Happy Valentine’s Day, Speaker Johnson! pic.twitter.com/0NPB04W4YR
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 14, 2024
Putin's last hope is Speaker Mike Johnson.
— David Frum (@davidfrum) February 13, 2024
I had assumed — and I don’t think I’m the only one — that ‘Pastor’ Johnson ended up in the Speaker’s chair because he was the schlub who got lucky when McHenry threw the thinly-gilded apple of discord at the backbenchers waiting like bridesmaids for the bouquet. He could, after all, stand in for Mark Twain’s childhood acquaintance who became a preacher because “the contents of his brain could have been replaced with the contents of a pie, and nobody would be worse off except the pie.”
But I’m starting to suspect that the man with less attempted charisma than Ted Cruz was a deliberate Judas goat, chosen by the oligarchs and the Fellowship to further break the government at whatever cost. (To quote the unofficial GOP motto, You don’t need brains to break stuff.) I only hope his personal Rapture into the bowels of Christianist think tanks and highly compensated sinecures happens as quickly as possible.
For those Republicans in Congress who think they can oppose funding for Ukraine and not be held to account:
History is watching.
— President Biden (@POTUS) February 14, 2024
White House spokesman Andrew Bates says Mike Johnson is looking for an escape hatch on the border- and the administration is not about to provide one: https://t.co/jAQsGpbJ2z pic.twitter.com/9Prbk4KYJR
— Jennifer Haberkorn (@jenhab) February 14, 2024
And not only is Mike Johnson adjourning the House to avoid a confrontation on Ukrainian aid, he's inviting a government shutdown in the process. https://t.co/6cfeGS5x7L
— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) February 14, 2024
Days after killing the bipartisan Senate border security bill, Speaker Johnson says the Senate must address border security, then runs away before anyone can ask a follow up calling him out on his ridiculousness https://t.co/633DjFBwwY
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 14, 2024
Narrator: Speaker Johnson declared a foreign-aid-plus-border security package as “dead on arrival” just over a week ago. https://t.co/ITngMq8eZS
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 14, 2024
Well done, @GOP. At least Republican employers can hire them now.
After border bill failure, ICE considers mass releases to close budget gap. https://t.co/dG23HEhi39
— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) February 14, 2024
I didn’t spend 4 months negotiating the bipartisan border bill for political advantage. I wanted a result. But Republicans have handed us a winning issue and we will capitalize on it. https://t.co/kwjOxAX0eN
— Chris Murphy ?? (@ChrisMurphyCT) February 14, 2024
Bear in mind that Johnson mostly won't be pressed or even asked about lying like this because to most of official Washington this is just how Republicans operate. It's taken as a given.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 13, 2024
sab
It is kind of weird. My little midwestern city welcomes immigrants. They revitalize neighborhoods. They broaden our food options. Their kids work hard in schools. They make our town less boring.
ETA Now we are competitive in soccer!
sab
I know things were different back then, but in retrospect I wish the Clintons, who were and are actual practicing Christians, had been a lot less tolerant and inclusive with the grifting tele-evangelical types. It gave those guys credibility among us normie church-goers that they did not deserve.
Clintons et al should not have gone to the Family’s annual prayer breakfast. Normalized those nut jobs.
Splitting Image
@sab:
I wouldn’t give too much blame to the Clintons. The grifters were consistently presented as the most sincere adherents of Christianity from the point that they embraced Reagan over Carter.
Even Barry Goldwater was denouncing them by then, but he was ultimately the guy who welcomed them into the party all the way back in 1964. By the 1990s, they were firmly entrenched and were simply a reality that the Clintons (and others) had to deal with.
Aussie Sheila
Actually the real issue here is the inability of the US Print Press and Cable News to remember what happened two days ago, and their resolute refusal to call out dishonesty and bad faith if that means pinging the Right.
The lack of any publicly supported media outlets in the US will be the death of a free press. Don’t mistake me here. Our Australian Broadcasting Commission is no angel, and conservative politics have effed it around no end. But its legislative remit and the consequential loyalty it still commands, even in the face of conservative fuckery is still worth the candle.
The so called ‘mainstream Press’ in the US is completely wired for Republicans. I sort of knew that before, but the unbelievable BS about Biden’s age initiated by a Republican A hole SP, appointed, my God, by a Democratic AG confirms it.
BTW, why do Democratic AGS always appoint Republican SP to investigate their own?
It would never happen here.
Properly.
Do US Democrats not want to win?
mrmoshpotato
White House translation: Enough of your horseshit, you horses’ asses.
sab
@Splitting Image: I agree with you, but sincerely religious people (of whatever faith) embracing Reagan over Carter has always just blown my mind. $ and tax cuts over faith maybe.
mrmoshpotato
@Aussie Sheila: Ahem. It’s not “inability.”
sab
@Aussie Sheila: Appointing Republican Special Counsels. Either they are trying to be and appear ” bipartisan” ( Merrick Garland) or they ( SP) cannot pass security clearance hurdles which are also pretty biased.
I personally think Merrick Garland is a good guy totally out of touch with reality. Trying to restore torched norms of behavior. He is mentally and politically a hell of a lot older than Biden.
sab
@Splitting Image: Yep.
TriassicSands
Funny, Anne, I was thinking something quite different. For the first time in my life, I was hoping that Hell exists.
@sab: For the record, I left a reply to your response in the last thread. It’s basically just a restatement of what I think of Republicans — all Republicans.
sab
@Aussie Sheila: Publicly supported media in the US would be Republican. Not because there are more of them, but because they have more money.
I still like NPR ( national public radio) and PBS ( public broadcasting system) but I have seen what happens to them when government gets involved. Toxic political people put on their governing boards when Republicans get in charge.
Tucker Carlson’s dad ran Voice of America for years, broadcasting into eastern Europe.
sab
@TriassicSands: Saw that comment.
ETA Still shocks me how much Republicans rise to the top when their basic motivation is to screw everyone else.
Aussie Sheila
@mrmoshpotato:
If it’s not ‘inability’ what is it? I’m not kidding here. Just what is it.
@sab
I understand Merrick Garland to be ‘conservative’. That’s not the same as a ‘Conservative’.
What I don’t get is the perpetual genuflecting of US liberals and mainstream Dems to Conservative norms and processes, especially when it comes to investigations of Democratic pols. I get no political Party is free of corrupt arseholes. God knows the Australian Labour Party could never make that claim.
But I just don’t get how the Dems never get to appoint Dem FBI bosses, Special Prosecutors or tough AGS.
I really hope and believe that the Nov Presidential elections will deliver a resounding victory to the Biden/Harris team and all the down ticket races.
In the event, something needs to be done about ensuring the political legal branches are staffed with Dem appointees. I understand the SC is out of reach, for the moment.
TriassicSands
@sab:
I think Garland is such an out-of-touch traditionalist that he’s playing cribbage in a world dominated by video games, so to speak. I’ve never thought he was a good choice for Attorney General, but I can easily imagine he was a fine judge, fair to a fault, where he set the timetable and ensured that the rules were followed. The requirements for a judge have not really changed, but with the Republican Party having descended into at a minimum authoritarianism and often outright fascism, the job of AG is now different. He isn’t just upholding the law and Constitution, he needs to be actively defending democracy against people who respect no rules and are utterly depraved.
mrmoshpotato
@Aussie Sheila: They love all the lying crap coming from Republicans. If the mainstream media actually gave a damn about holding them accountable, the US media would have been calling Rethuglicans lying bastards for the past 40+ years.
Look at how they jerked off (and still are) to the orange shitstain and all his horribleness and lies since 2015. It has nothing to do with actually reporting that one side is full of fascist trash. It’s all about ratings and clicks, so “Both sides are equally as bad!” scream the idiots with the microphones and TV cameras.
Aussie Sheila
@TriassicSands:
I agree. But the trajectory of the US Republican Party has been obvious for nearly two decades. How much longer must US Dem base voters and US liberals wait for the Democratic Party leadership to wake up and start fighting?
I don’t mean ‘fighting’ in the idiotic U.S. loony Left notion of fighting, meaning opposing every Democratic leader going, but fighting in the sense of striving to restructure the idiotic norms and tropes that makes even milk toast reforms seem radical.
TriassicSands
Too often, Democrats want to fair more than they want to win. Republicans will win at any cost and Democrats should not adopt the same attitude. However, they should understand the difference between nerf ball and hard ball.
As far as appointing special counsels that are Republicans, that is a way to bend over backwards to appear to be fair. Garland is out of place in time. He’s still living in a world where only the hardened criminals don’t play by the rules. I doubt it ever occurred to him that Hur would pull an unprofessional hatchet job on Biden. He would expect Hur to behave just as he, Merrick Garland, would. He’d do his job, no more, no less, and no dirty tricks. Unfortunately, that makes Garland much less than ideal for the job.
Once upon a time, Republicans, with some exceptions, were a loyal political party in opposition to the Democratic Party. Sixty years ago, the Democratic Party had quite a few racist scoundrels. Today, there are occasional Democratic scoundrels — e.g., Menendez — but, for the most part, Democratic politicians are decent people. That is no longer true of the Republican Party. Anyone willing to support or even tolerate Donald Trump, for any reason, is not a good person or someone who can be trusted.
sab
@Aussie Sheila: I realy think it has something to do with security clearances. If your politics are not toxic, you can’t get a clearance at the highest political level
ETA If you want to get a security clearance it has to go through the FBI. And we know what they are like.
Aussie Sheila
@TriassicSands:
I understand about scoundrels like Menendez. Every polity and political party have such A holes. Certainly Australia and the ALP has had its share of such scoundrels. What I don’t get is the lack of feral partisanship on the part of the Democratic Party in defence of their base and in defence of their vision of democracy.
I am easy about ideological differences. I made my bones in the TU movement after all. But I can’t get over the lack of partisanship seemingly displayed by the upper echelons of the Democratic Party . It’s a complete mystery to me. I like my fights intra mural.
When it comes to our political opponents, no quarter given.
TriassicSands
Actually, it has been a lot more than two decades. It has been something like a snowball rolling down a snow-covered slope. At first, each roll adds only a little, but as the ball gets larger, each revolution (year) accelerates the growth.
I put the real beginning of the modern GOP no later than in the eighties when Reagan was president. (Yes, Nixon was a crook, but his was a mixed bag.) Reagan spent eight years preaching about the abject evilness of the government and his hypocrisy was remarkable. Then, in the nineties, along came Newt Gingrich, who debased the position of Speaker and set a new, much lower standard for discourse. George W. Bush certainly contributed to the descent of the party. Finally, Donald Trump created the environment, where, to coin a phrase, the GOP could be all it could be — a thoroughly corrupt mob of depraved hypocrites with absolutely nothing positive to offer.
Note: Along the way, Reagan and Papa Bush engaged in the Iran-Contra scandal that should have resulted in both being impeached, convicted, and removed from office. George W. set a new low for competence and gave us wars of choice.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Republicans can’t manage themselves so how in the hell do they expect the public to believe that they can manage the country? Give them full control of everything and magically everything will get better? Parents are told that you don’t give in to your children because their behavior will go to shit as they demand more and more from you. Republicans are little more than spoiled little shits and have been getting worse as their demands grow more outrageous, along with their behavior.
I hope the voters beat their asses this fall. Spare the rod and spoil the Republican, so to say.
ETA: We just passed 40 inches of rain so far this year in our little south Oregon coastal town. It’s swampy out there!
TriassicSands
That’s simple. They know the electorate and they know how to manipulate people who either aren’t very bright, aren’t paying attention, or are so despicable they don’t care about successful governing, they just want to crush the other side.
With a system like ours, rigged to their advantage, they win elections they shouldn’t and have majorities that should be tiny minorities. And it is the electorate that makes that possible.
I will say for what must be the quadrillionth time, the Republican politicians are not the problem. The people who vote for them are the real threat. Unfortunately, they aren’t getting any smarter, any more honest, any better informed, or any more kind or generous as people.
Aussie Sheila
@TriassicSands:
Yes. I observed much of that from here, half way around the world.
And so did all my friends and comrades active in the Australian trade union movement and the Left. I had the privilege and joy of working with a section of the US trade union movement in the ‘90s. Great people. But ineffably closed off to the wider issues affecting workers across the world, and with an inability of seeing the links between their own struggles and the struggles of every one else.
They were great people, and hard working for their members. But they were simply unable to see connections that were obvious even to reasonably conservative unionists here down under.
The impact of US ‘exceptionalism’ even on the Labor movement there has yet to be really understood.
brantl
@Splitting Image: Gerald R.Ford was the architect of “The moral majority”.
AlaskaReader
@TriassicSands:
…Republican voters are every bit as corrupt and depraved as are the people they elect.
AlaskaReader
@brantl:
Jerry Falwell Sr might have a word…
brantl
It was something I read, I can’t remember where that Ford started the cooperation of the Rethugs and the god-botherers; make of it what you will. Fallwell didn’t coin the term either, that was during Nixon’s term.
Aussie Sheila
@AlaskaReader:
At the risk of being dissed, I disagree. Every polity has a large share of people who don’t take any notice of politics generally or who are able to be stirred by authoritarian calls to ‘action’.
For the former, existing political formations must make better efforts to connect with the people and issues that make a difference.
For the latter, every effort must be made to isolate authoritarian movements from the broad polity. I know that rich Aholes are doing their best to reinvent Nazism. But we know it now and we know the history. This time around, we should be a wake up.
No?
AlaskaReader
@brantl: Here is some deeper background.
Ksmiami
All well and good, but Biden needs to bypass Congress and get aid to Ukraine – now, thru whatever channels he has.
AlaskaReader
@Aussie Sheila: You ‘disagree’?
That just shows you don’t know Republican voters.
prostratedragon
Of course, there is this dialog:
“Romance del Diablo”
Ksmiami
@AlaskaReader: to be a Republican today, means you’re a bad person. Sorry, not sorry
Manyakitty
@AlaskaReader: I nearly ended up in a screaming match with a colleague from South Africa, who insisted that third party voting was the only way to demonstrate displeasure with the Democrats. Aside from the fact that I sincerely believe that President Biden is doing an admirable job in an incredibly difficult situation, she refused to believe that we only have a binary choice. Like, I live here and you don’t. Stop acting like the magical unicorn you think I keep in my pocket will make this country comport with your ideas about democracy. JFC.
Aussie Sheila
@AlaskaReader:
No, I don’t know Republican voters. But I know conservative working class voters very well. I have spent nearly forty years of my life organising conservative workers into active unionists and I always hoped, into ALP voters.
I was, if I say so myself, reasonably successful in making sure working people could be active in pursuit of their immediate economic interests. I was also reasonably able to ensure that social democratic political solutions were politically obvious rather than the rank authoritarian and racist garbage peddled by the Right. I was pretty good at my craft.
But nothing helped more than a polity that ensured everyone could vote and that every vote counted. That, and a legally mandated federal minimum wage that while never enough, never fell below double digits my whole working life.
It is now $AU23.23 per hr.
Betty Cracker
@sab: Are you saying the reason Democratic administrations never appoint Democratic special counselors/prosecutors or FBI directors is because they can’t find Democrats who can get the required security clearances? I’ve never heard that theory before. I don’t know how all this works, but that seems implausible. Haven’t Democratic administrations appointed Dems and independents to top national security/intel posts that require the highest level of security clearance?
I think the more likely explanation is that too many institutionalists have bent over backwards to show they don’t have a political agenda. Well, enough of that bullshit. Hiring Republicans to demonstrate bipartisan chops is a political move too, with the added detriment of being self-sabotaging.
There are reports that Biden and other White House figures are furious with Garland over the Hur situation. The reports are anonymously sourced, so who knows, but I hope they are true because it was a grave error — and the administration can’t afford to allow anything like that to happen again.
AlaskaReader
@Manyakitty: Displeasure with Democrats?
I’ll be happy take that up right after we remove all Republicans from any position of public trust.
Third Party? Some other country might have viable third or fourth or whatever parties, but here in these United States of 2024, …it’s strictly a binary choice.
Vote Democrats in, vote Republicans out.
AlaskaReader
@Aussie Sheila: Like I said, you don’t know Republican voters.
It’s just that simple.
How it is or was in some other place has no bearing on the simple truth that Republicans are simply awful people.
Manyakitty
@AlaskaReader: one thousand percent.
Aussie Sheila
@AlaskaReader:
At the risk of annoying you, every polity has plenty of simply awful and stupid people. The US isn’t unique in that respect, even though it might want to be.
The difference is it seems to me is both structural (the Electoral College ), and the extreme deference given to States to run their own corrupt, racist and gerrymandered electorate systems.
Eliminate the latter, and the former has less weight.
Do nothing, and fascism has a reasonable chance of electoral success in the US.
It is up to democratic and progressive movements in the US to determine how to defeat the minoritarian structures of US politics.
Anne Laurie
Gerry Ford, to quote my old man, couldn’t have organized a piss-up in a brewery. He was an affable placeholder who agreed to whatever his handlers wanted; I doubt he really understood half of what he was enabling, though he’s still classed as ‘Evil’ for general purposes.
Jerry Falwell was responsible for the ‘Moral Majority’ tagline, which didn’t really take off until Reagan’s regency. (I still have my ‘Immoral Minority’ button, which I sent with all my winter solstice cards one year… )
Aussie Sheila
@Aussie Sheila:
I also agree that in a first past the post electoral system, where two parties appear to be almost state mandated, voting third party in the current situation is a suicide pact.
TriassicSands
@Aussie Sheila:
I won’t diss you, but I have to agree with AlaskaReader on this. I’m not sure why AR replied to my earlier comment unless it was simply to reiterate the fact that the real threat in the U.S. is the electorate (and in any system where people have the ability to be well-informed and are free to vote (ignoring for the moment that Republicans are successfully attacking the right of many to vote).
I thought I had made my opinion of Republican voters clear. Mitch McConnell wouldn’t be able to illegitimately pack the SCOTUS unless people voted for him. After he did that, he was re-elected. Republicans in the House couldn’t demand immigration reform and then refuse to allow a vote on it unless voters put them in office. And, if that weren’t bad enough, then say they will refuse to allow a vote on aid to Ukraine because there has been no immigration reform. Year after year the same voters cast ballots to return the same people or those who are even worse to office.
The real problem in the United States is Republican voters.
Manyakitty
@Aussie Sheila: exactly
AlaskaReader
@TriassicSands:
Yes, …it really is just that simple.
TriassicSands
You live in a country with mandatory voting. In the U.S. millions of people consider voting to be 1) a waste of time, 2) annoying, 3) beneath them, etc. Our turnout, even at its best, is embarrassing. Unfortunately, the people least likely to vote are also far more likely to be people who would benefit from Democrats controlling the government. They enjoy the benefits that Democrats and progressives have won for them, but can’t be bothered to support them. There is a saying on the Internet, “You can’t fix stupid,” but combine stupidity with apathy and what you get is low turnout.
In 2022, there was a lot of talk and reportage about Democratic success. But the reality was something quite different. After four years of Trump, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, more tax cuts for the wealthy, Republican obstruction, endless gun violence, and on and on there had never been greater justification for record turnout on the Left. Because Democrats held the Senate and the Republican majority in the House was so small, lefties thought that was a great success. However, voter turnout in 2022 was DOWN, not just when compared with 2020, a presidential year, but with 2018, as well, and Republican votes outnumbered Democratic votes in a stunning turnaround. Millions who “should” be voting for Democrats are completely disengaged, while on the Right they show up and support more guns, less freedom, especially for women, more wealth for the already wealthy, and autocracy.
How does the Left convince stupid people who are both selfish and apathetic and uninterested in listening to vote?
Note: I’m using the word stupid here not to describe people who necessarily have low IQs, but rather people who ignore reality and the importance in a democracy of being a responsible, informed voter.
It’s 3:30AM here. I’m going to bed. Goodnight!
Baud
@TriassicSands:
@AlaskaReader:
Thirded.
Aussie Sheila
@Baud:
If the only thing standing between US democracy and fascism is the fact that Republican voters are awful then the world has nothing to fear. After all, no other polity has awful poopy voters like US Republicans eh?
Baud
@Aussie Sheila:
Correct. US republicans are big believers in American Exceptionalism.
Aussie Sheila
@Baud:
They seem to have that in common with their Democratic voting compatriots it appears. At least there is something US patriots can agree on.
Betty Cracker
@Aussie Sheila: Not all of us believe that — I think shitty citizenry is fairly equally distributed worldwide. That said, the effect is unevenly applied based on structural and cultural, etc., factors unique to each country. We all come at it with the lens we’ve developed from observing our own polity. It’s important to keep that in mind; otherwise, it’s easy to misjudge.
Chris Johnson
@Aussie Sheila: I would say look again.
We say the press is wired for Republicans, but the press, led by its grandest representatives, has been presiding over an economic collapse ever since the explosion of the Internet that replaced it as a primary mode of idea networking. This has been going on for a long time.
What we are seeing is a press run not by Republicans so much as it’s run by Russian mobsters for THEIR purposes, which has favored Republicans only as long as the Republicans in turn favored (a) civil war and (b) Russia. It’s outright geared toward dissolution of the body politic. Clinton, rightly being a Russia hawk, got the worst of it, because Russia saw the Clintons as architects of their decline.
The reason the press got taken over by Russian mobsters is partly because New York City got taken over by Russian mobsters (thanks Giuliani) and partly because the press hit an economic crisis that’s unsolvable by normal means. In the era of the internet, a physical newspaper is wasteful and meaningless, and sales is how such an industry functions. The journalism has to be paid for by something. So now it’s paid for by Russian mobsters (I could say oligarchs, but I’d repeat myself). Press mavens, unlike Republicans, are smart enough to cover their tracks. They were oligarchs too, in their day, before their industry collapsed. They just have different funding sources now.
And those funding sources are not shy about what they want… AND ‘if it bleeds it leads’. What the Russians want, is also drama and controversy and ‘sells papers’ more than peace and prosperity. It’s a match made in hell.
So, no, it’s not that the Republicans own the press. Something else got there first and owns both. That’s what war looks like in 2024.
Chris Johnson
@sab: Yeah the thing is if you don’t restore enough of the torched norms of behavior, you lose.
We don’t treat mass murders as ‘oh well, time for the police to start mass murdering people who look suspicious!’.
We don’t treat systemic corruption as an excuse to do systemic corruption except for the right side this time. We DO have to restore torched norms, because those are the rules. You gotta start by re-establishing how things are supposed to work, not accepting the criminal’s behavior as your new model for how to be, and then… what? Punishing them for acting that way while Republican? That’s not how any of this works.
Princess
*Pokes nose into the thread. Looks around. Hurries out again.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
It’s hard to identify another OECD country where the right isn’t merely pushing bad policies, but has abandoned policy completely in favor of performative actions led by a wholly unqualified, mentally unsteady, incompetent clown.
Republicans cannot discipline themselves the way other political parties can, and that’s because of the nature of their voting base IMHO.
mrmoshpotato
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
QFT!
And hopefully you don’t have any flooding.
Chris Johnson
@Baud: It’s only because they’re being run by Putin (indirectly) and their job is to collapse and then to civil war.
When they were masters of their own fate, they represented their real interests a lot better and they got a lot more power. There’s been many times in history when the authoritarian/right-wing side took and held more power, without wearing clown shoes.
They’re wearing the clown shoes because they’re being directed to fail, over-reach, and blow everything up. It’s not total control of them, they’re not zombies, but they’ve been guided (and funded) this way for decades now and the zombification has set in a lot more than usual.
They can’t discipline themselves to seize and wield real power because they’re not supposed to have real power, they’re supposed to implode and plunge the country into civil war. Consider how often you hear ‘civil war’ or ‘race war’ from those who try to influence the right wing. It’s a target being aimed for by those who try to control the Right.
Natural power for the Republicans wouldn’t look like race war, it would look like apartheid and no resistance. That’s what it looks like when their voting base dominates and actually wins. The idea that all will be destruction, is being put in from outside.
Chief Oshkosh
I think you are completely correct. Johnson will never be challenged by the Krazy Krew. He is their ultimate goal: a slick but sick Christofascist. He may not seem slick, but look how far he’s gotten under the radar. As to being sick, just look at his history. He’s right out of a David Lynch movie. He’s a seriously fucked-in-the-head “Christian” who punches each and every one of the tickets for the various conservative tribes.
I hope I’m wrong and that he turns out to be just another fuck-up. However, his background and how he’s being treated by the vast majority of Republicans and other sick fucks doesn’t bode well.
SFAW
@Chris Johnson:
Rupert Murdoch.
I defer to Aussie Sheila if she disagrees, but my (perhaps incorrect) estimation is that Murdoch Fox-ified Australia before exporting that to England, and then the US. The current electorate insanity in the US would be a lot closer to weeds-level without Fox to stoke it actively since Roger Ailes started his attacks on America. I seem to recall reading that Rupert did similar things in Oz and Blighty before he and Ailes got together.
I used to think that Mitch McConnell was democracy’s greatest enemy, but changed that to Murdoch a number of years ago.
Geminid
@Baud: One aspect of American Exceptionalism is that our Republicans are Exceptional too.
SFAW
@Chris Johnson:
I (tentatively) think you’re wrong about Russia controlling them. I think the 40-year war by the RWMF on the MSM has caused them to run scared about “liberal bias,” leading to the current “both sides” fetish. Putin has exploited that, but I don’t think he’s the direct cause of it.
lowtechcyclist
@TriassicSands:
Didn’t he notice Barr’s tenure as AG? That should have at least started to remove those blinders.
Baud
@Geminid:
To be clear, I don’t think the current US right is innately the worst in the OECD world for all time. They just happen to be that way currently.
And of course, a lot of poorer and less democratic countries have much worse, like the Taliban.
Matt McIrvin
@Chris Johnson: Putin’s interests are certainly served by this but I think it’s simpler. They’re acting this way now because the electorate isn’t as white as it used to be, so their basic pitch *can* no longer command a real majority. From their perspective this looks like a deep rot in the world that needs to be extracted. And they can eke out wins by sabotaging the system and making sure the other side can’t accomplish anything. Newt Gingrich was Newt Gingrich before Putin.
lowtechcyclist
@Anne Laurie:
As a born-again Christian who was paying attention, I can attest that it was already taking off in the late 1970s.
satby
@Betty Cracker: I think Aussie Sheila’s shift at the troll factory was over at 7 EST.
satby
@lowtechcyclist: yeah, and Reagan’s election was Nov. 1980. AL is correct in that Falwall spent the years previous building up his
churchgrift and that it hit political paydirt with Reagan’s embrace. Which would have been the 70s as youhelpfullyneedlessly pointed out.BellyCat
Truth. The “how” will be a very heavy lift as structural (read: Constitutional) change is required.
BellyCat
@satby: To describe thoughtful, provocative opinions which may be unusual or unpopular as “trolling” is not all that helpful to the discussion or critical thinking.
RevRick
@AlaskaReader:
@Ksmiami: I’m going to make an almost Einsteinian relativistic moral argument here, but from the internal perspective of the conservative/reactionary mind, they aren’t bad people. They believe, after all, that there’s a natural hierarchy to the world, inbuilt in the way the world works. And that natural hierarchy involves race, class, and gender, and it’s a belief system as old as civilization. They perceive us as the bad people, threatening to undo that and destabilizing civilization itself. Our tolerance, to them, is intolerable.
The thing is we have all grown up with this belief system (which I tend to lump as the imperialistic mindset).
We are all taught that this is the way the world works, and our struggles of resistance , our determination to undo it, make us dangerous subversives.
What I guess I am arguing for is that instead of attacking people as bad, which only makes them defensive and dig in, we attack the belief systems themselves. And the way to do that is not with open attack, but with subversive questions and yes, even humor.
The idea that we Democrats have to “fight” Republicans, shows how deeply imperialistic thinking is even buried in our brains.
There is a time, of course, when outright aggression and violence must be stopped. With force. But that shouldn’t become our first and only choice.
The Civil Rights Movement achieved great gains by nonviolent resistance. Maybe they have something to teach us.
Geminid
@Baud: I was joking a little. But today’s Republican Party is still exceptionally chaotic for a rightwing party.
I think Bush helped destabilize the Republicans with his disastrous Iraq war. That war had a lot of follow-on effects that are still being felt in this country and especially in the Middle East.
There were also huge opportunity costs. I think we are paying them now with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Shalimar
@TriassicSands: I’m sick of defending Garland because he really doesn’t deserve defending on the biggest points people have against him: all the delays in 2021 investigating Trump, which I put down to too much appeasing pro-Trump people in DoJ and FBI, and also choosing Republicans as special prosecutors to appear fair. Both of those management choices have been unmitigated disasters.
That said, I am guessing those areas represent less than 5% of Garland’s workload and he may have been exceptional at the 95% of it we don’t see. We’re judging him on the part he has been horrible at.
And I’m fine with that. You don’t let a murderer free because he didn’t murder anyone 99% of the time. Replacing Garland for a 2nd term is a good idea. But it does annoy me when ignorant people blame him for so many things that he has nothing to do with, like judge’s decisions. And that is most of what you see on social media. People hate him so they blame him for everything that happens they don’t like.
Dorothy A. Winsor
In the US, third party votes result in what we saw in the Maine gubernatorial race a few years back. The two quasi-Democratic candidates split the vote, and the state had minority rule. In a Parliamentary system, parties have to form a coalition after the vote occurs or the government isn’t formed. In the US, we have to form our coalitions before the vote.
Baud
@RevRick:
Our immediate goal isn’t to convert them, but to persuade people who aren’t them to join us in weakening them. I think that’s harder to do if we soft peddle about what the right is doing. I think we largely tried your suggestion during the Obama years, and what it got us is Trump and Dobbs.
lowtechcyclist
I really don’t like this “the problem is the electorate” bit.
If true, what can be done about it? We’re stuck with the electorate we’ve got. (It’s certainly not going to change appreciably between now and November 5th.) Guess we might as well just throw in the towel and let the MAGAts take over, then.
Yes, a good chunk of our electorate is MAGAts and racists and evangelicals who are, by and large, horrible people. I agree that there’s not a damned thing that can be done about them. But that’s maybe 35-40% of the electorate.
Besides, 81 million people voted for Biden in 2020, while only 74 million people voted for TFG, even though he was the incumbent President at the time. Sure looks to me like more of the electorate is on our side rather than theirs.
Now the distribution of that majority across the states is a problem, thanks to our antiquated Electoral College, but that’s a whole ‘nother thing.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Unfortunately, some people who would prefer that we have a parliamentary system simply act like we do.
Baud
@Geminid: I agree.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
You’re correct. There’s no quick fix. We have to grind them down over time. And we have to accept that they will hurt a lot of people on their way out the door.
What we can’t do IMHO is expect a quick fix and then get depressed when it doesn’t happen.
lowtechcyclist
@satby:
And evangelicals turned out for Reagan in 1980, on account of Falwell and Pat Robertson and James Dobson and all the rest of those abominations. That made a difference because the Moral Majority and the 700 Club and Focus on the Family and so forth were already big deals before 1980.
JML
@Baud: And some people fundamentally refuse to acknowledge how massively difficult it is to change the political system. Winning the game is hard enough, but changing the rules to the game that would put one team on the losing side for a generation? Nigh-impossible.
Blaming democrats for the GOP being trash is gaslighting bull$h!t.
p.a.
re: Garland. Don’t know his history besides the stolen USSC seat, but his appointment of Hur, seems to me, exposes him as a idiot who has been living in an isolation chamber for 20 years.
re: US exceptionalism. It is true, for one reason at least: Electoral College and (possibly) US Senate. The EC in effect gives representation to lines on a map. Senate also, but I don’t know enough about other representational systems to know if it’s that unusual in democracies to give equal representation to unequal populations.
At base, without the EC we have Gore, and ceteris paribus, Hillary. I know, can’t assume Hillary after Gore because history won’t work that way.
JML
@lowtechcyclist: the Moral Majority/700 Club v Reagan argument is a little bit “chicken or egg”, you know? The exact timing isn’t necessarily that important.
It’s also important to note that the GOP wasn’t as monolithic in the 70’s-80’s as it became in the 90’s, so you had parts of the country still electing republicans that were conservative on taxes but pretty mellow on social issues, supported education but were pro-business, and some of them had been around for quite a while and had always done their constituent service. Hells bells, MN Republicans were still known as the IRs, the Independent-Republican Party until like 1990.
RevRick
@Baud: I am not suggesting that we soft pedal anything, but if we want to really persuade the persuadables, maybe a better tactic is to unpack the unsustainable presuppositions of the right with pointed questions. Make the endgame getting people to ask themselves, “Do I really want my life to end up like that? Do I really want to hand over to my children a world like that?”
eversor
@sab:
Not entirely correct. I have to go through DCSA (defense counter intelligence security administration) which is out of Ft. Meade.
Who investigates you depends on what it is you are doing.
Baud
@RevRick:
Fine here. Those are good questions for people.
RevRick
@Baud: One of the troublesome things I find about this blog, and others like it, is that we work ourselves up into a froth of frustration.
Baud
@RevRick:
I feel like that’s a whole of Internet problem. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
stinger
I really, really love all this!
lowtechcyclist
@JML:
There’s nothing chicken-and-egg about it, the Moral Majority et al were a big deal before Reagan’s 1980 campaign. End of story.
Sure, they became an even bigger deal after that, but they would have anyway. They knew what they were doing, winning races from school board on up. They got a boost from Reagan’s win, but they weren’t doing a top-down approach and weren’t dependent on him.
Jim Appleton
@lowtechcyclist:
The high-grade campaign folks live and breathe this.
I’m an optimist.
Denali5
I think Garland remembered the impact that the Republicans on the January 6th Congressional Committee had. The trouble is that there now are no Republicans left who value the truth and the country over their Party. The times and challenges are so uncertain, volatile, and complex that simple answers and strong leaders appeal to voters. I do hold the press responsible for plumping TIFG. They have not done their job.
leeleeFL
@Aussie Sheila: Because they have to be approved by the Senate, and often, the Senate will stop a true Dem from getting the job. That’s my surmise!
Baud
@leeleeFL:
Special prosecutors don’t require Senate approval.
Glidwrith
@lowtechcyclist: 74 million is only 22% of the population. Since then, between old age, Covid, Dobbs and young folks coming of age, we’ve expanded our chunk of the electorate. Our job is to turn out our voters and we win.
PBK
Interesting thread. Always good to get a perspective from another part of the world.
AlaskaReader
@RevRick: Republican voters have proven they are awful people through their own repeated actions, they elect people like themselves, other awful people.
I’m not giving any of them the benefit of the doubt any longer, that’s been proven to be a mugs game.
Give them an inch they’ll take the Supreme Court.
I’m proposing we remove them all from any position of public trust. Elect Democrats, oust Republicans.
Violence isn’t something I’m promoting, and I’m not worried that what I am promoting will ’cause them’ to dig in.
They are dug in, they’re rooted in place. It’s time they are weeded out.
RaflW
Very late to this, but I gotta say, i’m loving how blunt and confrontational the Biden WH is being.
I think the howler monkey press conference after the Hur ‘report’ came out may have cemented in the White House coms dept that the only thing that gets respect in the fetid DC press corpse (not misspelled) is pugilism. Good.