This… this just gave me hope
— Fearlicious (@fearlicious.bsky.social) December 11, 2025 at 7:03 PM
Mike Johnson makes Kevin McCarthy look like Nancy Pelosi
— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) December 11, 2025 at 11:53 AM
===
I've staffed two impeachment trials…
I've battled a Rule 19 fight….
But never have I ever been a part of a successful House discharge petition… UNTIL TODAY.
Thank you, Congress, for passing the Protect America's Workforce Act to restore fed workers' union rights.
Senate, it's your turn.— Lauren Miller (@laurenmiller.bsky.social) December 11, 2025 at 4:48 PM
It appears within a couple of weeks more bills will be passed via discharge petition than by the majority party which.. yeah. What this means is Johnson is speaker in name only and has lost the house.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) December 11, 2025 at 9:05 PM
===
Texas & Florida are going to be Republican bloodbaths
— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) December 11, 2025 at 12:05 PM
fortunately for trump, the administration has a bag of carrots they're about to hand out, like
[taps earpiece] i'm getting word that the administration's bag is once again full of sticks— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) December 11, 2025 at 3:44 PM
going to be very difficult to stabilize a regime whose figurehead is becoming more unstable by the day
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) December 11, 2025 at 5:11 PM
On The Road – ema – Soy Mexicano, Esa Es Mi Bandera
Baud
That AP reporter must be applying for a job at the NYT.
BellyCat
The video of Obama at his old barber’s is gold.
goodmatt
I wonder what Trump is going to look like as they increase the dosage of whatever meds they have him on.
Gvg
@goodmatt: I think they have him on the wrong ones….I suspect they have been experimenting on meds and doses since the first administration and through the Biden one and now trying to correct his personality defects as if they were just health problems (and political inconveniences) instead of who and what he is. Now he is having visible health issues and they are limited by drug interaction in what they can do. Not to mention, that political appearances are probably overriding health priorities anyway. Also this time his family is not around all the time, not even Melania. I wonder if they don’t want to be close when a medical inquiry happens as will almost certainly be a result of cultivating a base of conspiracy nuts.
Sure the staff may try to delay announcement of death, but do you realize how that will set off his base when it comes out? It’s going to be worse than the Kennedy assassination theories for decades. Keep the tabloids in business another few decades.
Matt McIrvin
@Gvg: Maybe they’re in favor of those personality defects and are trying to enhance them.
NotMax
@goodmatt
The offspring of Lena the Hyena and Jabba the Hutt?
//
Baud
@Gvg:
His base will want to worship the relics.
Betty Cracker
From your keyboard to the FSM’s delicate al dente orecchiette, good sir!
Dorothy A. Winsor
@BellyCat: I loved it too! It’s great to see that we had a president who could act like a good human being.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Trivia Man
@goodmatt: my bet is on limiting or ending any public appearances. Citing vague “security concerns” he will not be seen y in very limited small, vetted groups with no outside video allowed. Even golfing he will clear the course.
zhena gogolia
Why bother with politics at all? According to the overnight Ukraine thread, Biden was the worst and last president of the Republic, and it’s all over, because of him. It’s all Biden’s fault.
I’m wondering who was the Democratic candidate in 2020 who could have ended Covid instantly, brought the economy back, withdrawn from Afghanistan without a single casualty, won the Ukraine war for Ukraine, and beaten Trump not once but twice.
Oh, and gotten Trump in prison within the first six months. I’m waiting for suggestions of names.
Suzanne
I think this demonstrates that most voters are just nakedly self-interested. Which is by no means a criticism. More a reminder to us that most people just want stuff to work well with minimal interference in their lives, and appeals to values are inherently less potent.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
People have opinions. Most will be in conflict with ours. What can you do except trudge forward?
They Call Me Noni
@goodmatt: I hope all his hair falls out. As vain as he is that would really send him over the edge.
Raoul Paste
That barbershop video is quite a contrast to the stupid gilded ballroom images. And I think the big O knows it.
It worked on me.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: I am just filled with rage at Trump day and night, I don’t need to be filled with rage at supposed “allies” as well.
narya
@They Call Me Noni: And if that happened, the wig placement would become as erratic as the makeup applications.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Same. It’s why I cut out a lot of political media. So much of it is invective and cynicism against us dressed up as insight. Not worth my time or mental health.
PaulWartenberg
DAMMIT BUCS YOU HAD ONE JOB. /walks into the Gulf of Mexico
Bowles is now blaming the players, which is never a good move for a coach on a hot seat.
Also wik, Mike Johnson should resign as Speaker. He’s clearly lost control of his own caucus.
Scout211
It’s Politico, but still, the “Republicans in disarray” and “Speaker Johnson is ineffective” stories always brighten my day.
And also:
Marjorie Taylor Greene Wildly Plotting to Oust Mike Johnson on Her Way Out of Congress: Report
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: You are a hardier soul than I am. I find them tiring and repititious. The certitude on display is also grating.
@Baud: I have too. That includes many posts and comments on this blog as well.
Baud
@Scout211:
Probably wouldn’t.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: There is a real schism in the D voters. Biden must go debate brought them to fore and they haven’t magically disappeared.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
No one has an obligation to subject themselves to anyone else.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: You are one of the commenters whose insights and humor makes this site bearable.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I think the schism is more online than with real world Ds.
The only question in my mind is whether is big enough to cost us a close election.
prostratedragon
Dawn the Hoosier way:
“Running Out of Fools,” Isaac Hayes
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Its also present in the dedicated volunteers/activists who work to get Ds elected. Each group thinks that they represent normies.
I agree with your assessment about the normies.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Thank you.
Suzanne
@Scout211: If MTG takes Mike Johnson out, I will grin. Republican-on-Republican violence is always a good time.
p.a.
@prostratedragon: Total speculation: don’t know if animated cream cheese sculpture Mike Pence has any pull left in Indiana, but I would find it delicious if he worked back-channels to defeat the new map in a “fuck you you asshole” operation.
lowtechcyclist
@zhena gogolia:
Just to get the exact quote in here: “Biden’s legacy as the worst and most impotent president in the history of the United States” – Adam Silverman, last night
He has fucking lost it.
narya
@prostratedragon: The side-eye in the end of that comment is interesting. I admit I was surprised by this–pleasantly surprised, but surprised nonetheless.
No One of Consequence
This is just such a fucking weird time to be alive. Never in all my days have I once thought that who’d turn out to be right wasn’t DesCartes, Wittgenstien, Seneca, Kant, Hume, Locke, Hobbes, Neitzsche, Heidiegger, Mill…
But Camus.
-NOoC
Layer8Problem
@zhena gogolia:
That was . . . something.
Nettoyeur
@Suzanne: Trump won on 2024 because he got more Latino support. The are getting what they voted for but don’t like it much.
Scout211
I agree with this. My personal life is filled with normie Democrats and a few normie Republicans and this schism is not evident anywhere in my world of the not very online. The only time I am aware of it is when jackals bring it up here.
Trivia Man
@They Call Me Noni: I cant wait to see him get a weave
Betty Cracker
@PaulWartenberg: I’ve never suspected it before, but now I wonder if maybe there’s some bad blood between Bowles and Morris. It’s unlike Bowles to lash out at players.
And did you see Morris mugging angrily/triumphantly at the fans as he walked onto the field at the end? I laughed out loud and said, “Your team still sucks, pal!” ;-)
Trivia Man
@Baud: “You don’t have to attend every
partyfight you are invited to”satby
@prostratedragon: The one thing you can count on Indiana rednecks for is pure oppositional defiant disorder, no matter who tries to tell them what to do. Besides, I think they foresaw losing seats if they diluted their already gerrymandered districts further.
Baud
@Trivia Man:
I’m never invited to parties or fights.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: Seconded! And the same to you.
Suzanne
@Nettoyeur:
Almost every demographic group shifted to the right. It’s not fair to blame any group in particular. It was a systemic failure and will require a systemic solution.
Baud
@satby:
I was surprised at how lopsided the vote was.
Soprano2
@Baud: Can you imagine how they would characterize a drop like that for a Democratic politician? Not as a slight drop, that’s for sure.
PaulWartenberg
@Betty Cracker:
(too busy drowning in the Gulf of Mexico to notice)
satby
@Baud: honestly, I wasn’t. Those people are assholes, but several aren’t stupid assholes.
Baud
@Soprano2:
It’s a big drop and a low bottom line. Especially for a Republican who has a large cult base.
Soprano2
That’s why I cannot read those threads, especially the comments. Biden wasn’t perfect on Ukraine, but he was head and shoulders above FFOTUS, as Harris would have been.
Or was it not the comments…..
Baud
@satby:
You know them better than I do. Just happy whenever anyone stands up to Trump.
jonas
@Gvg: For Susie Wiles, it’s like that classic “Got Milk” ad where this asshole yuppie gets hit by a car and wakes up in the afterlife with all the cookies he can eat. He thinks it’s amazing, but discovers there’s no milk anywhere. “Where am I?” he whispers looking scared. The “Got Milk” logo then appears in flames. Brilliant. Anyway, Wiles thought she landed a dream job I’m sure as chief of staff to the most powerful person on earth. Now she’s looking around asking herself, “Where am I….?” The words “MAGA” appear before her, enveloped in flame.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Suzanne:
This is true and why the abundance folks have a point.
Scout211
(Reuters)
(archive.ph version)
Oh, and did you know that Admiral Holsey is Black? I’m sure that was totally unrelated.
Baud
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
I don’t really follow them. What do they say that’s relevant to the self-interest point?
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Gin & Tonic
@Soprano2: Like any thread on this blog, there is wheat and chaff.
prostratedragon
@p.a.:
You might be right. His “Having a great time — don’t you wish you were here?” twitter postings during the 2024 convention displayed a malice I hadn’t been expecting.
jonas
Good God, can you imagine what a speaker election in the GOP caucus would look like right now? It would be a bloodbath. There would be a non-zero chance we’d actually end up with Jeffries in the chair as a bunch of retiring Republicans with no fucks left to give get fed up enough to cross over and put everyone out of their misery.
Soprano2
I think almost every group that isn’t MAGA voted to bring back 2019, because FFOTUS seemed to be promising he could do that and they foolishly believed him. As Baud reminds me, people hear what they want to hear. People were mad about Covid, about how it changed their lives, and they took it out on our candidate. I don’t know what you do about that.
ETA – you saw this all over the world, anger about Covid and immigration, it wasn’t just here. I think a good amount of people are finally waking up from their rage state and saying “OMG, what did we do?” but it’s going to take time to fix what they broke, and some of it can never be fixed.
Denali5
@schrodingers_cat:
Thirded.
narya
@jonas: Someone with a conscience/soul/whatever (so: not Susie W) would have learned from the experience w/ Ronnie and would vow to never do that again. Instead, she doubled down. While Vought and Musk and Hegseth and Noem and Kennedy (and and and) are destroying our infrastructure, Susie in many ways enabled all of it. I admit there’s a part of me that wonders what she gets out of it. I sort of understand the rest of them–they’re power-mad, and this is their chance to live out their fantasies. Maybe it’s the same for her, and she learned the wrong lessons from her experience.
lowtechcyclist
@Soprano2:
It was on the front page, above the fold.
Layer8Problem
@schrodingers_cat:
“The certitude on display is also grating.”
Isn’t it, though. I never assumed the paths forward on Ukraine or Gaza or prosecutions were intuitively obvious or that I had all the information needed to pass judgement. I don’t think we’ve heard nearly enough of what went on no matter what Tapper tells us he’s heard. But the utter certainty, the belief that the president obviously didn’t give a damn about human lives, just because, as if the armchair diplomats and geopolitical strategists had been as good as totally read in and the amateur prosecutors knew all the one weird tricks needed to put ’em all behind bars.
We’ll stand up another Democratic president, and we will charge him or her with fixing the mess, and we will then declare him to be the latest Biggest Failure Ever. Again.
Soprano2
@Gin & Tonic: Yeah, but the hating on Biden for not doing everything around Ukraine perfectly gets old fast. I agree he certainly wasn’t perfect; how are things now?
They Call Me Noni
@narya: Can’t you just picture how cheesy that toupee’ would look?
Soprano2
@lowtechcyclist: Well, on those threads “above the fold” can mean way, way down there. LOL I don’t think I even looked at that thread last night, but I’m not surprised. He’s so angry and frustrated by what’s happening with Ukraine because he feels he could see it coming and couldn’t actually do anything about it.
Baud
Viral on reddit right now
narya
@They Call Me Noni: Like a stuffed possum perched on top of his head?
zhena gogolia
@Soprano2: Both.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: I’ve been seeing a lot of blaming of people who didn’t vote for Trump at all and in fact tried their damndest to oppose him. But they did it wrong, in some way or another. The right way would have been such and such. Everyone’s got a genius plan that wasn’t followed.
It’s very Murc’s Law. And, in a way, dehumanizing of the people who are not being blamed. These Trump supporters, it’s like they’re barely even people, right? Wild beasts, no agency. They won’t change, they can’t change. Better focus our blame on the humans we understand, the liberals next to us.
Sorry, to a large extent I’m talking to myself here. These attacks really get to me because I have this voice in my head that tells me every grand, political evil in the world is personally my fault. The rationale keeps shifting but it’s been there for 35, 40 years. My wife says the guilt is my oldest, most toxic friend.
Baud
@Soprano2:
Didn’t read the post but
Democrats aren’t spouses that people are entitled to abuse. Trump is president and has been for nearly a year now. Take it out on him.
satby
So, anyone following the renewed contempt proceedings under Judge Boasberg? I guess things are heating up there. I would dearly love to see them bring down Emil Bove for lying to Congress next year 🤞
rikyrah
@Suzanne:
If only there had been a group that told them during the election season who had warned them about the Orange Menace 🤔🤔🤔
Oh well. That group was dismissed by a majority of Latino men
Suzanne
@Soprano2:
People are mad about a lot of things. Some of them are valid things to be mad about. Some of those valid things even have a political solution. But people also make lots of bad decisions. In all arenas of life, not just the voting booth.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Baud: The idea is that excessive, ill thought regulation constrains the ability of government to make people’s lives better AND frustrates people because it also constrains their ability to make their own lives better. So basically, it results in frustrating and ineffective government, even on goals liberals support, like expanding clean energy. Case in point, it takes 5-15 years to build a wind farm in California. That’s completely ridiculous. The bulk of that time is wasted on the regulatory burden. How do you get to zero emissions in any reasonable time if even green energy development is slowed to a painful crawl by stupid red tape?
That’s just one example. Naked self-interest means people want more prosperity and less frustration. Thus, abundance folks have a point.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: People shouldn’t be abusing their spouses either.
Gin & Tonic
@Soprano2: So those threads aren’t for everyone. They are important to me, and I respect Cole for continuing to provide space for them. But using an unrelated thread, which everyone knows Adam will not read, to air grievances about an earlier thread, doesn’t seem productive.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Yeah, the difference between Latino men and other groups that shifted right is that they crossed the magical 50% mark.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Wise words.
MinuteMan
@lowtechcyclist:
I think that judgment was mostly limited to the foreign policy arena and particularly Gaza and Ukraine. In a close election year Gaza was probably a no win situation since I think the Israel-First lobby is pretty rabid. The tepid support for Ukraine seems to be more culpable but might not have changed things to much: once the Russian blitzkrieg failed it was going to be a way of attrition like Afghanistan unless there was a Dien Bien Phu like incident. Taking the war to Russian infrastructure might turn the tide though.
Baud
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Thanks.
Baud
@Gin & Tonic:
Good advice.
satby
@Baud: the bottom line is that enough people were racist / misogynistic/ both to put the felon back into the White House. That was the only shift right, and now some of the perpetrators are feeling the effects and are unhappy. Fuckem*
* RIP ef
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
I take particular note of liberals who spend more time complaining about other liberals/leftists for their insufficient loyalty/DOIN IT RONG than they actually direct at the other side. It’s a toxic dynamic that reminds me of that I have observed in my family. It reminds me very much of the blame and responsibility that the caregiving daughters get heaped on them. At core, it’s an attitude of entitlement.
SiubhanDuinne
@They Call Me Noni:
[smiles broadly] Yes.
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: Is he open to a difference of opinion and criticism of his pronouncements on his threads
FWIW I think zhena g can comment about whatever she wants.
MagdaInBlack
@Gin & Tonic: TY
Matt McIrvin
@MinuteMan: I also don’t see how more forthright support for Ukraine would have helped the Democrats politically. I don’t think it was a vote winner–most Americans don’t care about Ukraine/Russia all that strongly; they may favor Ukraine on balance but they have an isolationist streak if the American interest isn’t blindingly obvious; we had the spectacle of Republicans selling themselves as the peace party as it was.
On Israel/Gaza, Americans do care but it’s a split right down the middle of our side’s coalition, no way to play it that’s a winner. When it’s politically salient, we lose. (Interestingly, though, we’re starting to see that split on the other side too, for very nasty reasons.)
tam1MI
Why, Johnny Unbeatable, of course!
Gin & Tonic
@schrodingers_cat: The very first comment last night disagreed with him.
But I’m not going to continue debating an unrelated thread here this morning.
Baud
Politico, via Reddit
tobie
@zhena gogolia: Agree. The longing for a President with magical powers is strong in some circles.
lowtechcyclist
@Soprano2:
Tru dat, but that’s his choice, and if it bothers him or his acolytes that I see things he says as I’m trying to scroll past, and have a problem with them, that’s their tough luck. And if Adam is going to be fucking nuts on the front page (“chaff”) and I happen to see it, I’m gonna say so. Hence my remarks here.
Jackie
@p.a.:
I have those thoughts, too. I would not be surprised in the least.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic:
Thank you for saying that. I was sitting here eating my soup for breakfast (don’t judge) trying to figure out how to say exactly that.
And of course your “doesn’t seem productive” is a better than what I was thinking.
Now that I’ve finished eating my soup, I want to thank you for saying that.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
I will judge you in an unrelated thread.
tam1MI
It already did cost us a close election.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: I commented in the thread in question. But I didn’t see it until this morning, so it’s pretty dead.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, the question of whether or not being more supportive of Ukraine would have made a difference is an interesting question. Ohio and Pennsylvania both have relatively large populations of Ukrainian descent. I tend to agree with you — likely everyone who cared enough for it to be a critical issue was already voting blue — but I also don’t think it’s unreasonable or disloyal for people on our side of the aisle to offer good-faith criticism of Biden’s handling of the situation. Our leaders sign up for criticism, it’s part of the job.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: When it comes to Balloon Juice threads, I am a fan of “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”.
Baud
@tam1MI:
Right. It’s not a hypothetical. But it’s still a question whether and how whatever schism exists will affect future elections.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Sure. But leaders also have supporters who will defend them. You can’t have one without the other.
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl: This morning when I saw those comments both in the OP and in the thread, I seriously questioned whether I should continue to participate in this community.
Harrison Wesley
@satby: So the state motto is “You’re not the boss of me?”
Chief Oshkosh
@No One of Consequence: I ain’t edumacated enough to know the reference. What did Camus get right that all those other vaguely important people didn’t? Not saying Camus doesn’t deserve the shout-out, but I’m not grokkin’ it.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
You’re, of course, free to do what’s best for you. But why not just skip Adam’s threads, or just read his tweets without reading his commentary? Most posts here don’t reflect his opinion.
jonas
@narya: She had certainly hoped to oversee the destruction of liberal America along with Voght, Miller, et al., but instead she finds herself running around trying to manage an increasingly ill, sundowning, and unhinged president while everything else goes to shit.
WTFGhost
@Gvg: Personality defects are the sorts of things you can’t drug away, in point of fact. The idea is, some things are fundamental to who and what we are – personality – and some things might be due to pain or other issues, which might be drugged away.
(Full disclosure: my pain causes psych symptoms; I’m sure at least some psych symptoms are pain, while others may not be.)
If you’re cranky and unpleasant, and your doctor says “with no pleasure in ordinary activities, frequent fatigue, and a sense that nothing can get better, I suggest you try Prozac, for an episode of Major Depression Disorder, and if you feel better, in six months, I’ll transition you off.” That might fix you up, and you’ll stop being cranky and unpleasant, relative to your norm. But if you’re a type A-for-angry person, you’ll still be snapping at people, barking out orders, etc., you’ll just be more willing to apologize when you realized you barked at the wrong person, and then go barking at the right one.
I’m sorry – I’m being pedantic, because I was nearly a psych minor in college.
Trump will always be a nasty, domineering, petty, tyrant who want to make you sit through a room clearing (mostly) fart that he smugly cuts loose, because you have no choice, because he’s the President. You could give him charcoal caps in hopes of dropping the stink, but he’ll always be the proverbial skunk at the picnic who wants to spray the ham and fried chicken.
Layer8Problem
@Suzanne:
Good faith criticism eschews absolutes in my estimation.
Soprano2
@Baud: I agree, but I think a lot of his frustration is about what the Biden administration did and didn’t do, which is why he blames Biden.
Suzanne
@Baud:
That’s also fine. My point is that I don’t believe voters owe any leader “loyalty”. But anyone can support anyone they want, and that’s great, and everyone’s free to offer their viewpoint and we can debate it in good faith here and hopefully we all get a little smarter in the process.
Expecting loyalty from voters strikes me as a banana republic, cult-of-personality tendency. I don’t like it. It doesn’t feel like how I conceive of my American-ness.
satby
@Harrison Wesley: yep, pretty much. Also “no such thing as a common good”.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: I agree that it was stupid to believe that anyone could bring back 2019, and voting for someone who promised to do that was an extremely bad idea. I understand the longing, sometimes I have it, but I know better than to think a politician can do it. As Baud says, people hear what they want to hear and ignore the rest.
Layer8Problem
@Chief Oshkosh:
Maybe rolling boulders up hills that keep rolling back down can be habit-forming?
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: I’ll be blunter: I suspect that if Biden had gone in harder on Ukraine, in that timeline, Ukraine would be much better off today, the strategic position of the free world would be better… and we’d all be blaming Biden’s hawkishness for Biden or Harris losing to Trump.
Baud
@Soprano2:
I understand. Doesn’t make it acceptable. Trump has agency. Voters have agency. Neither Biden nor any other Dem is morally responsible for other people because of a perceived failure to adopt a preferred strategy for dealing with other people.
Suzanne
@Layer8Problem: I agree with that. But I also think Adam has also earned some credibility here over the years and I can understand his viewpoint.
In short: I think everyone’s responses have been reasonable. We don’t have to agree or be identically calibrated on every issue.
tobie
@Suzanne:
Agree but that requires recognition that some situations are difficult and involve multiple domestic and geopolitical factors as well as intelligence assessments that none of us is privy to. Certitude is easy but it can also be a form of bad faith. It’s the conviction that we know best and could have powered Ukraine to victory easily with our own strategies that is annoying.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I agree. Both Obama and Biden were saddled with war weariness from Bush’s time. We now see that Republicans aren’t subject to the same constraint, although even there, there is some apprehension.
But who really knows? It’s all alternative history.
jonas
That was basically it. Because the average voter has no idea how anything in the world three inches beyond their own noses works, they actually thought Trump could snap his fingers the morning of Jan 22 and everything would be back to normal. It was such a cynical, transparent lie, and now we’re all paying for those peoples’ ignorance and gullibility.
Soprano2
@Gin & Tonic: I didn’t bring it up, I was just responding to it. I can appreciate the frustration, but it’s tiring to read sometimes. If he really did say something like Biden was the worst president ever, I think that’s over the top.
Gin & Tonic
@WaterGirl: Phở is commonly eaten for breakfast in Viet Nam.
Chief Oshkosh
Anybody seen this NTSB presser about the NDAA? Whoo-boy, SOMEbody just got a new asshole ripped.
youtu.be/UFAyD2Xmxpc?si=Mg6qQjo6EClkuN0N
I wonder which idiot Republicans slipped into the bill the bit about unhindered access to DCA airpspace?
WaterGirl
@Baud: Ha!
RevRick
@Baud: Well, “vengeance is mine, says the Lord,” and the way God gets revenge is by forgiving us. We are the Cains, slaying Abels, and blaming God for our actions is a story as old as the hills.
LAC
@rikyrah: yeah….that group. Geez, who was that group again? The group that didn’t turn rightward, continues to get insulted in every way possible and is tired of cutting people slack? 🤔
Matt McIrvin
@jonas: This is one of the reasons I actually dread what happens if Trump dies in office. You don’t want to see the J. D. Vance administration remake America at warp speed. He doesn’t have the broad-base charisma juice but his insanity is way more focused.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, that’s an interesting thought experiment.
Soprano2
I’m fortunate that I’m not subjected to that, because there’s no one else who thinks they could be doing it better. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who is criticized like that from an outside observer should be free to say “Fuck you, come do it and then tell me what you think” in just those words. If you’re not dealing with it you have NO IDEA what’s involved. Sometimes I am so tired…..the other night I was watching Taylor Swift on Colbert. I fell asleep and woke up on the couch at 3:30 a.m.!
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia
I question myself about it everytime I post here. So you are not alone in that thought.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: There’s something about Adam’s pronouncements on domestic politics that really awakens a self-destructive doom loop in my brain. It’s the main reason I stay away from his threads most of the time.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
When somebody brings up a voting shift by some block, it’s automatically assumed that we’re somehow “blaming” those people for voting the way they did.
At least in this space, that’s not the case despite how it’s constantly being re-framed that way.
Latino voters as a bloc shifted somewhat. I’m not blaming them, I want to understand why and how we as a party can better address their needs and priorities for example.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
On a completely different topic, I’m in the recovery room after getting my throat cut and an artificial vocal cord installed, I’m still coming off the sedatives, and I think I’m still currently in better shape than the First Felon, both medically and cognitively.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: Sorry to hear that.
My thoughts?
We have doom and gloom. But we also have hope and goodness and political action. We have great posts every morning filled with all sorts of great information that many of us would not otherwise see. We have amazing wordsmiths and sharp tongues (in the best possible way). We have pets and food and tangible support for people in the community when they need help.
A single thread or one front-pager is not the entirety of this community.
satby
@Suzanne: I think if we want elected officials to do the right thing according to our laws, the Constitution, science, and whatever other rational inputs into lawmaking apply, then we need to support them, i.e. be loyal, at least until such time as needs or they change or refuse to change. We need to have their backs against the ones who enter office with motives other than what I outlined above. Visionary changes and progressive policy take more than an election cycle to stick. If it’s all just transactional, what’s the point? That’s when we get these wild swings of the pendulum.
Baud
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
Also morally and olfactorally.
Soprano2
@zhena gogolia: I think those comments are not reflective of the community as a whole. Honestly, I think it’s mostly frustration at how things are going and the feeling of being powerless to do anything about it.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Yeah, I’m getting back in the boat. I haven’t looked in a long while, so I was shocked at how it had escalated.
Betty Cracker
@PaulWartenberg: LOL! FWIW, I blame my sister. She attended the game, which always doubles the chance we’ll lose to a less talented opponent. She’s a curse to the Rays as well. Next year, I will devise strategies to discourage her from attending live events. It’s okay if she watches games on TV.
Layer8Problem
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s a take I can agree with. Winning the next election in order to prevent Very Bad Outcomes was a inconvenient and perverse element in our foreign policy strategy. Funny how complicated life can be. But simple uncomplicated answers are always the best, sorry H. L. Mencken.
Suzanne
@tobie:
Sure, but certitude is thrown out all the time here.
The arguments I find the most interesting are like Matt McIrvin’s…. what was the best thing to do in a given situation is a separate question, to me, than what might have changed the outcome of the election.
LAC
@Baud: That is what i do. That post is a too grim for late night reading normally and I get the “what I write is too important for any pushback” vibe from the author. I need my sleep.
WaterGirl
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: Oh my gosh, that means that at least the scariest part is behind you.
Thank you so much for letting us know.
I have been thinking of you and your upcoming procedure every day, but I haven’t said anything in case you were (amazingly) able to not think about what was ahead for every single minute, I didn’t want to remind you.
zhena gogolia
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: So glad to see you!
WTFGhost
@narya: I suspect “Susie Trump” is a product of the Old South, like a lot of them, where a man could be a Real Man, by murdering “lesser men” in duels or forcing them to back down in any conflict. They wanted lesser people to be forced to eat shit to prove they weren’t the greater men, and, of course, you needed n-words around to make even the least white person know they could rape and murder a Black woman, and no one would care, except Black people, who didn’t count in the minds of the Old South.
These people really believe there was something good or grand about the Old South, because it was so close to a monarchy. Remember Shirley Sherrod, who got fired for giving a speech in which she revealed her dad was murdered, in front of witnesses, and no one was willing to indict the murderer? Yeah, probably not. No one paid any attention to that part of her speech. They did pay attention when she revealed that she did her job (but nothing more) for a poor, white, farmer one day, and they called for her head… got it too. That’s the Old South for you; that’s your Donald Trump (would-be northern investor in slave trade) and Susan Wiles (CoS and would-be special assistant to Ghislane Maxwell regarding procurements of slave staff), your John Roberts, your Clarence Thomas (“lemme show you stupid slaves how contempt-worthy you are!”), etc..
They really do believe that suffering is the way of life for the lessers, and it’s not possible to bring about a happy, egalitarian society. No wonder they hate European democracies so much!
schrodingers_cat
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Thank you. There are self proclaimed feminists in this space whose feminisim is not intersectional. Just like many of their suffragette sisters.
satby
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: good to hear you’re doing ok.
Suzanne
@satby: I think there’s a difference between adherence to a set of ideas/values and loyalty to a person/figure. I’m an every-time Dem voter, because as you note, there’s only one party within the realm of sanity and rationality. But I don’t ever want to feel “loyalty” to a specific person. That feels more like fandom to me.
Steve in the ATL
@Betty Cracker:
He’s an idiot to be acting cocky about anything. His days are numbered, and the only reason he hasn’t been fired yet is that Arthur Blank is as incompetent an owner as Raheem is a head coach.
Baud
@Suzanne:
How do you tell the difference?
Layer8Problem
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
Good news. Best wishes and a quick recovery.
Hoodie
WTFGhost
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: glad to hear the good news! I felt a bit funny wishing you luck, without knowing you well, but I’m always glad for happiness.
Suzanne
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: GREAT NEWS! I hope you’re feeling pleasantly loopy and comfortable. Can you watch The Price is Right there?
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: There’s a tendency among every group of people who talk about politics to assume that what they want, or what is objectively good by their lights, is also politically popular. It’s sometimes called “The Pundit’s Fallacy” (I think Matthew Yglesias of all people coined that?) It is often tragically wrong.
I have more of a fatalist/ironic attitude by default, that whatever I want is probably a landslide loser. This comes from growing up as a young Carter/Mondale/Dukakis supporter and probably makes me a poor activist.
Harrison Wesley
@RevRick: You never saw “Conan the Evangelist?”
CCL
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: best wishes for a fast and relatively painless recovery.
Suzanne
@Baud: I try to think about which candidate I feel the most aligned with separately from who I think is the most likely to win. I will note that I haven’t always done this successfully and I usually regret it.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Actually, I think it would make you a good activist. A good (lefty) activist is one that recognizes the political limits of what they want and figures out a way to push their agenda forward within those limits.
A bad activist harms their objective by punishing politicians over which they have influence for not being good enough.
Matt McIrvin
@Gin & Tonic: Now that is a civilized country.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Thanks. Understood. Predictions are hard.
tobie
@Suzanne: I don’t think I talked about the electoral consequences of of specific decisions. It’s just not something I do. What bothers me is when people act like complex problems can be solved easily. It’s misleading, leads to easy disappointment, and degrades political discourse in this country. It also distorts the decision we actually make when we go to the polls. We vote for candidate whose judgment we trust, even when we won’t always agree with them. It’s the best we can do since we don’t have aides reading reports on the socioeconomic and geopolitical consequences of every policy proposal. I appreciate the info Adam posts. I also try to read Yaroslav Trofimov and Michael Weiss regularly on Ukraine since they follow the conflict closely and are well-versed in Eastern European politics.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Suzanne: TPIR doesn’t play in Athens, and the sedatives may still be messing with my brain’s translator subroutines. I’m just trying to sleep it off for now.
RevRick
@zhena gogolia: Adam is somewhat of a zealot and absolutely convinced of the rightness of his opinions. And having the advantage of 20-20 hindsight can criticize every decision ever made. I mean if we really want to go down that path, Lincoln made the worst blunder of all time by replacing Hannibal Hamlin, a solid New England abolitionist, as his VP with the disaster that would be Andrew Johnson. Reconstruction would have looked a lot different.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: I almost always vote for losing candidates in contested Democratic primaries, and it’s probably because I’ve come to vote my policy preferences instead of trying to game out electability… but that’s because I’ve also learned I’m terrible at judging electability, to the point that I might as well not try.
(The most spectacular exception to this was Barack Obama– the one time my favorite guy won the whole megillah. And guess what, now people are blaming *him* for losing America and causing Trumpworld some way or another. Yeah, the cynic in me says, I can *see* the reason.)
Suzanne
@Baud: I should have added, I also try to think about governing and winning elections as totally separate skillsets, and ultimately making a judgment of a candidate’s likely effectiveness with a vote doesn’t require me to think they’re great at both things.
Constantly trying to sort through my thoughts on this. I’ve mentioned that I have been thinking a great deal in recent months about the distinction between populism vs. good governance on behalf of Americans. Similar vibe.
Geminid
@p.a.: According to Adam Wren, Politico Indiana reporter, it was former governor Mitch Daniels who helped organize opposition to the gerrymander bill.
The Daniels camp commented that while Daniels did not “make” phone calls, he “took” phone calls. So evidently, the word went out: “Call Mitch.”
@Jackie:
marklar
Perhaps part of Biden’s thinking was that he had to get all of Europe (not just countries bordering on Russia) to engage in standing up to Russian aggression. That leads to two questions:
Do we think his being more hawkish would have enabled him to be more successful in doing so (i.e., coalition building)?
If he hadn’t been able to get all of Europe involved in supporting Ukraine, what would happen if a klepto-isolationist won the next election, leaving Ukraine with practically NO outside support?
Coalition building has always been part of Biden’s ethos. We don’t know that the outcomes to these questions would be, but to suggest that we know that things would be better had Biden been more aggressive is to ignore the possibility that things could just as well be a whole lot worse.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
One of the primary causes for the present and the future is the past.
Suzanne
@tobie: I’m sorry, I was unclear. I am thinking about Matt McIrvin’s idea that we could have taken Adam’s preferred stance on Ukraine (possibly the correct one) and still lost the election. I might agree. There’s been a lot of certitude here for the last 18 months about what would have won the election, and I think it’s a separate question from what were the right policy actions. I have been thinking a great deal about why Americans vote for the people who do the things other than the things Americans say they want.
Layer8Problem
@RevRick:
That’s why I avoid his posts’ comment sections and take his pronouncements with a grain of salt. He’s a subject matter expert and I give his statements more value than others of equal absolute certainty.
gene108
@Matt McIrvin:
The U.S. is in a no win situation regarding domestic politics and Israel, but I think Israel burned a lot of bridges here with their actions in Gaza. Younger generations don’t have the positive view of Israel that older generations have. Plus, the right-wing anti-Semite’s who are irregular voters, but turned out for Trump, are not happy Trump bombed Iran on behalf of Israel.
Geminid
@Soprano2: That was commenter who said that. Silverman was more measured in his criticism, and didn’t say anything about Joe Biden and his team he hasn’t said meny times before. But the commenter is very angry about the current situation and feels threatened personally, and he took his anger and fear out on Biden.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but he often seems to act like a guy who has a historically-informed apocalyptic vision of a United States headed for a hot civil war (which is itself a theater of World War III), and a feeling that all the political stuff we do in this blog is pointless and that we should instead all be preparing for that hot civil war… but he knows that for various reasons he can’t come out and say that, he has to circumlocute. So there’s always this tension.
Personally, my main concern is the possibility that he’s right. But the thought doesn’t lead me to useful places, that’s the problem.
Some of us here are already thinking about fighting that war. Me, my plan if it goes down is to die. Old dog, new tricks, I’ve never been your war or violence guy. Sorry.
gene108
@marklar:
Biden’s nat sec team was pretty clear they feared nuclear war, if they provoked Putin too much. They hedged their support for Ukraine based on WCPD (what could Putin do) if the U.S. was seen as escalating or enabling attacks on Ukraine.
One thing Adam mentioned in one of his threads was when he was advising the U.S. military in 2014, I think, and Russia first invaded Ukraine, he followed the conventional thinking of not wanting to provoke or destabilize Russia. Some of his thinking on Ukraine comes from realizing he was wrong.
@Matt McIrvin:
Having something you support succeed creates more positive vibes than it not succeeding, even if the lack of success is not an actual failure.
It’s like getting a C on a test instead of an A. Getting a C isn’t failure, but no one’s bragging about it.
Geminid
@Hoodie: Adam Silverman doesn’t need a break. In my opinion, people discussing him would do better to take a break.
But I’ll desregard my own advice to observe that Silverman’s criticisms of Biden are not made in “hindsight.” He has made these criticisms in real time throughout this war, as the the Biden administration made the decisions in question.
I disagree with a lot of Adam Silverman’s analyses, and I’ve tangled with him over some of them.. But I think Silverman’s Ukraine posts are very valuable and a real credit to this blog, and people ought to get off his back.
lashonharangue
Not commenting on last night’s thread but I think most people here are focused too much on the politicians and not enough on the structural issues. I believe the U.S. has been in a slow rolling constitutional crisis for decades, at least since Gingrich.
It is impossible to have a normal budgeting process. It is almost always CRs and reconciliation actions. This limits what the bureaucracy can do productively with no ability to have a stable planning process.
Everything requires 60 Senate votes. So both D and R presidents rely on Executive Orders which constantly get reversed.
Our Congressional seats are way too few for our population which tends to make many of them less connected to their constituents. And over time the staff with subject matter expertise have been replaced by those skilled in social media.
I would like some politicians to talk specifically about reconstructing our democracy, not just restoring the rule of law, necessary as that is.
HinTN
@Matt McIrvin:
I think Adam’s point, with which I generally agree, is that leadership to do what’s right is far more important than political considerations. We may differ in our assessment of what’s “right” but leadership that clearly states what they think it is and acts accordingly should be valued.
Baud
@lashonharangue:
Agree. Although, I believe when Dems had a trifecta, they had regular budgeting.
The filibuster skews everything legislative. It’s our biggest fixable problem, but we have to be emotionally prepared for when the Republicans have a trifecta again if we get rid of it.
schrodingers_cat
@lashonharangue: Good points.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Attribution errors are everywhere in political analysis and it’s extremely hard to figure out why anything happened. Sometimes something is overdetermined. But I suspect the 2024 election was mostly not about foreign affairs at all (and to the minor extent it was, the issue was Israel/Palestine, not Ukraine). It was mostly about COVID and its economic fallout. Which was also what 2020 was about!
I think Trump’s reelection was a near certainty the moment the COVID-19 virus mutated into the extremely contagious Omicron variant. That changed the whole dynamic of the pandemic from a situation Biden was spectacularly winning to one he was losing, and it gave the antivax movement a huge boost by changing the vaccine story from a simple and seemingly miraculous one to a tough and nuanced one. Nuance requires explanation and as they say in politics, when you’re explaining, you’re losing.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: The press turned against Biden from the get go. During the Afghan withdrawal they pounced on him like hyenas.
Dave
@satby: It’s difficult because obviously mindless support isn’t acceptable but if you say something like I support Y because because of all these things while believing that they, in good faith, made decisions regarding issue Z that is disagree with it is either tuned out as blah blah blah or treated as a full throated break and attack regardless.
Miss Bianca
@Soprano2: why the fuck would anyone want to bring back 2019? JESUS CHRIST, TRUMP WAS THE POTUS THEN, TOO. It’s not like shit was wonderful before Covid hit.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud:
Whoa (in a Keanu-like way)
schrodingers_cat
@Miss Bianca: This. He was attacking different immigrant groups and minorities and long term visa holders daily among the other horrible things that were happening
leeleeFL
@Betty Cracker: winner if the Intertubes this Day of Our Lord 2025! F—in genius!
Elizabelle
@schrodingers_cat: I despise Mr and Mrs Peter Baker. They were Hyenas in Chief. Fuck them both.
Look at what THEY, not Joe Biden, wrought. Miserable sacks of shit, with prominent MSM perches.
Miss Bianca
@lashonharangue: Agreed.
leeleeFL
@Baud: Perfect rejoinder, Baud!
Elizabelle
@lashonharangue: Excellent post.
zhena gogolia
@marklar: Right.
I also didn’t see a great groundswell of support from the American people for a more aggressive approach to Ukraine.
Soprano2
@Geminid: Actually, I looked at the thread, and they both said it. I agree that Adam has been lodging these criticisms in real time, but saying “worst president ever” is kind of over the top don’t you think? Everyone’s talking as if Ukraine has already lost.
Matt McIrvin
@Miss Bianca: If you were not in a group that Trump was directly targeting, and you were not paying much attention to politics, things were pretty good. The economy was strong (though with the long-term structural class inequities that are always there, and I find it curious that somehow Democrats get consistently blamed for these inequities during times of “good economy” and Republicans don’t).
Hurricane Maria was a catastrophe that would have been played as a Katrina-level political hit if it had happened on the mainland, but it was Puerto Rico so most of us didn’t care. (When hurricanes did hit the mainland, they were in states that were politically sympathetic to Trump so he actually made sure they got some help.)
Trump’s behavior was like a 24/7 assault on the senses even then, but there was a sense that it was all for show, he wasn’t really wrecking the store. He was wrecking some parts of the store, particularly the State Department, but they were bits that most voters didn’t care about.
I recall all these “God protects children and fools” think pieces about how Trump had been lucky, that he hadn’t really been challenged by a big exogenous crisis to test him as an administrator rather than as a propagandist and clown.
Then the big exogenous crisis hit, and it was so bad that it could make people nostalgic for just about anything.
WTFGhost
@Suzanne: Well, part of it is, Republicans really do want the President to break the law. I’m not sure why it gets them so hot and bothered, but just like with Dobson and spanking, it seems to be sexual in nature. You know Roberts was fapping under his robe while writing the Presidential immunity decision, and the only question was whether it was metaphorical or literal.
So to them, loyalty to a person matters. You need to clam up, and refuse to say anything incriminating. They don’t want to be loyal to the USA, because that might ruin their dream.
@zhena gogolia: Meh. Scold people for being irrational gits sometimes, you’ll never stop scolding. Tell me I was a right bastard yesterday, I’ll say “this isn’t yesterday, is it?”
@lowtechcyclist: Um… with warm regards, why drag an argument into a new thread?
@Baud: Um, you do realize that the three fellows who threatened to “beat you up,” “break your effing neck,” and the colorful fellow who threatened to “rip off your head, partway, to crap down your neckhole, before ripping your head the rest of the way off” – they were offering a scuffle… a conflict… a violent altercation….
I’m not going to talk parties, I don’t know from parties, I’m just saying what I do know, and that is, you might be a bit slow in recognition of the invitations.
@PaulWartenberg: (throws a Life Saver. Pauses, turns, throws a Life Preserver. Damn language processing/trademark issues.)
@Soprano2: in retrospect, with 20/20 hindsight, Biden failed gloriously with respect to Ukraine, but, so did everyone else. Remember, people offered Zelenskyy asylum, not weapons, initially. Then, yes, today, we now know that Biden should have let Ukraine hurt Russia, cost them enough that Putin is forced to call off the war. But at the times those decisions were made, no one realized that SCOTUS was going to hand Trump a “Get Out Of Responsibility, Free!” card. The naked cowardice of the Republican Party, the absolute, total, corruption of the Republican branch of the Federal government, including the federal courts (which are controlled by Republicans, not “conservatives”), those are all what put us where we are.
Because only Trump (as far as I know) was willing to throw Ukraine completely under the bus. ONLY Trump. And no one could have easily foreseen just how evil Republicans in 2024 would be, lying and abusing the powers of their office, to re-elect Trump. Someday, they will be seen as worse than Nazi Germans, because the stakes were just so, so, so, low, and yet, they chose fascism anyway, to dump all-but literal shit all over the shining city on the hill.
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve been battling voices like that for decades. I later learned that they were, quite literally, pain. My pain might have directly caused them, or, may have indirectly caused them, but, blocked my normal coping mechanisms, the ones that would let me shunt the ugly feeling away, you see? And for me, it was a relief to understand that sometimes, it just happens. It’s not that my brain isn’t learning – it’s that my neurology has a shiv. So, while ordinary folks can dodge that guilt feeling entirely, you might be stuck having to deal with it, but, it doesn’t mean your sense of self is weak, or damaged, it might just be a literal injury that twinges sometimes.
Geminid
@Soprano2: I guess I will have to reread Silverman’s post. I don’t recall him saying Joe Biden was the worst president ever. I know a commenter said that and was quite vehement about it.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: And, curiously, Adam is also the one reminding us that Ukraine hasn’t lost (which is absolutely amazing if you think about it, though it’s consistent with patterns in asymmetric warfare).
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: Many Ds also don’t like immigrants or potential immigrants if they see them as direct competion, case in point, international students and work visa holders.
We have heard both these groups described in less than flattering terms on this blog, Daily Kos and similar spaces.
Quiltingfool
@Gin & Tonic: I read the posts on Ukraine because I need to bear witness. I don’t want Ukraine to be forgotten.
I appreciate the work done by Adam so we can keep apprised of the situation.
It hurts my heart to read about all the horrors Ukrainians must bear. I wish Americans had half the fortitude and courage as Ukrainians. I suspect we wouldn’t fare too well if we were in their shoes.
zhena gogolia
@Geminid:
Just to set the record straight. From the original post:
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Along with this, I think the relatively large numbers of asylum seekers crossing the border, and inflation/housing prices climbing so fast relative to wages basically created a perfect storm that meant that no one was happy. And, as you say, the situation was a tough one that required history and nuance to understand, and that sucks.
WTFGhost
@Matt McIrvin: @Matt McIrvin: Yeah, but, remember, Republicans know that Trump is so effing stupid he thought that bleach might be a miracle Covid-19 cure, and that he was the first person in the room to have thought of that as a possibility, “since it kills the virus so quickly.” They knew that he was that stupid in an exogenous crisis, and put him in charge again.
And what historians will find puzzling is how we just kind of accept it, as a given, without mentioning it.
“Excuse me, ma’am, you son is gnawing on my leg.”
“Oh, yes, he does that.”
“And you’re not going to try to stop him?”
“Meh, he doesn’t like it when I try to stop him, though I do occasionally remind him that it’s antisocial behavior. It never affects polling, so I’ve stopped bringing up unpleasant topics that might reduce readership, which would reduce advertising revenue, for a $0 benefit called ‘personal and professional integrity.’ Why do you ask?”
“BECAUSE YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO CARE!!!”
tam1MI
@Geminid: For the record, this is exactly what Adam said:
Quiltingfool
@Matt McIrvin: I’m so old I remember when we weren’t big fans of the Soviets/Russia. Maybe not Russians, per se, but their government.
I’m still not a fan. That asshole Putin treats his own people like shit. He needs to go away, one way or another. That’s up to the Russian people though.
We have our own asshole who needs to go away; well, we have MANY assholes who need to be gone. If not gone, be seriously shunned.
Matt McIrvin
@WTFGhost: Well, I’ve got multiple sources of intermittent chronic pain thanks to being in my late fifties, but most of them weren’t there when I was a lad and all of this started.
A consequence of having to deal with gangs of seemingly undefeatable bullies in my early adolescence was that I put a huge amount of stock in being Good. The bar for being good in that environment was so low that it was something I could easily manage and that would make me feel superior–I couldn’t beat them, but I was better than them. But if I slipped up and said or did something that inadvertently hurt somebody (which happens to us all), I felt it just like a physical gut-punch. It could stagger me for days.
Of course, the problem is that when you become an adult, you realize that “not physically beating smaller kids up all the time” is kind of an insufficient condition for being Good. There are a lot more ways to be Bad, and in a world of connected systems of influence and consumption, most of them are things you can do accidentally just by living your life as a seemingly OK person. And I became extremely anxious about that. You can make yourself completely nuts trying to avoid every way of being Bad.
(You see this theme sometimes in, say, terrorist manifestoes: they need a reason why they actually must kill civilians, so they go on about how there are no innocents for this or that very important indirect reason. I’m, like, the one guy who actually feels guilty when I see these.)
It’s also an entirely negative conception of goodness, a goodness that consists entirely in never doing harm, and it causes a bias toward inaction that can lead to avoiding doing positive good. (What if doing good accidentally causes something bad? Better not risk it! Warning about those unintended perverse consequences is always a hallmark of conservative arguments against any kind of change or activity–the conclusion is always that it’s better to do nothing.)
And, in fact, when I look back on my life, most of my greatest mistakes when dealing with other people have been sins of inaction. There was something I should have done that I didn’t, usually because I was afraid.
Quiltingfool
Lol! After I had an emergency appendectomy, with plenty of drugs still in my system, I was watching the Shopping Channel with great interest, oohing over the flashy jewelry displays. This is not normal behavior for me!
Thank goodness I couldn’t get to my purse.
schrodingers_cat
@tam1MI: Saying anything good about Biden is rehashing old arguments, apparently. But critcizing Biden for sins real and imaginary that is topnotch political commentary.
Soprano2
@Miss Bianca: Because it was pre-Covid, and people want things to go back to the way they were before Covid.
Quiltingfool
@Baud: I feel sorry for deaf interpreters having to sign Trump’s insane jibber-jabber.
Talk about needing to drink heavily after that event.
WaterGirl
@lashonharangue: 5 star comment!
schrodingers_cat
@Quiltingfool: Are they still there? I thought any ADA concessions were too woke.
Soprano2
@Geminid: It’s a ways down there, but it’s there. Someone up above quoted it.
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca: I wondered about that, too!
Matt McIrvin
@Quiltingfool: Interestingly, when American conservatives said that their loathing of Russia was not a nationalist/ethnic enmity but a loathing of Godlessness and Communism, they were apparently sincere! Putin and Russia’s oligarchs can have all the nostalgia for the Soviet empire they want but as long as they invoke God a lot and reject Bolshevism as an ideology, they’re all right.
artem1s
I predict the Gohmert faction is going to use Johnson and the fight over ACA to force another shut when the CR expires in January. They are the ones least concerned about retaining their seats because they believe Congress and all these agencies should cease to exist. This is their wet dream come to life.
The Chamber of Commerce GOPers who want to keep the grift that keeps on grifting going. The Red States who take more dollars than they put in the federal pot, want their state’s fat government contracts, stimulus bills, FEMA, Medicaid and Medicare dollars to keep rolling in. There are more GOPers who want ACA to survive than want it drowned in a bathtub. But there’s just not anyone in the GOP House anymore who can wrangle enough votes to do one or the other and so they are stuck until the mid-terms having to go over to the Dark Side of the aisle to get anything done.
It may take a motion to vacate Moses Johnson to break the logjam this time.
I want my, I want my, I want my M T Veeeee
Matt McIrvin
@lashonharangue: The situation has a corrosive effect on the cause-effect feedback that is crucial to democracy. Ostensible purity leftists (who may or may not be troll impostors) trying to dampen Democratic enthusiasm can point to Democrats not accomplishing much to fix the big problems during the times when they “controlled the entire government”, but if you remember back to those times you realize that the reason was that they did not actually control the entire government, despite appearing to. There was always this minority veto from the Senate Republicans or sometimes the courts.
Or, to the extent that they did, it was in such a tenuous manner that the 2 or 3 most conservative outliers of their own party had effective veto power which they swung around in destructive and self-serving ways–and then that bias to inaction that emerges from the system gets attributed to the whole party.
I have literally in the past few weeks seen people bashing Barack Obama for all of the deficiencies of the ACA, arguing that it’s not single-payer because he personally was a right-wing corporatist stooge. And I remember how the Clintons tried single-payer and got smacked down hard for it, and then how that ACA shit went down, that whole agonizing Congressional sausage-making process with Ted Kennedy dying and being replaced by Scott Fucking Brown right in the middle of it. I wonder if they think the Democrats all treated Obama as their dictator, because they sure as hell didn’t.
WTFGhost
@WaterGirl: “but the balloon-juice thread wasn’t *in* Vegas….”
@rikyrah: Jon Stewart, at least, had the grace to admit “if only I was warned… before the election… many times… in all caps! OKAY! I ADMIT IT! I didn’t know he’d go this bad this fast!”
That was when Kilmar Abrego Garcia was “accidentally” deported to an El Salvador gulag, with NO REMOVAL ORDER AT ALL, which means that his Fifth Amendment rights are going to need a lot of quick thinking by John Roberts to explain away.
@Baud: It’s weird. Did they think that, when Trump bellowed they were eating the dogs, he wouldn’t be saying the same thing about them, if it were politically convenient? I mean, I know he said it about Black people, but, to me, it would apply to every immigrant who isn’t white.
Seriously, do Hispanics recognize that everyone’s gonna dump on Black people, thus think it’s okay if/when they do? Maybe it’s because of my background, but if I see a person hating on anyone, I’m worried about the hate’s very existence, not comforted by its target.
@satby: yabbut, remember, it took the entire power of the Republican Party USA to decree that Trump was not only an acceptable candidate, but their candidate, in spite of his ineptitude, and in spite of his flagrant lawbreaking.
You think it’s obvious that Trump is a criminal, but, you have a lot of people insisting that it’s all just Democrats saying that, and, that’s mostly true. Well, argumentum ad populum is a popular fallacy for a reason. If enough people profess something, it seems like it must be reasonable to believe it, even if you’re not sure on all the details… right?
I remember having a sensation of craziness in the run up to the Iraq War, because so many people were ignoring so many giant, gaping holes in the arguments for WMDs, and at first, I assumed they had more information, and were making a decision based on it, up until I saw the IAEA said “the tubes couldn’t be used for centrifuges,” and Rice said “they couldn’t be used for anything else.” Well, I knew the IAEA wasn’t going to lie; I knew a Bushie would. Problem solved, I wasn’t crazy, the mainstream media was.
Same thing here, much of the trumpies aren’t crazy, the mainstream media is; cure the meda, you’ll cure a lot of trumpies.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
We could have FDR type majorities and still wouldn’t be able to fulfill the lefty wish list. Because our reps reflect the voters who elected them.
Matt McIrvin
@Quiltingfool: After my knee surgery I was reading an N.K. Jemisin story collection on a phone in my left hand with the IV drip in my right arm, and I remember flying on whatever drugs they had in me to the point that I was having this hugely heightened emotional reaction to all the stories, just tearing up in situations where I never do. It’s a great way to experience literature.
Matt McIrvin
@WTFGhost: A lot of Hispanic American citizens identify as white. They’re the ones most likely to be Republican voters.
Even many of the ones who don’t, do share the MAGA resentment of undocumented immigrants, and sincerely believed that that was who Trump was really going after. What I don’t entirely get is that you could already tell that wasn’t true from the behavior of ICE and CBP during Trump’s first term in office. But you had to be paying attention.
Layer8Problem
@Matt McIrvin: I must try this.
Elizabelle
@Baud:
Not with the gerrymandering. And not when Congress is several hundred seats too small to be representative.
This is not on us, as in we people.
It is very structural. And kept to that structure to benefit a minority.
Last night’s thread was so ugly, with blaming a lot of the wrong targets.
I think it might be good to stay off the internet today.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: We could do a lot better than we do. Lefties of democratic-socialist leaning are correct that many of their favored economic policies are now popular.
And they’d be even more popular after being enacted, a thing that Republicans are deeply, deeply aware of, which is why they always do their damndest to keep an effective social safety net from being a fait accompli, and do their best to sabotage existing programs so that they seem weak and dysfunctional, whenever they have the power to do so.
Eolirin
@artem1s: Why would they bother to get rid of Johnson and set up a messy fight over the next speaker when the discharge petition route is working?
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Of course. But when has that ever been enough?
Doesn’t mean they’d stay that way when the rubber hit the road in enacting and implementing them.
Eventually. Obamacare became popular when the Republicans tried to take it away.
I think they’re correct that social programs are sticky, and may be worth the political hit. But it’s not easy to elect that many Dems who are all on the same page of taking that hit.
Layer8Problem
@Eolirin: If he’s enjoying being a sub why should anyone get in his way?
Chief Oshkosh
@Geminid: Totally agree. From the outset Adam has been clear about his concerns, and that analysis has not changed, AFAIK. And as others have comments in this thread, many, most, maybe all of the over-the-top commentary in his posts are not coming from him, but from respondents.
At the end of the day, Adam was right overall. Waiting on full consensus from every European country was a fool’s errand (hell, Europe STILL isn’t united over Ukraine, even after Trump has completely abandoned them to their own devices and Putin’s tender mercies) AND Putin responds to aggressive push-back by backing down and responds to mushiness with more aggression on his part. Nukes never figured into it.
That said, I understand the path that Biden took. It just turned out to be not the better path (and certainly was not the worst).
Matt McIrvin
@HinTN: The thing is, Israel/Palestine was absolutely an issue where Biden WAS doing what he thought was right, screw the political calculations and damn the torpedoes… and what he thought was right, in the wake of a terrorist attack that shocked the conscience, was to give a huge amount of aid and slack to the Israeli government.
It was pure 9/11, Second Intifada thinking and Netanyahu fucked him over so, so hard.
Eolirin
@Chief Oshkosh: Adam’s also highlighted some key points that didn’t require consensus, like when the Ukrainians had the opportunity to blow up a significant portion of Russia’s planes, as they were still clustered together, but needed American go ahead to use the weapons and were denied it. And then the Russians spread out their bombers.
Without those planes to engage in glide bomb attacks Russia’s current tactics that are allowing them to gain territory would not be effective. That single decision had massive and negative consequences for Ukraine, and it was entirely the US’s call.
No One of Consequence
@Chief Oshkosh: I don’t have a philo degree, but have had enough classes for a minor. It is/was kind of a intellectual curiosity and exercise when I was younger, and in college, I was exposed to thinkers whose work was little or lesser known, but was profound all the same. I still look for one treatise, that I thought was by Jonathan Wisdom entitled, ‘Gods’, but I have not been able to find it again despite looking.
Tangent aside, Camus was of the Absurdist school of philosophy. Essentially, his argument was that life is absurd, and one should not take oneself too seriously. Nothing means anything. His most famous work is L’Etranger (The Stranger), iirc. He is also most well-known for stating that the only real philosophical question is whether or not to kill yourself. (He argued against doing it, but stridently defended the earnestness of the debate. I saw a parallel to DesCartes who argued about whether or not we could be sure of anything, because we could be brains in jars being fed experience by some Evil Genie. Thus, his reductionist assertion that Cogito Ergo Sum. I think therefore I am. More properly reduced to: I experience, therefore I exist. This assertion was arrived at in an argument where DesCartes was questioned about whether or not to believe in God. He ends up with the positive that we should, because what is the downside if God doesn’t exist and we pretend he does, as opposed to the opposite, we live like heathens and then it turns out that the God Botherers were Right and our immediate environments take on an increase ambient temperatures with notes of brimstone in the increasingly smoky air…
I hope I haven’t butchered this too much, nor rambled on too overtly. Apologies.
-NOoC
ETA: Turns out I lost the thread upon re-read. Lemme sumup: Camus believed that Life is Absurd. Meaning itself is meaningless and nothing matters. Our current timeline leads me to support his conclusion. Not sure if this is existential crisis or just poignant, inane, unrequested observation.
Matt McIrvin
@No One of Consequence:
I’ve struggled with the fact that what Camus claims is a core element of being a moral person is the same thing most psychotherapists identify as a dangerous pathology that needs attention in the interest of safety.
Matt McIrvin
@No One of Consequence:
I think that was Blaise Pascal (who also was one of the inventors of probability theory in a context of games of chance, so he was trying to think about expected payout). Descartes tried to demonstrate that God actually DID exist, on the basis of some form of the “causal adequacy” argument from the existence of the world, and from our conception of perfection requiring a perfect author as a model for it.
No One of Consequence
@Matt McIrvin: You’re not wrong. IIRC the protagonist in The Stranger kills The Arab, and doesn’t fell any remorse, when again, iirc, it is essentially a pointless unnecessary killing. Have not read in decades, but I do recall that being something I had a hard time processing when I was attempting to be as honest with myself as I could.
Camus was a strange bird, to be sure. The rest of the philo world didn’t take too kindly to his dismissive attitude and certainty they were all Full of Shit.
-NOoC
No One of Consequence
@Matt McIrvin: You’re absolutely right, I think. A Critique of Reason, (not checking tho I probably should). He is trying to prove the existence of God, but doesn’t do so. Or if he ‘does’, it was unconvincing and inadequate. IIRC, again. But that prose contains the premise of experiencing therefore existing IIRC.
-NOoC
Geminid
@zhena gogolia: Now I see he said it. I disagree, but I’m still not going to judge Silverman harshly for this. He’s entitled his opinions, and he’ll defend them on his posts if anyone wants to challenge them there.
@tam1MI:
Shalimar
@Soprano2: I am surprised Trump hasn’t been worse faster on Ukraine. That is the frustration with Biden’s mediocre support. Most of us could see this disaster coming if Trump was elected, and Biden had the opportunity to put Ukraine in a much better position than he did.
That said, there is no point rehashing this again and again 12 months later and I don’t generally read Adam’s posts anymore as a result. Too much heartbreak.
Matt McIrvin
@No One of Consequence: Those ontological-type arguments always made it sound like we were dreaming God into existence rather than the reverse. Of course, anyone presenting one would deny that it went that way.
Matt McIrvin
@Layer8Problem:
A leftover notion from the post-9/11 period, in which the great conventional wisdom was that the War on Terror was now everything and “Democrats need a story on foreign policy”.
Another Scott
@Chief Oshkosh: As smart and thorough as Adam is, he’s a military-mindset guy and it colors all of his analysis. E.g. very early on after the February re-invasion, he said NATO should invoke Article 5.
I’ve argued with him about his use of the word “war” too. (If what VVP is doing to the West for the past 20+ years is ‘war’, then what was Iwo Jima and WWII??)
Biden was clear from the outset and before about what his primary goal was – keeping NATO unified. He did that. He knew it would limit what he and the US could do, and there would be consequences, but keeping NATO united was key for him. And a few minutes of thought illustrates the validity of that viewpoint.
Also, the legislature has the power of the purse, so there’s no legal way for the President to empty the Treasury if the Congress doesn’t go along. And the GQP Congress didn’t.
This stuff has been argued about in Adam’s threads many times. I don’t think any minds are going to be changed doing so yet again.
Biden was a great president. Adam is trolling, or something else… It reinforces my decision not to participate in his threads anymore.
YMMV.
End of topic for me, FWIW.
Best wishes,
Scott.
satby
@Another Scott: you and others. Thanks for putting it so clearly.
lowtechcyclist
@MinuteMan:
It also quite specifically included Biden’s failure to keep Trump from returning to the Presidency:
satby
@lowtechcyclist: as with most political criticism, the only person who has agency is the criticized person. Everyone else is an NPC. Voters didn’t matter, our psychotic oligarchs didn’t matter, the sane-washing media didn’t matter, VP Harris actually running after Biden chose to sacrifice his run rather than tear the party apart didn’t matter. Okay then.
Another Scott
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: 👍
Heal quickly!
Best wishes,
Scott.
TerryC
@Geminid: Hear! Hear!
Sally
@Geminid: I agree with you here.
IMHO, the West has overestimated Russia for … ever. Just because they have a large land mass, significant numbers of human “meat”, which they use callously to fight their wars, a (very) few brilliant scientists, doesn’t make them a formidable foe. As we saw after ’89, their technology is paper thin. But it is thickening now. By not supporting UA more aggressively from early on, China, and what I’ll call an Axis of Evil: Russia, Iran, North Korea, are learning on the job just how to fight a modern war in Europe. This is my fear. All these countries are becoming more dangerous by the day. Developing new weapons, systems, strategies with battle hardened militaries that will pose a much higher risk to democracies than they did four years ago.
All western democracies have failed us in this battle, the US is only one part. South Korea needs to act, Switzerland hiding behind cowardly “neutrality”, Spain and other EU countries figuring they are safely far away, Germany, dithering, and those like Hungary who think they will be safe. I was sorry to lose Boris Johnston’s leadership from the UK. Despite whatever his involvement with Russia and Brexit, he was the most aggressive advocate for UA. I recognise that it was the goal of the US to persuade, enjoin, EU and NATO. But it was always going to fail, even I could see that.
Also, no one recognises the cost to Europe of the UA refugees in assessing Europe’s contributions. The longer this goes on, the more backlash there is to refugees, and the more these countries are destabilised politically. So many have made their homes, lives and living now in foreign lands. Sadly. The longer it goes on, the more it is irreversible. Sadly. What putin in counting on.
I am not a 20/20 hindsight person either. I have been saying this since the first six months of the full scale invasion. We are at war with Russia. Even a fool like me can see that.
schrodingers_cat
@satby: Life is simple when you deal in certainty.
O. Felix Culpa
@WaterGirl: And if that thread is dead? (As in this case?) And what if it’s an open thread? Are we to understand that Open Thread means only somewhat open? If so, then the parameters of “openness” need to be spelled out. Or are we dealing with Heisenberg’s openness, where you can never know with certainty where it actually stands?
Paul in KY
@Nettoyeur: Anyone of them that voted for TACO, I hope they get it good and hard.
Paul in KY
@satby: I also think that considering what TACO is doing/saying/looking like right now, they can foresee the end of his hegemony and wanted posterity to see they weren’t as craven as those douchewads in Texas (for example).
Paul in KY
@PaulWartenberg: My favourite Gulf :-) Hope y’all are enjoying it all.
Paul in KY
@Scout211: Completely unrelated. Just the merest coincidence…
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: That voice in your head is really stupid and crazy. Laugh at it the next time it says that BS.
Paul in KY
@Gin & Tonic: I’m gonna read it as soon as I finish up this one.
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: I think Pres. Biden’s major problem was he didn’t focus enough on defeating TACO. That really (IMO) was the only job he had. All else was secondary or tertiary.
Paul in KY
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: Hope your recovery is 100% great and no more need for surgery.
Paul in KY
@Miss Bianca: That’s the way I think about it too! Also, COVID was bad cause he & his admin fucked up the response in just about every way they could. Why the everloving fuck would you want that?!?!?!
Ramona
@Matt McIrvin: I am not a biologist but I read accounts at the time that Omicron would not have evolved had the stubbornly unvaccinated not constituted a population in which the variant incubated.
Ramona
@schrodingers_cat: Witty and accurate!
Paul in KY
@schrodingers_cat: Touche.