Jennifer Rubin nails it (gift link) in the second part of her piece on the Trump challengers:
[…] Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has abused immigrants, run roughshod over the First Amendment, regularly intervened in free markets for political reasons (e.g., bullying Disney for criticizing his policies), fanned white nationalism with his scaremongering about “critical race theory” and used the power of the state to persecute disfavored groups (e.g., LGBTQ students). It’s not even clear whether he rejects the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. (He has become adept at sidestepping questions.) In other words, DeSantis reflects many of authoritarian attributes the MAGA cult reveres; he’s just more disciplined than Trump.Meanwhile, too many in the D.C. media bubble have treated Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin as a departure from Trumpism or a return to “normal” GOP politics. Wrong! Youngkin in his campaign for governor embraced election “integrity” measures premised on the need to prevent nonexistent fraud. He has waged war on public schools and also pushed the “critical race theory” issue. He even campaigned with Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, arguably the worst of the election deniers this campaign cycle. And let’s not forget the appalling “joke” he made about the vicious attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which he later apologized for. Despite his slightly better manners, he, too, is a MAGA figurehead.
Some other 2024 contenders — such as Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.) — tried to implement Trump’s coup plot by pushing the “big lie” and objecting to electors with no basis. They also both voted to acquit Trump twice in his impeachment trials and smeared the Justice Department and FBI for conducting a search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club for highly classified documents. And Cruz, who acknowledged that the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection amounted to a “terrorist attack,” later groveled before Fox News’s Tucker Carlson to disassociate himself with his own remarks. It’s possible Hawley and Cruz are even worse than Trump, since they certainly should know better and understand the injurious impact of their lies.
The first part of her column is a heartfelt paean to conservativism that never was and never will be, but she definitely is not buying the DC bullshit that DeSantis is some kind of normal alternative to Trump. He’s just as bad or maybe worse.
Here’s a gift link to Josh Marshall and Kate Riga’s interview with Fetterman campaign manager Brendan McPhillips. If you have an hour to spend on it, this is some great insight into one of the best campaigns of this cycle.
Finally, I have a feeling that the right wing effort to shit on Gisele Fetterman will be successful in the way that the effort to shit on Pelosi, AOC and others has been successful: it may motivate a nutjob to attack her, but overall most sane people will see the misogny and hatred and be repulsed.
Within the Margin of Effort – 28 Pairs of Boots On the Ground in GA (We Have an Angel!)
SmallAxe
Ha! Rubin was literally predicting Trump wouldn’t announce a couple days ago on Twitter.
mrmoshpotato
I’d forgotten that DeathSkidmark tried to bully the House of Mouse.
Baud
From the link
Kind of weird to not mention the most obvious comparator when talking about the right’s obsession with the notion of a power-hungry wife behind an elected official: First Lady Hillary Clinton.
Princess
Have to admit, I laughed when I scrolled down and saw the “cropped” photo. If this I what is making the wingnuts crazy, they’re in for a long two years. It’s a perfectly nice off centre photo of both of them, and Gisele is the cool fun Mom from the block that everyone wants to be their friend.
Eljai
I have to hand it to J Rubin for having some awareness. I often wonder if a lot of reporters who prop up Youngkin are just republicans desperate for the days when republicans weren’t all batshit.
Qrop Non Sequitur
My Republican parents can’t even accept the discriminatory nature of DeSantis’s policies.
They buy the line that schools are teaching students to hate white people, full stop.
They don’t see the harmful nature of the Don’t Say Gay legislation either, trotting out the well-worn line that “gay” doesn’t appear in the bill.
What it does do is restrict teachers from discussing matters of sexuality and gender in an overly-broad way. Teachers won’t be able to push back on anti-gay bullying by students that learned it from their parents. Banning discussion of pronouns is ludicrous for reasons that have been discussed widely here. They know they won’t ban the normal teaching of pronouns, but won’t accept that this was meant to target trans people.
I don’t know what to do with Republicans. They deny the most obvious things and even my own lived experience growing up gay is dismissed.
Qrop Non Sequitur
Precision check.
FelonyGovt
OT Christy Smith, the D about to lose in CA Congress district 27, is blaming the Democratic Party for failing to support her adequately. The article points out that LA is an expensive market. I think someone else should run next cycle.
Eljai
@Qrop Non Sequitur: I stand corrected.
Geminid
Last month the Washington Post’s “Style” section featured an article on Ms. Fetterman. There was some interesting info on her life, and some remarks by Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer prize winning journalist (who is married to Senator Sherrod Brown) on the lot of a “political wife.” The item that interested me most was Giselle Fetterman describing her husband as an “introvert.”
This was a view of John Fetterman I had not taken before, but I think Ms. Fetterman would know.
Kay
Another power-mad conniving female who isn’t taking care of her family, as is her proper role.
Suzanne
Gisele Barreto Fetterman has already gotten a bunch of shit. Some racist piece of shit screamed the n-word at her in a grocery store two years ago.
Matt McIrvin
@Qrop Non Sequitur: Back in the day, the way they did it was that you’d have your Reagans and Bushes mostly saying anodyne things about the promise of America, but there would also be the Dinesh D’Souzas and Cal Thomases and R. Emmett Tyrells down in the weeds, gloating about violent bullying incidents and claiming to be the army of God and hinting that some day we’d drop the libs out of helicopters like those awesome dudes in South America.
What’s happened now is that it’s all collapsed; the ugly comes straight from the mouthpieces at the top. Or when it doesn’t, it’s easier to draw a straight line. But it was never really that hard.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Agreed. The top would still do things like going to Philadelphia, MS to kick off a campaign or the “black hands” ad, but they wouldn’t use Trumpian rhetoric in polite company.
Jeffro
As a Virginian, I really can’t thank Ms. Rubin enough for using her platform to correctly name Gov Fleece Vest as just another MAGAt with slightly better manners.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: It’d be a little coded depending on the audience. You still got your “strapping young bucks buying T-bone steaks”, etc., but outright saying we were coming to beat up your commie professor was something you left to the foot soldiers.
UncleEbeneezer
@Qrop Non Sequitur: All of these things that your parents believe are such utter non-sense and I’m sorry you have to deal with family like that. I don’t know how one is supposed to engage with people like that. I just choose not to with my own family. I can’t. I don’t have the f*cking patience for their bullshit any more than I have the patience to argue with someone about Global Warming, Creationism, Flat-Earthers, Anti-Vaxxers etc. What’s more, their shitty belief in abject lies are directly harming people I know and love.
Geminid
@FelonyGovt: In this area, I believe “Two strikes and you’re out.” This seems to be the practice.
On the other hand, for a good candidate,”If at first you don’t succeed, try again” can be pragmatically justified (if the candidate is willing). I’m hoping that Mr. Rollins takes another shot at Ken Calvert in the California 41st CD. Same with Frisch in the Colorado 3rd. They may do better with a Presidential year electorate.
Hilary Scholten did well to try again in the Michigan 3rd CD. She won, and while I’ve seen people advocate against running “retreads,” I don’t think they’d want to give that seat back on account of poor form.
Almost Retired
@FelonyGovt: That was not a good look at all and I agree that perhaps it’s time for someone else to try and unseat the odious Garcia.
Kay
@Geminid:
The photo is funny in the same way the Fetterman campaign was funny. It’s really approachable, playful humor and Pennsylvania definitely got the joke. That conservatives didn’t should not surprise anyone- the brand on the Right is “resentful, entitled grievance”. There’s no joy in any of it, unless they’re shitting on someone else.
Baud
Via Reddit, Fetterman
https://i.redd.it/nvibqigh290a1.jpg
FelonyGovt
@Almost Retired: Yep. It’s true Smith was bombarded with negative TV ads, but I’m not sure how much that mattered. The huge spending on Prop 27 (online gambling) TV ads came to nought, voters saw right through them.
lowtechcyclist
I guess we’ll find out soon enough whether she wakes up at least some of the others in the DC media, or whether she winds up being an outlier.
gene108
@lowtechcyclist:
So far, Jen’s been an outlier.
Kay
I feel like part of what the public rejected in Trump was Trump’s nastiness- he’s mean – petty, punches down, vindictive. Not the GOP base- they loved it- but the broader public.
DeSantis is also mean – petty, nasty, vindictive. That’s the commonality in my view and perhaps the vulnerability.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@FelonyGovt: I agree, she’s had 3 shots at that seat.
R-Jud
@Baud: It’s like they took Jim Hopper from Stranger Things and mashed him up with Steve Harrington from Stranger Things.
Sister Golden Bear
This is delicious. NY Post throws epic shade with a Page 26 story that’s essentially “Florida Man Makes Announcement.” Be sure to click through, the actual article (quoted in full) is Spy Magazine levels of snark.
Geminid
@gene108: I run into a few people like Ms. Rubin on a Virginia political journal called Bearing Drift. I mainly follow them for their coverage of Virginia politics, particularly the Republican side.
narya
@UncleEbeneezer: Spare a thought for my friend, who’s about to go in search of Bambi’s grandfather this weekend. The rest of the family are RWNJ, and he is just torn up by it–the place (a family farm) and people were vital to him growing up and he still feels very connected to the place–and even the people–but listening to them is painful.
Baud
@Kay:
DeSantis seems like a sourpuss.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I’m trying to recall what persona DeSantis peddled in the 2018 general election after he won the GOP primary by kissing Trump’s ass. IIRC, he tried to tack center and come across as a “reasonable Republican.” It was bullshit, of course. He was a hard-right backbencher in the House, but most people didn’t know that.
I don’t know if he could pull off a center-right presidential campaign after rising to fame as a uber-wingnut governor for six years, but who knows? The American electorate seems to have the attention span of a fruit fly.
Scout211
Daniel Dale will have lots of work in the next two years. He found 20 “false and misleading statements” in Trump’s speech last night. And he added that it was not a comprehensive list.
I still wish that the top news organization would use the L word. He spouts obvious lies but they keep parsing with words like falsehood, misleading, baseless and inaccurate, etc. But at least they are pointing them out now instead of seemingly admiring Trump for being so brazen, as they originally did.
FelonyGovt
@Betty Cracker: DeSantis seems to me to be heavier into the culture wars than TFG was, at least in terms of anti-gay and trans, anti-abortion, and Christian nationalism. Hopefully the electorate at large isn’t interested in these things.
Ohio Mom
Here’s what I didn’t read in Ruben’s “paean” to conservatism: the idea that we are all interdependent upon one another, that we need to see to the least among us, that free markets need reining in, if only to protect us from the externalities of environmental degradation.
I am so tired of Rubin being held up as some sort of ethical deep thinker. She is as selfish and mean spirited as any other conservative.
In the mean time, she wants credit for approving of democracy and a government run by rules.
Betty Cracker
@FelonyGovt: DeSantis has definitely governed as a hard-right culture warrior, but he ran as a more traditional conservative in the 2018 general and even governed that way in the beginning, IIRC. He did some stuff you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a FL Republican, like raising teacher pay and funding some environmental initiatives.
He took a hard-right heel turn during the pandemic and has been rewarded for it, so my guess is he’ll keep up the current shtick. Hopefully it’s a loser nationwide.
Scout211
I read this commentary in the Washington Examiner so you don’t have to. You’re welcome. ;-)
The title just caught my eye:
Trump 3.0 is a changed man—he’s now a loser.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: He just doesn’t fit in a frame!
zhena gogolia
@Kay: Absolutely.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
They haven’t built a lens that can hold John Fetterman!
Captain C
@Kay:
Trump was definitely all you said (mean, petty, &c), but he’s a lot more entertaining at it than DeSantis, and had a long history of media BS obscuring his true record, which probably helped him keep it close among the non-cultists. DeSantis seems more like the boss’s no-fun asshole incompetent boss who you hope doesn’t notice you when he visits the facility lest he erupt in a torrent of irrelevant abuse. His fellow local Chamber of Commerce members might find him amusing, but none of the people who watched The Apprentice or WWE do, except maybe when he’s shitting on their particular bugbear.
Leslie
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: She won the district before it was redrawn, but it doesn’t seem she’s the best person to go up against Garcia now. Wish we had someone like MG Perez to run against him.
Geminid
@FelonyGovt: One group DeSantis may have going for him is the political evangelical component of the Republican coalition. Those are some hard networking people, and DeSantis is one of them. Or he at least tries hard to present himself as such.
The political Baptists and their allies are calculating people when it comes to electoral matters. They leave the enthusiam to their Pentacostal rivals.
These guys want temporal power and they want a winner. They’ve gotten their use out of Trump, but they helped him win and they owe him nothing. He’s damaged goods now and they’d just as soon send him to the dump to make way for a candidate who can win.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Baud:
Y’know, Fetterman is a big Yinzer dude with a massive physical presence. I don’t know that casually trashing his lady will go down well with him – particular for wingy pundits.
He’s not a candyass like Cruz.
oatler
“Florida Man Makes Announcement”
zhena gogolia
Mitch McConnell reacts to Rick Scott’s challenge (Cauvin, hilarious, oh, and BTW Cauvin is 1000 times better than that guy on SNL doing the TFG impression):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoUaPFa91kM
Leslie
@Scout211: Saw an article that FB has forbidden any fact-checking of TFG now that he’s announced again.
MattF
@Scout211: Interesting, since Examiner is very RWNJ. Problem is that voters are very closely divided into static blocks, so if the RW block loses even a few percentage points, they’re doomed.
Baud
@Geminid:
Makes you wonder how people like Cruz and Pompeo will make inroads. They try to appeal to the religious right too.
Avalune
People around here have long called Giselle “tits” and demeaned her in any other “alpha male” kind of way they can manage. Anyone who followed Giselle and John (or Jawn as Levi calls him) know this is just the kind of thing she likes to do and this photo was just a wife being proud of all their hard work. The misogyny is just so tiresome.
Matt McIrvin
@FelonyGovt: With Trump there was that weird two-step where he was blatantly nasty and bigoted, but because there were a lot of culture-war issues where he clearly didn’t give a shit, he still got frequently characterized as a “moderate”.
But not giving a shit also means you’ll happily oblige the worst fanatics if they kiss your ass.
gene108
@Betty Cracker:
My hope in any Presidential election is what Baud’s quote states below, because I think it applies to any Republican seeking higher office.
@Baud:
I think every Republican is a sourpuss. Even Romney, in 2012, was a sourpuss.
There’s nothing optimistic in the Republican agenda. There’s no vision of a brighter future where most Americans prosper. Whether through Republican discriminatory practices, promotion of a certain type of conservative Christianity, hostility to the environment, or an economic policy that disproportionately favors the rich, there’s nothing optimistic about what Republicans try to pitch.
Even Bush, Jr., in 2000, talked about “compassionate conservatism” and not throwing poor people to the wolves. I can’t picture a modern Republican even trying to pretend they care about the less fortunate, without being branded a communist in their primary.
I think the modern Republican Party lacks broad appeal outside of Republican states.
My real concern is that disdain for Republicans is still very narrow in places like AZ, making an election close enough to steal.
kindness
They have 6 years to beat up on Fetterman’s wife to make her Hillary II. It’s what they do. They’re no better than Russian trolls.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@FelonyGovt:
I’m OK with writing off Florida spending and dumping every dime elsewhere. Let demographics erase the lump at The Villages.
frosty
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Giselle is no shrinking violet either. I’d bet she was behind a lot of the Oz trolling. I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: DeSantis has that dictator scowl, the face Mussolini and Hitler put on and that Trump has on the covers of his books, all squinty-eyed and angry. Under the right conditions people will actually go nuts for it. It says “I’m mad at the people you’re mad at, and I will hurt them.”
Bill Arnold
@MattF:
It is a very RWNJ piece. Just anti-Trump. (It is also detached more than a bit from consensus reality, which will be a GOP weakness if it continues forward.)
Paul in KY
@Princess: Wow, was that cropped! a whole 1/9th of Sen Fetterman was not included.
lee
I did a tweet @elonmusk suggesting that in his quest to make twitter more open with citizen journalism and his quest to monetize the blue check mark he should not allow folks with a blue check mark to limit those that can reply to them.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@frosty: I think this couple is delightful and refreshingly normie. I suspect that as his stroke effects dissipate, he’ll be a breath of fresh air in the Senate in terms of his willingness to speak plain truth.
MattF
@Bill Arnold: Quotation from Phillip K. Dick:
Paul in KY
@Geminid: I think one thing the jelly Repubs dislike about that picture is Mrs. Fetterman’s cute pose.
frosty
Oh please, cropping John’s head is a family joke with Gisele. They put it on a campaign T-shirt! These RWNJs are looking really desperate!
Avalune
@Paul in KY: She’s also wearing a thrifted dress – which is going to be subject of scorn, just as all the endless judgmental BS about AOC’s clothing choices.
catclub
@mrmoshpotato:
 
The impression I got was that he did a pretty good job of bullying. I was hoping otherwise.
trollhattan
@Scout211: Science tells us the “Loser Stench” is bigly hard to shed. Here’s hoping; also, too, Princess wants no part of that shit, especially considering she’s not (yet) in prison.
https://twitter.com/KFaulders/status/1592720745645641731?cxt=HHwWhsDU6YvFvZosAAAA
catclub
@lee:
The way for twitter to be profitable is to monetize the addicts. Make em pay, … a lot, for both tweets and follows. One is named Elon Musk
Qrop Non Sequitur
That there sounds like context. They don’t cotton to that on the Right.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Someone over at KOS was doing a deep dive into the polling from the Midterms and it was quite the eye opener. It wasn’t simply Pollsters were wrong, they were actively and knowing spreading misinformation or simply outright faking it, like the two highschool kids. The guy writing the article was asserting that if you narrowed the pre-election polling down to just pollsters who have a record of playing straight they were pretty accurate, but that would have been boring, so the MSM ran with the BS polls. Perhaps something for a front pager?
Geminid
@Baud: Pompeo probably has his own people networking too. 2024 is a ways off and no one has to choose a candidate now unless they’re trying to get a paid job.
I think Cruz, if he runs, will run for the sake of running. He may have a tough primary if he runs for the Senate again, and wouldn’t be a cinch to win the general. He’ll lose a Presidential primary campaign, but he can lay his loss off on his “uncompromising stand for conservative principles” or some such bullshit. That beats losing because everybody in Texas thinks he’s an asshole.
Then Cruz can put his law degree to work, maybe with a top Houston law firm. Ex-Senators can have value for those outfits.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Scout211: The NY Post tag line for their article on Trump’s announcement was “Been there, Don that.”
Paul in KY
@Avalune: The horror…
Qrop Non Sequitur
@Matt McIrvin: Only dogs hear dogwhistles, dontcha know?
@UncleEbeneezer: Is really frustrating. They’re not explicitly racist or homophobic, just dismissive of the ways policies affect people unless, I don’t even know, someone explicitly wrote pejorative terms in every footnote in the bill.
I frequently point out to then they vote for people who would be happy to jail me for my sex life in exchange for a small tax cut (negated by Trumpian tariffs). I’m assured they won’t really jail me, even though sodomy laws were only eliminated within the last couple decades.
Besides, we’re safe here in MA.
Paul in KY
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Just goes along with what we know: The elite media is trying to put their thumb on the scales in favour of the GQP at every instance they feel they can get away with.
God, I hate those fuckers!!
Betty
@Kay: Anyone who followed the Fettermans on Twitter would see how crazy that is. They are a loving family. She spoke for her husband when he couldn’t. She runs several charitable organizations. Some people may like her more than her husband.
Steeplejack
@frosty:
Thanks! I was just looking to see whether people knew that, as noted by Jezebel editor in chief Laura Bassett and others, the head-cropping thing is a long-running joke.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Paul in KY: I get the feeling it’s even more silly than that. Bad Polling makes good theater, so that’s why the MSM goes for it. They really lost the point that politics under all the theocratics is serious stuff and can mean life or death for many people.
Ruckus
@Baud:
Hillary Clinton is the huge thorn in their sides. The more they denigrate her the more they look like 4th grade bullies who get beat the hell up by 5th grade bullies. She has been right all along and seems like she no longer wants/needs/bothers to tell them to piss up a rope. All they ever get from this is her trademark smirk that is the 3rd grade school marm telling them they don’t get a cookie today. She just turned 75 and I’d bet she has no more political job desires. She’s put her time in the trenches, she is a better politician than most and has more class than the entire republican political club put together. And they know it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Aren’t the Evangelicals a big part of Trump’s base, or rather the part that really matters. If DeSantis took that group from Trump, Trump is dead because the Qanon clowns barely know what a primary is, much less how to organize for one.
Qrop Non Sequitur
Not saying your wrong, but they do network in such a way that if you tell them to be a particular place on a particular day, they’ll do it; even if the reason is laughable.
trollhattan
@Steeplejack: Her jib, I like it’s cut. I hope she causes some of those “nice” D.C. in-crowd ladies a good case of the vapors.
Now let’s boot Walker so we can stop talking about Sinema and Manchin the next two years.
Matt McIrvin
@Qrop Non Sequitur:
ICE agents kidnapped plenty of people right out of immigration hearings in MA. I assume other federal entities can do similar things if given a reason and the appropriate orders.
trollhattan
@Geminid: My money’ son Pompeo being Trump’s biggest rival. Their egos cannot be contained within a single structure.
Qrop Non Sequitur
@Matt McIrvin: A federal gay ban will never make it through Congress.
I say whistling upon the approach to the graveyard.
FelonyGovt
@Qrop Non Sequitur: Yeah, just like they were “never” going to outlaw abortion. You can’t trust these fuckers not to do what they’re clearly hinting at (if not saying outright).
You have my sympathies dealing with such willfully blind family members.
Qrop Non Sequitur
@FelonyGovt: They didn’t outlaw abortion, just allowed states to. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg intended.
/wingnut
It’s refreshing to see them put words in dead people’s mouths in real time.
Also I’ve had multiple assurances from the rents over the years that Roe was safe and “Why do they even talk about this?”
cain
Covering the right wing hate on Giselle is just propagating that hate. Let’s stop doing their work for them.
cain
@Qrop Non Sequitur: Just tell them that they can go to jail for talking about their son to their grandkids.
Baud
@Ruckus: Right. Hillary is retired and enjoying her best life. I was thinking back to how they first treated her in 1992 when she was First Lady.
West of the Rockies
OT, but does anyone know what became of that smug little poop stain high schooler who stood staring at an older Native American man as some form of smarmy protest? I recall he intended to sue everybody. Is he now in college (probably Duke or U TX or some such).
Geminid
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Evangelicals are certainly part of the Republican coalition, and have been for decades now. They voted for Trump, but a lot of people voted for Trump who thought he was a jerk. They won with Trump once and they tried to win with him again, but they are electorally pragmatic people and they don’t have to stick a fork in Trump to know he’s done.
I think the Qanon nuts and the freaks who attend multiple Trump rallies are outliers within the Republian coalition. I can see how people like to treat them as representative of the Repiblican base, but they’re not.
lowtechcyclist
@trollhattan:
Not saying you’re wrong, but are there that many people who care whether Pompeo runs or not?
He’s one of those people I’ve known of for quite a while now, but still have no sense of what he’s like, other than being yet one more standard-issue RW Rethug.
Ruckus
@Qrop Non Sequitur:
I know they all are not the simpletons they act like but they grab onto mimes like their lives depend on it and I think it’s because they have zero concepts of life being anything but their way. It can’t possibly be more complicated than one plus one equals something they can’t remember. They are scared that the world doesn’t add up to the 3rd grade concepts they finally learned by 8th grade. They want simple consistency/not being different, because anything else scares the piss out of them. It doesn’t compute.
trollhattan
@lowtechcyclist: I know he presents an oddball choice but his non-Trump competition is so very weak. Everybody talks up DeSantis, but DeSantis has the very real problem of being DeSantis. Ted Cruz, same deal: an odious person who Texas seems happy to elect for no apparent reason.
Who can get legs for a 1.5-year long campaign? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’s why I think a D.C. insider might slide into contention.
West of the Rockies
@West of the Rockies:
Ah. I looked it up. His suit got thrown out. He goes to the aptly named Transylvania U of Kentucky. Perfect for a dweeby bloodsucking putz.
West of the Rockies
@lowtechcyclist:
Well, in his defense, he does have the personality of congealed vomit. So he’s got that going for him….
Urza
Why are wingnuts worried if Mrs. Fetterman is bi? If she is, she’s still married to him, and he might be a very lucky man. As every wingnut male wishes they could be.
narya
@Ruckus: Well, I’m not a huge fan of mimes, either, but I don’t go around GRABBING them. :-)
Urza
@Baud: They were dumping on Hillary in Arkansas long before there was a hint of Bill running for president. Its just what they do. Shame the women in their lives don’t stand up to it.
Paul in KY
@West of the Rockies: I hope he joined some real asshole frat & got the full monty on some creative hazing from Niedermeyer type frat members.
Paul in KY
@West of the Rockies: A few of my relatives went there. Very nice liberal arts univ. I’m sure they (the administration) wished he hed gone somewhere else.
Matt McIrvin
@Qrop Non Sequitur: At this point, it would only happen in the context of the kind of descent into fascism where it would be associated with mass arrests of political opponents. But I’m not ruling that out either.
Ruckus
@UncleEbeneezer:
The right seems to be basically simpletons. Any issue that is at all complicated seems to scare the crap out of them. Everything has to be spelled out in very simple words. They are afraid of life, they need order – even though they can’t seem to understand it when it’s in front of them. If they allow gayness then they will have to be gay so let’s outlaw it. They respect people who are all about money because that sounds good to them, and it’s simple, think Elon.
I’m not sure there is any way to get through to them, the media competes for eyes and wallets and hasn’t been a small operation with a hand operated press in a lot of decades. The political world is very divided most every where, and the old guard seems unwilling, unable to see that the world is different now than even 50 yrs ago, that it is impossible to go back in time to simplicity, hate and money were the points of it all. The world and humanity just isn’t simple, reality has reared it’s ugly head and conservatives have no concept of adjustment to reality. Fluidness is scary to them, going with the flow is against all their fears, it might fail. But then it might get a hell of a lot better. They are blind to change, to different, to new.
Ruckus
@Baud:
If you had all of his traits to his levels wouldn’t you be a sour puss?
tobie
My understanding is that Josh Shapiro ran one of the best campaigns of the cycle, winning PA by over 14%. Fetterman scored ten points lower than him. Hard to see that as a superb campaign. Whitman ran a superb campaign. In a far more hostlle environment Mark Kelly won by more than Fetterman. I’d love to see TPM focus on Dems who won by over 10% in traditionally purple states.
Matt McIrvin
@tobie: Fetterman had a stroke during the campaign and ended up somewhat aphasic, which the opposition portrayed as unfitness for office with some success. It sounds as if a lot of people went from supporting him to “I’m just not going to vote” because of that. It’s hard to imagine the political campaign that wouldn’t be negatively whacked by something like that. But he hung on anyway.
LiminalOwl
@Urza: 1. Because bi, like gay, Wrong. 2. Because she might be violating their religious strictures in other ways. 3. (the real issue I suspect) because it would mean she’s not a proper little woman looking up at her man and worshipping his every word..
or, maybe: as a dog-whistle about Them Immoral Furriners, as “French” used to be.
Chief Oshkosh
@Princess: Yep, I laughed, too. Good Lord these people are pathetic. I guess we’ll just have to keep sending the more violent ones to prison. Still not clear why we’re not sending those mooks to Gitmo. And then forgetting about their existence when we hand the land back to Cuba.
Qrop Non Sequitur
@cain: The’ll say “what grandkids?” and demand I produce some.
tobie
@Matt McIrvin: That’s a surmise. It doesn’t track with the pollng which showed Fetterman’s popularity sinking rapidly after a big boom in June and July. Fetterman first claimed his stroke was mild (it happened in the final days before the primary); throughout the summer his campaign said he was just about to return to the campaign trail; only in October did he appear in public. I’m glad he won because we need his vote but he was not transparent about his condition and his campaign was not great IMO. Even the tweets his staff put out for him wore thin after a few weeks (New Jersey!) or were just lame (“Shit costs too much”).
Chief Oshkosh
@Eljai: Well, Jenghazi is sort of self-aware. I don’t think I’ve seen her present the real problem, which is Republican voters. Who they elect is just the symptomatic outcome.
I don’t think Rubin has fully internalized the reality that about 70 million voters would be A-OK with removing most if not all rights from her and millions of others. As Bill Clinton said at an event I attended a few years ago (paraphrasing here): “The biggest shock and disappoint in my first term was finding out that there are so many people in this country who deeply believe that entire groups of citizens should not be allowed to vote, and that worse, almost all those same people would be fine with having just a handful of the powerful making all the decisions…forever.” This is tough to internalize if you’ve always believed that most people think other people should have rights equal to what they themselves possess.
Mo Salad
And we can start talking about Sinema OR Manchin.
Ruckus
@gene108:
If you only had reverse gear in your car, you’d have no vision of going forward. Rethuglicans only have reverse, forward is banned because it might/will change something. And rethuglicans hate change because it means that they might have to change, to accept different, new, the possibly unknown. God forbid that any thing moves forward because it would mean they get left behind. It might mean they have to learn something new, might have to allow something new and that is unacceptable, as change can be scary to a 3 yr old, even one with a 60 yr old body. It is extremely difficult to see forward when your head is located where the sun don’t shine.
cain
@trollhattan: I will not understand Texas voting pattern – Abbott by any metric is a lousy governor who has repeatedly made mistake that most other states would have tossed him on his year on just one of the many mistake. The laws he’s help pass, the electrical grid, Uvalde – the list goes on – and the man sails through and gets re-elected as well as the rest of the cohort.
Anybody remember that border bullshit that caused such a ruckus where he had trucks stopped at the border and basically stopped trade? Unbelievable. Either nobody is being reminded that he’s incompetent or something else is going on.
Ruckus
@catclub:
House of mouse really does not like to make public waves.
Which is likely why Death Skidmark tried to bully them. Bullies rarely go up against someone/something stronger than them, they might just get their ass kicked. OK chances are good that they might.
Death Skidmark – not bad as a moniker for his shittyness.
Avalune
@tobie: I’m not going to comment on whether it was superb or not but it was one of the most fun…from the Jersey celebs putting out videos, to the birth of Wegners, to the airplane banners, to Levi and Arti the dogs… very entertaining. Oz was never really able to mount a defense to the twitter/tiktok/meme game. What he mostly had going for him was name recognition, white dudes love of rich white dudes, and a more polished debate appearance because he wasn’t recovering from a stroke.
I know a lot of people felt like they shouldn’t have put John on stage in that condition and that it was a mistake and I’m sure it did sour some people on him but the fact he put himself out there anyway and was just real about it and Mr. I’m a Doctor was basically being mean to a person recovering from a stroke was still compelling enough for many. Also you had a number of people who were ready to vote for a literal lamp over Oz – so there is that.
sab
@Avalune: Not just Mister I Am A Doctor, but also a cardiologist who had actual patients recovering from strokes. That was his specialty. I will never get over being gobsmacked by his campaign. What an utterly worthless human being.
Brachiator
I don’t even understand this. This woman is not a member of Congress. Does she have emails or a laptop that must be investigated?
ETA. She didn’t even take the photo that seems to be butthurting some people. How is this even a thing? This just seems a bunch of nothing on a slow news day.
tobie
@Avalune:Fetterman lied about his stroke in June. And July. We were told for months it was a mild stroke. Yes, his gimmicks were amusing for 2 weeks. They grew stale pretty fast for me.
As for the debate: I always figured people would have sympathy for someone visibly recovering.
Fetterman and Shapiro both lucked out with lousy opponents. Shapiro ran with it and won by 14 points. Fetterman coasted.
Brachiator
@Baud:
Ha! Yeah. I can see that.
misterpuff
@Mo Salad: If we get to 51, I think Sinema just might get a clue. Her home state has reputiated all MAGA election denying BS, so maybe Sinema decides its her turn in the Progressive spotlight.
A boy can dream.
Scout211
deleted. wrong thread.
eversor
A thing to remember about Musk is he’s not really the leader of a cult, he’s a member of one. For those who don’t know about all this.
There are two ideologies that took off in California with the tech boom that are related. The first is Longtermism. This means essentially that the only thing that counts is the long term survival of mankind, what’s going on today does not matter and if it slows down progress on the longterm it’s actually negative. The second is Effective Altruism, which means a quasi “do what creates the greatest good” but that greatest good turns out to be a carbon copy of Longtermism. Both of these openly advocate for handing billionaires even more money so they can pull this off as they are the best among us and also creating corporate atocracy to run everything for the same reason.
These are not dreamed up by the rich. These were dreamed up bored and normal ass people. The first big name they bagged was Peter Theil who immediately declared this was the way when he realize the nation wouldn’t be a “capitalist democracy” where wealth determined vote power and he couldn’t just get rid of social security and medicare and taxes unless he could do it by fiat (also give me more youngs blood so I can live forever). Theil advocates for it but he didn’t dream it up and he’s not the voice behind it. Musk jumped on later. With Musk he threw a fit when people complained about his work place practices and talked about a wealth tax and went full alt-right and then found Longtermism which is the perfect justification for what he wants to do.
So you have a bunch of billionaires who are in thrall to and throw money at a cult created by average guys who couldn’t get laid, were members of the manosphere, and members of the alt-right, who openly stated they needed to snag rich people to pull off their planned society and tech billionaires have been diving right in ever since. And guess what, the brains behind all this advocate for religion (Christianity mostly), western values, traditional gender roles, and monarchy as well.
Elon’s a member of a cult that was designed to snag people of him specifically to gain more members for the cults ultimate goal. I’m not saying this to defend him. He fucking sucks and should be fired into the sun. He took the bait of “it has CEO sun gods! to run it all” and leaped in. But he’s not even the top player in this whole mess, he’s just the best face for it’s world view.
topclimber
@FelonyGovt: As noted last night, the current CA 27 is composed of precincts that gave Biden a 12% margin in 2020. Last I looked, Christy Smith was DOWN 8%.
It looks like here and in a couple of other Biden friendly districts, Dems did not turnout. But 27 is the worst. District 47 is scraping by with a 1% Katie Porter lead vs. Biden’s 11%. So I wouldn’t place all the blame on Christy Smith.
It looks like a few California Dem campaigns missed the same memo about GOTV that NY Dems ignored.
Overall GOP votes are 4% points higher than Dems for a Congress where they will win the same proportionate share of actual seats, so we can’t blame gerrymandering for falling short either.
Dan B
@Qrop Non Sequitur: My in laws (my partner’s siblings) have the same approach.
1. Sadistic humor is the only humor.
2. Everything we say about our anxiety of the Right Wingers is overblown and ludicrous.
3. Bad manners are the most hurtful thing in the world and if we were nicer (didn’t rub our sexuality in nice people’s faces) we would be treated well.
I suspect they also believe that we’ve never experienced discrimination and they are not interested since that would be impolite to ask. They have immense blindness due to great privilege.
sab
@Dan B: Your inlaws sound like my brother.
ETA When I was young I thought he was just a boy and boys are sort of monsters.
Years later when I got married my husband explained that that behavor wasn’t just boys. It was sociopaths who happened to be boys. What did I know. I only had one brother.
ETA: Pop your sister’s kitten in the toilet and flush. Kitten is too big do go down, but it will scare her. Launch frogs in helium balloons where they will invaribly die, just for entertainment. Put ray fish to toast and die in your rowboat in the hot Florida sun, also just for entertainment. Pull wings off flies..
Dan B
@sab: Yikes! My BIL is not that bad but the endless sadistic humor, our Christmas present when Obama was elected was an Obama Chia Pet – can you say crude and deeply racist without saying you loathe the n-word? When he tells jokes he always looks at us to see how much we squirm. The corner of his lips curl up in glee when we do.
Ruckus
@Baud:
“Hillary is retired and enjoying her best life.”
I didn’t say that, I’m saying she did her best and that’s pretty damn good. But the rethuglicans have played the blame game on her for a long time and I’d bet it just isn’t worth the effort. She’s 2 yrs older than me and has been in the political spotlight for a long time. At some point one retires and moves on and at our age, mid 70s, most of us stop or have stopped the work routine if we can. I’m enjoying retirement, and yes there are days when I’m thinking something to do would be nice. So I am building furniture to replace the clunky crap I have. And some weeks I go for 2 or 3 days without doing squat, because I can. I’d bet that as much as she likes playing the politics game and thinks she could do well in the top job, at some point it just becomes more than one wants to do.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
“Ted Cruz, same deal: an odious person who Texas seems happy to elect for no apparent reason.”
To get him out of Texas for any length of time seems like a good enough reason. If they don’t elect him he’s there 24/7, being Teddy. How else do you get rid of him?
Ruckus
@narya:
Yes but you are NOT a rethuglican asshole. You are a person. A human being, you don’t need a mime. They have nothing else.
sab
@Dan B: I am glad to see your yikes! I grew up thinking he is normal and all boys are awful. I read Lord of the Flies when I was twelve and I thought ” yep, that’s boys for you.”
Matt McIrvin
@sab: Lots of kids couldn’t relate to Lord of the Flies at all. I did because my thought was “yeah, that’s about 8th grade PE class.”
Paul in KY
@tobie: You win 60 – 40 or 50.1 – 49.9 in your senate race & you know what they call you? Senator.
Paul in KY
@sab: Your brother, sad to say, is a piece of shit. I’m sure you know that, though.
Paul in KY
@Dan B: He seems to be heading that way. What a choad.