of my favorite scenes in the book Charlotte’s Web.)
Chalk me up as another fan of McCullough’s biography of Harry Truman. I’m also fond of Plain Speaking, by Merle Miller: a series of interviews with Truman, almost 20 years post-Presidency.
MisterForkbeard
@Betty Cracker: Nah, they’ll just book Republicans who are there to yell at the ‘liberal media’. It’ll still be just as bad.
But even NPR (NPR of all ‘both sides’ media groups) is saying that Republicans just aren’t talking to media outside the conservative bubble anymore. Republicans talk to fawning ‘reporters’ that praise them for attacking Democrats, and that’s all they’ll do.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Betty Cracker:
It’s a bit more than that, Trump wasn’t just a celebrity for 40 years or so, he was a businessman and not a politician.
trollhattan
Oh please oh please, let it be a voiceover while running video of the Miami Beach condo collapse.
JoyceH
@Betty Cracker:
I think it goes beyond Florida, actually. In those polls about who would you support, about fifty percent of Republicans say Trump, but something like 25% of them say DeSantis. Everybody else is in single digits. He’s doing all those feats of performative jackassery for a national audience. The fallout might impact his actual constituents, but he’s going for a wider role.
Mart
@RaflW: Abbott set up a useless border double check as who can trust the feds? It lasted a couple weeks, found nothing, and cost business billions in lost goods. Freedom!
Kent
Here is the thing though with respect to DeSantis.
The only thing that really matters is getting through the primary. Does he have what it takes to run the field in the 2024 GOP primary? I don’t know. Maybe he does. The GOP will rally around whoever is their candidate in 2024. They always do. And then it will mostly be a question of how the more disengaged “moderate” swing voters come down, not what the base thinks.
James E Powell
@waspuppet:
They didn’t forget it. Their Republican sources told them to disparage & distract, so that’s what they did.
JoyceH
@Mart:
I can’t believe nobody did a little research and got some pictures of wherever they discarded the rotting produce. A decaying mountain would make a lovely metaphor for the Abbot administration.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@West of the Rockies: Hawley demonstrated he is a Congressional track star! He can run faster than almost any Senator.
Doc Sardonic
The property insurance bomb is about to explode. If your house has a roof 15 years +1day old you are going to be cancelled and unless you replace said roof your only refuge will be the catastrophic market. That said, even if everything is fine with your roof etc, with small insurers dropping like flies the big players are putting in the neighborhood of 100% increases in premiums. All this under the watch of our less than useless Insurance Commissioner and Dictator wannabe. At least when the big players tried this under Rick Scott(spit) he at least had the balls to put a boot in their ass and tell them to either drop the premiums or get out and sell none of your products.
FelonyGovt
@Tom Q: Following up on your point, I also think that Trump voters who are turned off by Trump at this point are as likely to go back to not voting at all, rather than vote for a weak imitation.
James E Powell
@Doc Sardonic:
Is that just a Florida thing? Or is there something going on with property insurance everywhere?
raven
@Doc Sardonic: Our friends in Seagrove just had to put a new on their house.
Jackie
Biden’s White House is embracing Dark Brandon:
”The “Dark Brandon” meme has been embraced by White House officials and at least one sitting Democratic member of Congress, possibly bringing about the end of the meme’s life cycle.
“Dark Brandon is crushing it,” wrote White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates on Twitter on Sunday night, referring to President Joe Biden.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-white-house-dark-brandon-meme-far-right-dark-maga-2022-8?op=1&scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
jonas
@trollhattan: Story in the LA Times the other day (can’t find the link at the moment) interviewed locals who blamed the fires on, you guessed it, the big, bad government and those DFH environmentalists who had evilly prevented logging companies from logging those forests like they used to. No trees, no fire, amirite?
MattF
Twitter sez the contents of Alex Jones’ phone has been given to the J6 committee. Since Jones’ presence at the head of the mob was at the behest of the White House…
Doc Sardonic
@James E Powell: As far as I am aware this is just Florida, as I am currently auditioning roofing contractors, but I was just having a conversation over the weekend with a friend who just got their renewal notice on their insurance and it went up 92%.
FelonyGovt
@Suzanne: You’re absolutely right, but the idea of “Trump” and “aesthetic” in the same sentence is a bit jarring!
Baud
@Jackie:
Maybe. It’s the old people who turned kids off of Facebook.
I’m a little surprised the media hasn’t asked Biden about it yet.
Betty Cracker
@Doc Sardonic: Yep. Maybe a “where are all the teachers?” bomb will go off too since there’s such a huge shortage DeSantis is now letting veterans and spouses with only enough college credits for an associate degree teach in public schools. How sweet would it be if DeSantis gets blown up in Florida this fall? That creep Rufo would go into mourning.
Betty Cracker
@Doc Sardonic: I’ve mentioned before our homeowner’s insurance went up 300% in three years, and we’ve never filed a claim.
cmorenc
@lowtechcyclist:
True, the GOP did everything to prevent a fair vote count from happening in 2000, as well as voter roll disqualification / suppression and blatantly partisan meddling by SCOTUS on a 5-4 vote. However, the Democrats and Gore gave an unwitting assist that made the Fla. result close enough (<1000 votes) to make it possible for the GOP to manipulate the outcome.
First, what in the Hell was the democratically controlled Palm Beach County Board of elections thinking with using the idiotic “butterfly ballot” that obviously fooled a substantial number of elderly voters in Palm Beach County to vote for the antisemitic Pat Buchanan instead of Gore? Or such an obviously error-prone balloting mechanism (“hanging chads”)?
Second, Gore refused to allow Bill Clinton to campaign for him in Florida – Clinton aka (America’s first black president”_was uniquely capable of enticing at least another 5-10k of black voters to turn out for Gore.
Third, well the sheer arrogance of many still-unrepentant Nader voters in Florida (to say nothing of Nader’s preening savior narcissism)..
bbleh
@CaseyL: @BruceFromOhio: @Betty Cracker: @MisterForkbeard: … every single one of his would-be successors, including DeSantis, should be asked, explicitly and repeatedly …
Yes they certainly should, and ultimately that will require the media to do it, but Democratic politicians cannot depend on the media to do their work for them. It’s not enough to say that “the media should” make X or Y an issue; Democratic politicians should make it an issue. If they want the voters to consider an issue, if they want the media to ask about an issue, if they want their Republican opponents to be confronted with an issue, then they need to talk about it, repeatedly, at every encounter, in every speech, and with every journalist. They need to raise it in their ads and press releases, and via their surrogates. They need to call voters’ attention to it. And if they do that loud enough and long enough, then the media (other than Faux, of course) will pick it up.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t nag the media. But there seems to be a belief that Trumpism is prevalent among Republicans in significant part because the media aren’t doing their jobs, and I think if that’s the case, then it’s reasonable to ask whether Dem politicians are doing theirs.
Ramalama
@James E Powell:
Yeah but he didn’t make the cut as GOP nominee for president.
I recall everyone talking about their gut feelings for George W. as he ran for pres.
Wonder if people who voted for Trump referred to their gut feeling?
Seems as if DeSantis needs to have more likability since he doesn’t have Trump’s record of being a publicly edited ass-wholia. DeSantis is lacking in the liking department.
Suzanne
@FelonyGovt: I’m using “aesthetic” more in the visual culture sense of the word, as in “what it looks like relates to what it means”.
I hear people use the term “aesthetic” to mean “looks nice” or “looks expensive” or even “has a strong visual style”…. and I feel like we lost the plot a bit.
If Trump has anything, it’s an aesthetic. I feel like examining it is a lot more insightful than looking at him from the typical approaches of political analysis. Most of our pundits don’t know anything about this and that’s why they don’t fucking get it.
lowtechcyclist
@Chris T.:
I’d love to see that demonstrated – perhaps in the manner of Hitchcock’s The Birds.
Ramalama
P.S. I just came to the comments to give a Huzzah to Betty for her writing. So good! But then I got sucked into what youse all were saying and forgot. Like, have I done ANY WORK today?
Dorothy A. Winsor
I think the property insurance market in Florida has been difficult for a while now, mostly related to weather and flooding issues stemming from worsening climate change. As I recall, a friend had to get her insurance from some sort of federal program? I can’t remember. As I say, it’s been a while.
Josie
@artem1s:
I don’t remember hearing her justify any of Trump’s actions, and I faithfully watched all the hearings. I did hear her speak to the importance of following the constitution and the lawful transfer of power. She also spoke about the necessity of settling election disputes in a court of law and upholding the court decisions.
I’m no great fan of Liz Cheney, but it’s wrong to put words in her mouth that she did not speak.
lowtechcyclist
@MisterForkbeard:
Can’t argue with that. But it did lay a certain amount of groundwork, including the Florida legislature seriously considering making the decision themselves on how Florida’s electoral votes should be assigned. I expect they’d have gone through with it, too, if the Supreme Court hadn’t saved them the trouble.
ETtheLibrarian
DeSantis doesn’t want to break from the tRump brand. He wants/needs and really sort of likes, the yokels that trail after TFG like lemmings.
Kent
The latest research suggests that logging actually increases fire danger because of all the fuel in the form of brush and scrub trees that grows up in the wake of logging. But then facts and science were never a strong point with these folks.
Mart
@West of the Rockies: “should be asked, explicitly and repeatedly, if they believe Trump lost the 2020 election” Hauling ass Hawley always responds with weasel words like – many of my constituents are concerned about the outcome of the election and we need to get to the bottom of it for them…
trollhattan
@FelonyGovt: Before Reagan brought them onboard the religious fundys tended to stay on the sidelines, not voting. Would love to reestablish that habit.
kindness
Even if DeSantis said that Trump lost the 2020 election (he wouldn’t ever say that) and even if DeSantis said he would abide by the 2024 results if he lost, I would never believe him. DeSantis has already promised us he’s an authoritarian (fascist really) who believe’s it’s his God given right to run roughshod over what ever group he is beating up on at the moment.
trollhattan
@jonas: @Kent:
They’re forever pissed they weren’t allowed to mow down the last dozens of acres of old growth, which were in their sights during the James Watt era. That would have totally saved all those lumber mills.
Having seen so many fire footprints overlaying obvious clearcuts I don’t understand how anybody can argue that no trees=no fires, but there ya go.
Choked second-growth w/o thinning and/or controlled burning of undergrowth, that’s worth correcting but there’s no way to make money doing that hippie stuff.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: Oddly enough, I see online style mavens promoting an Old Money aesthetic lately. That’s about as far from Trump’s aesthetic as one can get. Also, quite far from Kim, Kortney, etc., bling as can be.
Another Scott
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I would expect fundamentals to make property insurance in Florida difficult (especially with warming temperatures and sea-level rise). What gets me is that “fraud” is explicitly talked about as a big problem. It must be huge (or they want people to think it is huge) to get explicit mention.
(repost) – Here’s the RollCall story about it that I posted on August 4:
I think that many/most marginally attached voters will let the monsters play politics and do evil things as long as those voters think that the state government is actually running Ok. Start costing people real money, or be unable to clear the streets of snow, or …, and “throw the bums out” can gain the upper hand quickly.
We’ll see!
Cheers,
Scott.
J R in WV
@SiubhanDuinne:
After Sept 11 and the fall of the towers, the NYT undertook to write a real obit for everyone identified as having fallen with the towers. It was a double-truck of individual obits, or more, every day for a long ass time.
Even the janitors and bus staff in the restaurants got their death memorialized by The Times.
I thought it was a monumental effort and admired the paper for undertaking such a difficult assignment. Finding people who could tell you about each and every person known to be lost in that catastrophe. Amazing job.
Geminid
@cmorenc: And fourth, Gore picked that stiff Joe Lieberman for VP instead of Florida Senator Bob Graham!
different-church-lady
@Betty Cracker:
They will if Democrats become the most entertaining option remaining. And only grugingly at that point, because they’d rather have the circus stay in town forever.
Captain C
@Tom Q:
Agreed. By 2015, most people knew Trump from The Apprentice, the tabloids, and/or professional wrestling, and his bankruptcies and many business failures (including running an entire football league into the ground) were mostly memory-holed.
Chris T.
@cmorenc:
The “butterfly” thing was an unforced error, just poor design.
The card system is (was, I hope) because people are cheap: skinflints, misers, tightwads. Punched cards are an old, old (1970s) system, with tabulators being cheap and fast (well, they were for a long while, now they’re museum pieces, expensive to maintain I imagine). Insert card into punch thingy, press with tool, et voila you have cards ready to run through the tabulator machines. But you have to press hard enough to punch through the card: not really a problem for the able bodied, but a lot of seniors didn’t “get it”.
The old scantron systems are from about a decade later, and are a lot better since it’s just marks on paper, so you can see it. But you need good eyesight, which again, well, us Olds are losing our eyesight…
Amir Khalid
@ETtheLibrarian:
Then I’m not sure I see how he solves his problem of being the Pepsi of Trumpism.
different-church-lady
@JoyceH:
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
Thanks for the reminder — I’ve been meaning for a few years now to watch it. I’ll see if it’s streaming on one of the platforms I have, and if not, will track down a DVD.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Another Scott: So maybe it’s sort of the Florida equivalent of the Texas power grid. When it fails, you notice
ETA: IOW, it’s reality slapping you in the face rather than something bogus like caravans.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus:
Absolutely. And it’s no accident. “Aspiration” means that not everybody gets to be cool. That applies to the Trumpy.
Kent
Trump was also probably the most relentless self-promoter in American history. Whereas those reporters and writers who questioned his business empire were usually the ones who were memory holed.
Kent
I guarantee you that the old money blue blood Ralph Lauren look never had any following in Trump-land that is for sure.
Trump knew what he was doing with the red baseball caps.
Cameron
@different-church-lady: I don’t know if they’d be able to book John Fetterman every week.
geg6
@Suzanne:
I totally agree with this.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Are the Republicans on the Sunday shows really “entertaining”? I honestly can’t remember the last time I watched one of those shows.
Betty Cracker
@kindness: It’s still vitally important that Republican candidates answer those questions, even though we know they wouldn’t reply in good faith. Something like a third of the electorate believes Trump’s lie about the stolen election. Anyone who aspires to a position of power should be part of the pushback on that bullshit. Also, if you’ve said on camera that you’ll abide by election results, respect court decisions on election outcomes and believe that citizens rather than state legislators should elect presidents, it makes it harder to pull what Trump tried to do in 2020.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’ve never paid that much attention to their clothes, but I’d be surprised if JarVanka don’t work very hard to cultivate that look, her especially.
geg6
@Cameron:
Bwahahahahahahaha! It sure would be entertaining though. Maybe they could have Giselle and Levi, too. They are both social media stars, too.
Ken
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Speaking of the Texas power grid, I don’t think this is what either the Texas government or its citizens had in mind when they invited the crypto miners to move there.
Kent
Especially when they can still get the real thing.
Jeffro
@Suzanne: I thought trump’s ‘aesthetic’ was ‘loud, unapologetic asshole’, and DeSantis more than qualifies. But I get what you’re saying about him being trash, too.
“loud, unapologetic asshole trash”?
zhena gogolia
@Suzanne: I agree.
Kent
But Javanka isn’t trying to gain an invitation to a coffee Klatch at a diner in Ohio, or a pancake breakfast in a VFW hall in Kansas. She is trying to get invitations to charity galas at the Met.
Suzanne
@Kent: Trump lives in the world of marketing. And he has spent much of his career catering to the consumer tastes/aesthetics of what pundits call “the white working class”. That term sucks, though, because it doesn’t really get to who we’re talking about and it’s too….sociological.
Think of the team “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”. That term is great because it absolutely captured a type that we all knew but didn’t really name. It’s hard to do this in the political arena because obviously lots of people who aren’t the Trumpy type voted for him, and plenty of people who are actually white and “working class” aka “blue-collar” and didn’t go to college did not vote for him. But the deeply MAGA are a type (broadly speaking, don’t @ me because you know of an exception to this generalization), they have a common aesthetic. I mean, Junior staged his engagement outside a mall jewelry store, they have an aesthetic.
Where the Ralph Lauren set went wrong was thinking that the Coors cohort was controllable, content to be the second banana in the coalition.
trollhattan
@Kent: I’ve tried convincing myself that Trump’s seeming lurve of French whorehouse decor and trappings was performance art aimed at his marks, but it’s not as though he has secret mid-century modern or Greene and Greene getaways.
zhena gogolia
@trollhattan: He’s from Queens. Nuff said.
Suzanne
@Jeffro:
It’s a specific flavor of loud, unapologetic asshole. It is the loud, unapologetic asshole of someone who came into money but has shitty taste and no manners. This is a dude who eats good steaks with ketchup and who doesn’t watch his weight and literally took a picture of himself eating fast food, who married women who look like cheap strippers and cheated on them with porn stars. All of this is aspirational behavior for a certain type of man. DeSantis doesn’t look like that. He’s trying to attract those people, but he doesn’t have a lifetime of trashiness.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
my recollection is one of the sources of trump’s resentment is the charity-galas-at-the-Met crowd never sent him invitations, or at least stopped when he didn’t get the part about making big donations. His old man told him to not even try with those Manhattan people. IIRC the old money in Palm Beach never gave Mar A Lago a second sniff until there was lobbying to be done, then at least some of them came around
Baud
@Suzanne:
I’m trying to envision what DeSantis would run on. As you note, Trump ran on his celebrity and aesthetic. Not really policy. The GOP didn’t even have a platform in 2020.
And I don’t think hating woke liberals is enough for anyone but Trump in the general election.
Suzanne
@trollhattan: No, Trump really is that fucking gross.
He gets those expensive Italian suits that look like pajamas and then uses Scotch tape on his ties. The man is absolutely a case study in what happens when you have money and absolutely terrible taste.
Ken
“UNTHINKING OBEDIENCE TO OUR ORANGE GOD-KING” is a kind of platform.
jonas
BC can chime in on this if she wants, but my understanding is that the big crisis with property insurance in FL is not just that a lot of major companies won’t underwrite the state anymore, or will only do so for exorbitant premiums, it’s that even as more and more people are forced into the state’s catastrophic insurance fund, it’s nowhere close to being funded well enough to cover the losses if the state took another Andrew-style hit from a hurricane, which it eventually will. It would pay pennies on the dollar, at the most. Why so many Floridians, including DeSantis, continue to be so sanguine about this, I don’t know.
Relatedly, in other “I moved to a red state and now my life sucks” news, there was a listener who emailed or left a voice mail on the NPR program 1A this morning who had moved from NYC to Texas recently and was horrified at 1. the shitty tap water and 2. how much it costs. Probably has fracking chemicals in it, too.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
GOOD:
Third guy has his hearing this afternoon and I am assuming and hoping he gets the same.
john b
Oooh, ooh, that was me in 2000! Hours-long lines at NC State University because of all the student registrations that had been “lost”. And we didn’t find out about this until election day (a school day toward the end of a semester, when I had at least one exam). I didn’t vote. It was my first election and what got me politically engaged for life (that and the FL recount stuff of course). The assumption around Raleigh was that it was more about the local politicians not wanting the students to have a voice in local issues, but it could have been a synergy between local and national forces looking to shut up the youths.
SiubhanDuinne
@Suzanne:
For real?
Jeebus, if so.
Suzanne
@Baud:
Eh. Instead of thinking about it like a politician, who is supposed to do stuff in the public interest…. think about it like a marketer. Is there a cohort of likely voters who feel un-served, unheard, unrepresented by the current candidate offerings? How can I be positioned to appeal to them? I mean, yes, DeSantis could certainly try to target the same cohort that Trump did, but he doesn’t authentically represent them. Trump understood that his diehards wanted nothing else more than they wanted to humiliate the people they hate (us). And Trump’s people are bound up in a personality cult and aren’t reliable voters anyway. So, if I were DeSantis, I’d target a more reliable cohort, probably the social conservatives. (Who are no less mean than the Trumpy MAGA crew, but they have different aesthetics.) The Socons would love to find someone who acted like Trump but dressed like a man with three sister wives.
Ken
Fixing it requires (1) admitting there’s a problem, (2) acknowledging that government has a role in fixing the problem, and (3) raising taxes and/or premiums to pay for the fix. All three of these are anathema to the GQP.
Kent
What they actually did was just roll over the old one from 2016. Complete with all the language lambasting the “current Administration” for all kinds of ills.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Suzanne:
Exactly. When I look at DeSantis, he looks like a prosperity gospel preacher. He pushes their issues, too. If he had that vocal cadence, they would find him irresistible.
Ruckus
@Frankensteinbeck:
I think that SFB’s stick is that he’s a billionaire and has been “president.” Except of course he seems to be anything but a billionaire and his idea of being president is being the worst kindergarten student president possible.
So of course he did the shittiest possible job in his 4 decades in office, because he’s a failure and a total shithead. (I know it was 4 yrs, it just seems/feels like it was 4 decades…)
I wonder how people who fly in jet airplanes and have computerized vocal/visual communications devices in their pockets can square their policy ideals that are from the worst of the 12th century conservative concepts and where we are now – the 21st century?
Baud
@Suzanne:
I’m not sure if that’ll be enough for him in the general. Also, I’d imagine Ted Cruz will be targeting the same cohort in the primary.
Mallard Filmore
@Ken:
Some TV shows would call that a “murder board”.
Kent
@Ken: Also they are just rolling the dice. The chance of a catastrophic Katrina type hurricane wiping out the state during any one administration is fairly low.
Baud
@Kent: They didn’t lie for once.
Suzanne
@SiubhanDuinne: Yes, he proposed to Vanessa in a mall in New Jersey. For a free ring.
SiubhanDuinne
@Suzanne:
I was thinking the same thing about Alex Jones last week. Saw a lot of him from behind. The guy has an income in the millions, but the (loud, ugly) stripe patterns in his suits don’t quite align, the jackets are cut slightly small (or he’s gotten too fat for them) so they strain across his back, and he has an overall unkempt and unclean appearance, not unlike Bannon.
Kelly
Mainly this. After living inside the boundaries of the 2020 Beachie Fire I’m convinced forest management has little effect on fire behavior in the rainy Douglas fir and hemlock forests of western Oregon. Well watered grass and brush grows too fast to control. Commercial timber plantations and wilderness old growth burned at similar rates. Very random, maybe 20% burned hard, 40% burned light, 40% barely touched. Probably driven by the wind at the moment the flames arrived. Clear cuts under about 10 years old seemed to light off very reliably so there’s an exception. I’ve seen burns on the dryer east side pine forests that were moderated by brush reduction. Nature Conservancy’s Sycan Marsh reserve is a good example as are the forests near Sisters, OR.
Frankensteinbeck
@Suzanne:
And he will, but not in the numbers and with the zeal Trump did. And that makes a difference in how many votes he gets, which is all-important. A couple of percentage points shaved off around the edge make all the difference.
The Lodger
@Suzanne: Yeesh. Was the jewelry store named after his brother-in-law, by chance?
Suzanne
@Baud:
Yeah, that’s the problem. Trump found a cohort that no one else was serving well, so he had that lane all to himself. I don’t think any of the others will be that lucky.
I don’t get the impression that the Socons love them some Ted Cruz, though. Ted Cruz with the trips to Cancun and the investment banker wife and who chose Carly Fiorina as his “VP”. Ted Cruz is damaged goods, I think. He might have had a durable cohort if he hadn’t slobbered on Trump’s knob, but now he looks WEAK!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Speaking of FL: I’m seeing a lot of tweets and gotten a couple of fund-raising emails saying that Val Demmings is pulling closer to Rubio. I clicked on one of the tweets and it was some “Florida Politics dot Com” thing– basically, some blog (pffft). Anyone know if it’s real?
Tom Q.
@zhena gogolia: Hey, there are some very nice people from Queens. (Disclaimer: we moved from there when I was in 8th grade, 1965. But, still.)
Suzanne
@The Lodger: It was a Bailey, Banks, and Biddle.
Which sounds deeply made up. Like, straight out of Mary Poppins.
Cameron
@Baud: I disagree. DeSantis does a hell of a job here in Florida of being a strong man who kicks and humiliates the weak. Red meat (well, OK, maybe a Big Mac) for Trumpazoids.
Doc Sardonic
@jonas: It’s not that they won’t underwrite, it’s the necessity of the property owner meeting their conditions. I will use me as an example. My current insurer is one of the top tier companies nationwide, when my policy expires in February 2023, they will not renew me until/unless I replace my roof. Now, I have a couple of options, I can go to one of 2 or 3 small players that are writing for roofs 15years+1day to 20 years old or Citizens which is the state run insurer of last resort. Citizens has neither the funding or the budget to be able to pay claims if we get another Andrew or a 3-peat like 2005. Ditto with the smaller players, you file a claim you may or may not get full reimbursement(the lawyers are gonna make bank).
Then we get to insurance fraud, which there is a lot of, that is emphasizing roofs for the big players. The fraud goes like this, you get hurricane damage, you get a contractor to come out, put a blue tarp special on your roof and give you a quote. File your claim for the damage and get paid. After these events occur the homeowner pockets the cash, and continues to refresh the Harbor Freight roof(blue tarp special). Next storm comes through more damage lather, rinse, repeat the process.
zhena gogolia
@Tom Q.: I knew this was dangerous! But don’t you think there’s something ineffably Queens about TFG?
James E Powell
@cmorenc:
You’re letting unrepentant Nader voters in New Hampshire off the hook.
The Lodger
@Suzanne: Sounds very Old Money Philly to me. (The store name, not Junior.)
Tom Q.
@Frankensteinbeck: It was only the fact that Trump got that extra bump that made him (barely) president in 2016. The polls weren’t “wrong” — they were simply based on turnout models for WI, MI and PA that matched all recent historical evidence. Trump simply blasted through those models; I question if anyone else can, if they don’t go The Full Asshole. And The Full Asshole, as we’ve seen, also spikes opposition voting (and might have in 2016, if everyone had realized Trump winning was an actually possibility).
Jackie
Betty Cracker may get hope from this: Progressive group polling suggests Ron DeSantis may be in a closer race than expected.
https://floridapolitics.com/archives/544778-progressive-group-polling-finds-ron-desantis-may-be-in-a-closer-race-than-expected/
Peale
Olivia Newton John has died apparently. I think Grease in my wee lad hood was the first musical where I knew all the words to all the songs.
Baud
@Suzanne: Yeah, I don’t know what Cruz’s standing is with them anymore. But he did come in second in 2016 based on their support.
@Cameron: You disagree with what? That hating libs will be enough for DeSantis in the general election.
Gravenstone
Let’s be real about that constipated smirk that passes for a smile on his ugly puss.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@James E Powell:
Is there another type?
raven
@Peale: Oblivious Neutron Bomb and John Revolting. . .
Matt McIrvin
@cmorenc:
A lot of that was, I think, pure “this is how we’ve always done it”.
I remember voting with those Votamatic punch-card devices in a local election in Cambridge, Massachusetts back in the 90s. In the early post-Election Day discourse in 2000 there were a lot of jokes cracked about how stupid the Palm Beach County voters must have been. I was skeptical because I remembered how hard it was to figure out how the candidates lined up with the punch holes on that thing. It really was a terrible system. But it was widely used at the time, not just in Florida.
Tom Q.
@zhena gogolia: It was no accident Archie Bunker was a denizen of Queens.
I’m actually kind of grateful we moved away before my psyche got political. I don’t have to know how many of my grade school friends turned out Republican.
Baud
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛:
Betty Cracker is a repentant Nader voter.
Ken
@Kent: An option useful only for any politician whose goal is to not be in Florida in two years.
dmsilev
@Suzanne:
He went to Jared?
zhena gogolia
@Ken: I love this, because I can’t keep Kent and Ken straight. Here you are talking to each other. I still can’t keep you straight.
JML
I’m bummed about McCullough, whose work I really enjoyed. He had a style that made reading those big tomes surprisingly easy, and I walked away feeling like I actually had a sense of the person he was writing about, not just what they did or their place in history (while getting plenty of that too).
The Truman book is wonderful, although I did feel like it would have been interesting to spend a little more time with Senator Truman before he became VP & President Truman. I also thought his post-presidency chapters did a rather good job of summed up a vigorous person whose political relevancy had passed and couldn’t quite figure out what to do with himself. (Back then presidents were supposed to ease into the background as elder statesmen, assuming they lived for more than a handful of years)
The Adams book was also terrific, and reading it back to back with Chernow’s Hamilton bio was fascinating, because they overlapped in so many ways, but while Adams is an obstacle and opponent of some note in the Hamilton book, in the Adams book Hamilton is much more of a fringe character. We’re lucky to have had McCullough and Chernow writing about the Founding in close proximity to each other and from differing perspectives.
RIP, David McCullough.
SiubhanDuinne
@Tom Q.:
All of them, Katie.
#lowhangingfruit
Ladyraxterinok
@lowtechcyclist:
If I recall correctly, Florida ballots will preserved and a consortium of 8 (?) Newspapers went through all of them and were to give their results September the 12th 2001.
After 9/11 no one was interested.
I believe all but one concluded that Gore won the ballots in Florida.
In the 5-4 SCOTUS decision Justice’s wrote that the result in no way set a precedent.
Some noted national judges said that this was not the way Supreme Court decisions were treated
Bill Arnold
@Ciotog:
Is de Santis a Christian Supremacist?
Serious question.
And I’ve stopped using “Christian Nationalist”, in part because Christian Supremacists have started proudly calling themselves Christian Nationalists.
(Operatives might want to try mainstreaming “Christian in Name Only”, CINO, also “Patriot in Name Only”, PINO)
Ladyraxterinok
@lowtechcyclist:
If I recall correctly, Florida ballots were preserved and a consortium of 8 (?) Newspapers went through all of them and were to give their results September the 12th 2001.
After 9/11 no one was interested.
I believe all but one concluded that Gore won the ballots in Florida.
In the 5-4 SCOTUS decision Justice’s wrote that the result in no way set a precedent.
Some noted national judges said that this was not the way Supreme Court decisions were treated
Cameron
@Baud: I disagree with the idea that only Trump can run on mindless hate and resentment – DeSantis is actually more effective at this than Trump, because he understands (a bit, anyway) how governments work. His people love the fact that he throws out government attorneys and public health officials just for disagreeing with him, but he usually finds some bogus excuse instead of coming right out and saying he’s canning them just because he can.
J R in WV
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Just go to ActBlue.com and search for Val Demings, you can contribute to her campaign there and know that nothing goes anywhere but to her campaign, unless you agree to “tip” ActBlue for their service in providing a fund raising tool for liberals and progressive candidates.
You can make it a monthly donation also too. And manage the donation there until you want to stop. We’ve used ActBlue for years now, it’s great for Dem campaigning.
SiubhanDuinne
@Bill Arnold:
But never, oh never, PINO Noir.
:-)
Ladyraxterinok
@Old Man Shadow:
Very true!!
Bill Arnold
@Chris T.:
Bosh! Totally peccable.
Oooh. Learned a word today.
peccable: liable or prone to sin : susceptible to temptation
Denali
@Zhena Gogolia,
Consider yourself lucky, I can’t keep Kent and Ken and Kay straight. And then there is Tony Jay and Jay. At least you have a nom de plume distinctive.
Baud
@Cameron:
I agree that DeSantis would be a more effective hater than Trump in office. I don’t think that it would work for him as well in winning the election. I think he needs to offer something more. We’ll see if he gets the nod.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@J R in WV: I’ve had a monthly donation set up for the Demmings campaign for a while now, but I’ve seen a lot of pessimism about it in the last couple of months. I was hoping there were signs of a turn-around post-Dobbs, etc
Redshift
@Baud:
What else are any Republicans running on these days? Stoking white grievance and hating liberals seems to be all they have.
Betty Cracker
@Ladyraxterinok: That matches my recollection. I believe they concluded if SCOTUS had allowed the county recounts Gore requested, Bush would have prevailed. But a statewide recount would have shifted it to Gore by a few hundred votes.
zhena gogolia
@Denali: Oh, I have no trouble with Kay or Jay or Tony Jay!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Denali: and there’s a Tony G, and a Jay C who I think posts less frequently now
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛:
[Embarrassed raised hand]
SiubhanDuinne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
God knows why, but I seem to have landed on one of Steve Schmidt’s emailing lists and haven’t yet been sufficiently arsed to unsubscribe. So, according to Steve, Lil Marco is pretty blatantly using “Soros” as a stand-in for “Jewish” as a pejorative.
EarthWindFire
@jonas: Because there are no dangerous grass fires (Boulder says hi) 🤦♀️
Cameron
@Baud: I hope (although I don’t think it’s likely) that whoever wins the Dem primary here can take him down.
Dan B
@Chris T.: I find Death Santa to be as impeccable as the bully who beat me up in Sunday School, git a thirteen year old pregnant, and burned down several houses. I was first but likely after torturing animals. The town did nothing to stop him, perhaps because he went to church.
Impeccable character Death Santa seems like someone who would only have sex because it was expected that he father children. He seems to have less joy than DeJoy or Ted Cruz.
As a gay guy I don’t feel revolted by him as much as I feel afraid for my community and other vulnerable minorities. The sadism and lack of empathy is all too familiar. Who wants to live through Junior High again, and worse, much much worse.
SiubhanDuinne
@West of the Rockies:
No.
He grimaces.
He makes a rictus.
I’m not sure he’s ever genuinely smiled in his misbegotten life.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@SiubhanDuinne: I caught that over the weekend. I’m a lefty political junkie and I only know who George Soros is cause the whack jobs are so oddly obsessed with him. {{{{{oddly}}}}}
Good for Schmidt for calling him out on it
Kent
But it works. If we have a massive hurricane this fall and a disastrous response, no one will blame prior governor’s Rick Scott or Charlie Crist. They will blame DeSantis.
SiubhanDuinne
@Dan B:
Father Who?
Omnes Omnibus
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛: There are some people who post on this blog who supported Nader in 2000 and learned from it.*
*I have never been a supporter of Nader, Bernie, Stein, or any of their ilk.
Baud
@Redshift: I don’t know what they will try to run on, but I don’t think that is enough to win nationally.
geg6
@SiubhanDuinne:
And that’s exactly what that cohort sees as aspirational. I know only because I am surrounded by a lot of them and have been all my life.
trollhattan
@SiubhanDuinne:
Or Pinoe in noir?
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/07/rapinoe-1.jpg
Cameron
@SiubhanDuinne: I think he’s got gas pains.
Redshift
@Cameron: Supposedly a big part of Trump’s appeal was his reputation as a “billionaire/successful businessman” and his TV/movie persona. DeSantis is going hard on being an asshole and hurting the right people, but he’s still just a politician.
I hope that’s true, but I’m certainly not counting on it.
geg6
@Peale:
Sad. I believe she’s battled breast cancer for many years. Don’t know if that is the cause of death, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Ken
@SiubhanDuinne: In fairness, if a baby is brought up by people who never smile at it, it will not learn to make the expression. For the rest of the story, refer to any of Mary Trump’s books or interviews.
Kent
Ken is the smart one.
Kent is the good-looking one!
PST
@Peale: I was sorry to see the news about Olivia Newton John. I was surprised, although maybe I shouldn’t have been, by the level of snark in the brief FTFNYT story. I understand that actual obituaries may include critical assessments, especially of politicians, but this was just a few paragraphs on the untimely death of a well liked entertainer. The author seemed determined to make it clear that he regarded the decedent as a lightweight.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I still can’t quite believe Xanadu exists. Gene Kelley’s last movie (I think) was set in some kind of supernatural roller-disco (and how can I get any work done since I must now go IMDB to confirm these things? I must)
Elizabelle
Be forewarned that some of the Twitter dolts are discussing Olivia Newton-John’s death with the hashtag RIP QUEEN.
Ken
Who will blame Biden, though I don’t know if that deflection would work.
If it weren’t for the harm to the people of Florida, I would love to see DeSantis in the same dilemma as Chris Christie after Hurricane Sandy. Accept the federal aid and be hated by the base; or refuse it, and be hated by everyone else?
Another Scott
@Doc Sardonic:
Zooks.
Of course, with the seeming increasing frequency of hurricanes (e.g. the 2005 hurricane season), even if one only wanted a Blue Tarp Special for a few weeks, another storm might arrive before the roof could be properly repaired.
Another thing about state politicians waiting to fix the state insurance programs is that they probably figure if things get bad enough they can just scream to Uncle Sam for a bailout and everything will be fine. And they’d count on not having a federal manager step in and take over state control to run things for them – that only happens from the state level down to places like Flint, MI. Grr…
Thanks. Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Great double-bill with “Zardoz.”
Ken
@Another Scott: There’s an excellent XKCD for the 2005 hurricane season, almost all directly from NHC advisories.
trollhattan
@Ken: Checked, and the head of FEMA is Criswell, so no “Heckovajerb Brownie” is possible.
The Lodger
@zhena gogolia: “Oh, you can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay… but ya doesn’t has to call me Johnson.”
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: I can keep people straight if they use a whole fake name, even if several people use names that are similar or even a first name and initial. But sadly, people who use initials only are a faceless mass to me. Weird how the mind works.
Geminid
@Omnes Omnibus: Magdi Semrau was a Nader campaign volunteer while in high school (she was too young to vote). Semrau has since forthrightly admitted she was wrong, and cites Al Gore’s policies on combating climate change as just one of reasons she was.
CaseyL
@Betty Cracker: This thread may be semi-dead, but:I just found this quote and thought you’d be interested:
Ron Filipkowski
sdhays
@lowtechcyclist: I’d add that the Republicans on the Supreme Court stole the election as well. It was a partisan vote, but I simply don’t believe that if the foot was on the other foot that the non-Republican justices would have changed their votes. The Republicans on the Court made it partisan, and betrayed the country, by deciding that W was ahead and the counting needed to stop.
trollhattan
@CaseyL: He could have gone further and demanded they rehire “that nice McCain chick.”
Captain C
@zhena gogolia:
This, but more specifically one of those small, obnoxious parts of Queens that contains a surfeit of Yankee fans.
Dan B
@SiubhanDuinne: Not sure of your question. My mind was contemplating a Jebus version of Doctor Who.
AmI close?
Dan B
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Xanadu, the Empire Dances* Back!
*Prances?
Ruckus
@Kent:
SFB has all the class and style of – well nothing actually, he has no class or style whatsoever. That is likely a part of the draw for those that only really paid a smidgen if any attention at all. He often gets portrayed as a rather wealthy man about town. There was rarely any mention of his actual wealth nor the fact that he is a failure at every thing he’s ever tried. Forbes used to say he was worth around 12-14 billion but when actually called on it said he was worth maybe 3 1/2 billion. If you take out his real estate holdings, which he brought quite some time ago and quite a bit lower prices, he’s worth far less. I read somewhere that if he had just put the something like $400 million he stole from his siblings in a bank, he actually would be worth the money he’s said he was worth, which is the amount that Forbes published because that’s the amount he told them he was worth. He was small fry enough that they spent no time actually looking at his worth they just took his word for it. And we all know how much that’s worth.
He is a dumpster fire of a human being, nasty, far worse than useless, bad for the environment and bad for humanity,
Betty Cracker
@CaseyL: Not surprised Pushaw refused to go on The View, but I am intrigued that they invited her. She needs a lot more scrutiny than she currently receives, IMO, so that’s encouraging that she attracted The View’s notice.
There’s something extremely fish about Pushaw. I’ve seen profiles on her that attempt to dig into her background a little bit. She worked for some corrupt AF Eastern European characters, which is a giant red flag. But I have a feeling a truly enterprising reporter who made a project of it could find much more
ETA: I now realize I probably misread the tweet and that they invited DeSantis, not Pushaw, the press sec.
Wilson Heath
This really isn’t hard: Cheney is against the current GOP state of play because she wants to support permanent GOP advantage and not have to cede any of it.
Her party has gone 1 for the last 8 on the Presidential popular vote but has held the position after 3 of those elections. The senate and the congressional map give the GOP a natural advantage even before gerrymandering is taken into account, and her party often controls either or both houses with vastly fewer votes. Permanent home-field advantage, no matter how bad or unpopular your team is.
This is a constitutional order that you don’t fuck with if you aren’t sure you can win and sustain your win in perpetuity by going to Orban-ism or beyond. And you certainly don’t normalize the idea that the outcomes of the system are optional in the event that an actual popular majority doesn’t like your guy winning because of some bizarre twist in Hoyles’ rules.
The real question is why dem partisans don’t see a rigged game and flip the Monopoly board. As with many other things, I think the answer is that somebody has to be a mature adult if we’re to avoid a bloodbath and everything on fire. That also seemed to be an option in 1859.
Urban Suburbanite
@CaseyL: Pshaw is a liability all by herself. She was an unregistered foreign agent (funny how those keep popping up among the political parasite class) who was working with Georgian (the ex-SSR, not the state) Nazis, before she became the professional Twitter troll for that smug jagoff. She was also working really closely with that deranged realtor Chaya Raichik to help craft her employer’s attacks on gay and trans kids. She’s a weird, vindictive creature, and much like her boss, cannot function outside of a specific environment and fawning idiots.
I suspect they’re both fucked once they have to cross the Florida state line.
Boomzilla
“Life’s rich demand creates supply in the hand
Of the powers, the only vote that matters
Silence means security, silence means approval
Watching zenith on the TV, tiger run around the tree
Follow the leader, run and turn into butter” MS
Make sure to follow the Leader.
Boom
r€nato
*pfffft* They’ll get over it. They have plausible deniability. DeSantis has a modicum of self-control, and his name is not Trump. That’s all they will need to rationalize their decision to back DeSantis. After all, Trump gave the GOP tax cuts and three SCOTUS justices and an overturn of Roe v. Wade. DeSantis is Trump v2.0, if you’re a Republicunt you get all the good things you liked about Trump but without the losing and whining and endless embarrassing behavior that distracts from the cause and requires effort to defend.
I agree 100% but not just because it’s important that Trump’s election-denial must not be repeated; I want this to happen because anything that pits the Trump base against DeSantis would be fucking awesome for Biden’s electoral chances in the general.
Conversely, DeSantis running without significant opposition is not good for Team Blue. Your average disengaged, non-politics-wonk voter (meaning, nobody who is reading this comment right now) doesn’t give a fuck what he did in FL and never will. He will be a blank slate, he will be able to be whatever he wants a voter to believe. Biden has a track record to defend or have distorted by the other side.
There is still a tremendous force behind Trump; ju-jitsu that shit, make it work for you. DeSantis cannot piss off the Trump base. Every effort should be made to encourage a Trump candidacy and to pit the one against the other via their respective bases.
For those pissing their pants about a possible Trump 2024 return to the WH: grow up and stop being defeatist. He will spend many months into the future fighting to stay out of prison. His candidacy will siphon off significant funds, either into his pockets or pissed away on a poorly-run, losing cause. That’s money that would otherwise go to someone who doesn’t turn everything he touches into shit.
Trump also has the stench of losing all over him, despite his infantile refusal to accept his 2020 loss. None of this is a recipe for victory in a presidential campaign.