Holy shit, Mitt got abused by the cult tonight

[henrygandorf 29194]

6 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

Romney fully supports the disenfranchisement of black voters.

to be fair, i don't think he knows any.

[animaltobacco11 107]

3 hours ago, Bullneck said:

 

 

I think you posted these as examples of negative things about the guy, but he was and is essentially the Mayor Pete of the Republican party. Too smart and logical and articulate for his own good, I guess. These videos are why Mitt was cool and he was right.

Edited September 14, 2023 by animaltobacco11

[bolverk 29708]

59 minutes ago, Skipper said:

Yeah, that article puts it in perspective and even probably worse than I thought.   I'll put it more bluntly.  Any Democrat celebrating Mitch retiring is a fucking idiot.  You may not have agreed with him but he was one of the only sane and principled R's left.  I don't really get the overall cockiness on the D side when your hand consists of an extremely old (and thus weak) Presidential candidate, an incredibly weak VP and the alternative on the other side being pretty much the end of American democracy considering the Cheney's and Romney's of the world are rapidly leaving the picture.  

Why don't you go back to the previous page to the post with the announcement and read back to here? You see one, one, poster who expresses any sort of celebratory sentiment regarding his retirement. The rest are a) saying his replacement will be worse and/or b) pushing back on the notion you first put forward that Romney was a moderate.

Yes, he was in the traditional mainstream of American politics, and, yes, we should mourn the fact that there are no (or very, very few) Republicans left with those stripes. But here we are.

Embedded within that article was a citation to another one that should also give you concern. The link appeared in this section:

“A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—­people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?

Here's that linked article. It makes the same strong case that I, and several other posters, have been making for a few years now. This has been a long time coming, and the early warning signs of this new GOP appeared about the time I first became politically aware during the late 1980s with Pat Fucking Roberston giving Daddy Bush a hard time in the 1988 presidential primary along with the rise of Limbaugh, Gingrich, and Pat Buchanan (the true precursor to Trump).

It also points to making the case that a return to normalcy within the GOP may be an illusion at this point. 

On a personal note, my rejection of Republicanism, having grown up in a small town, conservative, Southern Baptist family, was due to those same personalities. It caused a great amount of strife between my family and me to the point that it permanently curtailed any semblance of an adult relationship I could ever have with my now deceased father as he became more and more extreme -- along with his Party. And it speaks to the kind of rift that many on this site also recounted during Trump's four years. By the way, he died of Covid just before the vaccine came out because he started to believe that it wasn't that big of a deal...because after all Trump survived it.

Please read it, too (plain text below).

Spoiler

The Long Unraveling of the Republican Party
Three books explore a history of fractious extremism that predates Donald Trump.

By Kim Phillips-Fein

In 1992, pat buchanan made a campaign stop at the San Diego–Tijuana border. As a few white-power activists who had tagged along milled in the background, he called for the United States to build a wall—a 200-mile-long physical boundary between the U.S. and Mexico. At the time, Buchanan was seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency, the first of two consecutive efforts that were rebuffed by party voters and leaders alike. Buchanan and his politics seemed to be on the verge of being drummed out of the GOP altogether. (When he made one last try for the White House, in 2000, he ran on the Reform Party ticket.) From the start of the 1990s, his hostility toward free trade and NATO, his extremist proposals on immigration, and his jeremiads against cultural decline marked him as an outlier. Communism was over, the stock market was rising, Silicon Valley was just taking off, and few were interested in Buchanan’s grim vision of a looming “illegal invasion.”

Three decades later, Buchanan’s ideas may still seem fringe, but they are no longer marginal. His call for a barrier at the border has become a staple of Republican platforms, as have his denunciations of cultural decadence, his skepticism about free trade, and his warnings about the dangers of the “global elite” and of immigrant incursions. As the midterms approach, Donald Trump’s conspiracy-laced version of those views shows no sign of flaming out, which forces the question: Is this ethno-nationalism and pugnacious stance toward cultural “elites” going to be the signature of the Republican Party from now on? And if so, what happened? Not all that long ago, the GOP was the party of Big Business, free markets, “traditional” family values, and anti-communism. Now it has become the party of election denial and the Wall.

When Trump first surfaced as a 2016 presidential candidate, his dizzying ascendance, seemingly out of nowhere, fueled the sense that he was hijacking a GOP theretofore rooted in the confident optimism that had come out of the Reagan era. Historians have considered Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and the adoption by the Democratic Party (especially under Bill Clinton) of Reagan’s end-of-big-government-and-big-labor-and-high-taxes ideology, as the formative development of the last quarter of the 20th century—the vision that laid out the parameters for American politics in the new millennium.

Yet the recent trajectory of the Republican Party, and its turn against many of the key precepts of Reaganism, calls for a reassessment of this perspective. That is precisely what the historian Nicole Hemmer offers in Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s. She is joined in rethinking the evolution of conservatism by two journalists who approach the subject from different places on the political spectrum. Dana Milbank, the author of The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, is a liberal Washington Post columnist. Matthew Continetti, the author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, arrived at The Weekly Standard as a 22-year-old in 2003 and is now a Never Trumper at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to National Review. All three books portray a conservatism that was fraught with tensions long before Trump’s emergence. Their goal is to explain why the current incarnation of the GOP shouldn’t come as a surprise. In showing the deep roots of our present crisis, their analyses also suggest the limits of any politics focused on a dream of salvaging the Republican Party.

The consensus among political historians of the post–World War II years is that the conservative movement of the period was driven by two connected concerns: the desire to constrain the welfare state and the labor unions that had been created during the New Deal, and the imperative to fight international communism. In pursuit of both goals, conservatives embraced the ideology of the free market—as articulated, most notably, by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman—and rejected the isolationism and “America First” mentality that had prevailed among many on the right prior to the war. This was, as Continetti argues, a major political shift: In the 1920s, the American right had been split between open elitists in the intellectual world, such as the journalist H. L. Mencken, who warned in a 1919 essay that “all government … is a conspiracy against the superior man,” and the grassroots mobilization of the Second Ku Klux Klan, which strove through mass rallies and political campaigns to maintain the purity of “the old pioneer stock.”

During the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, the fight against the New Deal and the Soviet Union gave the right a new energy. Under the broad umbrella of opposing socialism and communism and defending freedom, all kinds of policies that might otherwise have appeared narrowly self-interested—free-market economics, anti-tax measures, opposition to unions, an aggressive interventionism in Vietnam and elsewhere—acquired an idealistic gloss. Even the ugliest aspects of postwar conservatism, such as its opposition to the civil-rights movement, could be portrayed as a principled defense of localism, or even as part of the anti-communist project: Some conservatives suspected that key advisers of Martin Luther King Jr. were secretly in league with Moscow, and that the entire civil-rights movement was riddled with communist sympathizers.

But this brand of conservative politics—while garnering substantial support, especially from midsize-business owners and prosperous suburbanites, as well as southerners—failed to gain enough traction to win national elections in the ’50s and ’60s. Victories came only in the ’70s, as postwar economic growth faltered and the conservative coalition expanded. Now it included working-class white voters in the North and South animated by resentment, fear, and racism in the aftermath of civil-rights successes. The movement also tapped into a new wave of organizing among evangelical churches, which were able to make common cause with anti-government conservatives in opposing such policies as the IRS denial of tax-exempt status for Christian schools found to be racially discriminatory. For their part, conservatives signed on to much of the evangelicals’ cultural crusade against abortion access and gay rights.

Yet these new recruits and the business-oriented conservative establishment, all three authors argue, never fully merged. The New Right, which gathered momentum in the ’70s, remained at arm’s length from the elite intellectual organizations of conservatism, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the libertarian Cato Institute. Its key activists lacked the establishment’s intense focus on economic issues, and were angry that their own zealous focus on cultural issues (strictly limiting abortion, banning gay teachers from public schools) wasn’t shared. The schism and the fractious extremism at the core of the party, in tone as well as policies, were masked, however, by Reagan’s cheerful persona—that of an avuncular, old-school movie-star gentleman whose politics embraced, Hemmer writes, “flexibility and optimism, making movement conservatism genuinely popular for the first time in the Cold War era.”

Not that Reagan, despite the unifying power of his presidency, was a moderate. He had a long history of warning against the “encroaching control” of the liberal state, and his administration’s harsh attacks on welfare policies, unions, and busing were extreme; so was his support for his “Star Wars” defense initiative and for violent anti-communists in Central America. But anti-communist internationalism on the right also helps explain Reagan’s comparatively genial stance on immigration. As he put it during his 1980 campaign, “You don’t build a nine-foot fence along the border between two friendly nations.” An early draft of the speech went further still: “We cannot erect a Berlin Wall across the southern border.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union and decline of communism in the early ’90s shook the political world of the right. Suddenly, the lack of common ground between religious and cultural conservatives on the one hand and the libertarian-leaning establishment on the other was exposed. Already, anti-communist hard-liners had denounced Reagan for meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, and evangelicals had been chafing at his failure to do more to outlaw abortion. In the 1988 presidential race, Hemmer reminds us, the television host Pat Robertson had challenged George H. W. Bush in a campaign that tapped into conservative dissatisfaction with Reagan.

Despite the apparent triumph of capitalism in the Cold War, many conservatives in the 1980s and early ’90s were gripped by what Continetti calls a “deep-seated pessimism.” They had managed to take control of the White House for eight years, yet were unable to shrink the state, had trouble holding Congress, and felt unwelcome in Hollywood and academia. A gloomy, bitter conservatism began to spread, from above and from below. Its rhetoric was tinged with loss and preoccupied with themes of masculinity, race, and immigration, a far cry from Reagan’s upbeat invocations of freedom and morning in America. The journalist Peter Brimelow’s 1995 best seller, Alien Nation, for example, opened with the suggestion that the country had been defined by a “specific ethnic core” that “has always been white”—and was now in danger of being replaced.

The transformation on the right was stylistic as well as substantive. It’s hard to imagine Reagan leading cheers of “Lock her up!” or inventing Trump-style nicknames for his enemies. But this jeering patois would have been familiar to followers of Rush Limbaugh, whose nationally syndicated conservative talk-radio program started broadcasting on AM stations in 1988. Limbaugh was a college dropout who had read Pat Buchanan’s newspaper columns when he was growing up in Missouri and then found his way to radio, getting his break when Morton Downey Jr. was fired for using openly racist language on the air. Limbaugh immediately began to develop his own style, one that anticipated the bullying sarcasm of Twitter: Rather than harangue his audience or engage in high-minded exegeses of Friedrich Hayek or other conservative thinkers, he set out to “ridicule the left,” as Hemmer puts it. Limbaugh routinely insulted Democratic politicians—Ted Kennedy was “The Swimmer”; Robert Byrd was “Sheets” (referring to his Ku Klux Klan past)—and when critics phoned in to his show, he would cut them off with what he referred to as a “caller abortion” (a loud vacuum-cleaner noise followed by a scream before the line went dead).

A similar shift took place on Capitol Hill, where a program of tax cuts and deregulation was supplemented by constant hyperbolic invective. Newt Gingrich’s crusade to rally congressional Republicans to build their base by explicitly embracing political language that demeaned their political opponents is well known. Even so, the intensity of some of this rhetoric—and the ways in which it foreshadowed the style on the right today—remains surprising. Milbank describes the 1990 memo that Gingrich’s political-action committee circulated to Republican candidates. Titled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” it instructed them in how to “speak like Newt,” using words such as sick, corrupt, bizarre, pathetic, destroy, and decay when characterizing Democrats. Gingrich himself deployed this strategy incessantly, describing Democratic politicians as the “enemy of normal Americans” and calling for a “war” against the left to be fought with “a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars.”

Meanwhile, conspiracy theories acquired new salience in the movement, having long proliferated in less public ways on the right. (The John Birch Society, for example, specialized in anti-communist paranoia and continued to attract members well after it was repudiated by William F. Buckley and National Review in the 1960s.) Stoking doubts about whether Vince Foster, who had been deputy White House counsel to President Clinton, had really died by suicide in 1993 proved popular. Helen Chenoweth, the three-term Idaho representative in the ’90s, catered to militia supporters and the far right with claims that the United Nations was secretly plotting to institute a “one world” government, a mission enabled by federal agents in “black helicopters” flying over Idaho.

Hemmer and Continetti make the case that the Republican establishment still held sway as late as the George W. Bush years. Hemmer calls Bush “the last Reaganite,” intent on pursuing free-trade agreements and tax cuts, while Continetti describes Bush as adopting a principled “freedom agenda” in the War on Terror and notes his efforts at immigration reform. Milbank, by contrast, sees the entire Republican establishment lurching to the right over those same Bush years. In his account, gerrymandering, campaign-finance scandals, and the “Brooks Brothers Riot” in Florida after the 2000 election (in which Republican operatives in suits mobbed the office where a recount was taking place, shouting “Stop the count! Stop the fraud!”) all anticipate the naked power grabs of the contemporary right. Milbank himself became the target of Karl Rove’s rage after writing a 2002 article headlined “For Bush, Facts Are Malleable,” about the administration’s efforts to stoke support for the Iraq War; after it appeared, Rove telephoned Milbank’s boss and requested that he be removed from the White House beat.

As the authors get closer to the present and to Trump-era chaos, the reading experience becomes disorienting. One source of overwrought, outlandish outrage is rapidly overtaken by the next; any given departure from evidence-based rational assessment is topped by another, as denial of Barack Obama’s American citizenship is joined by climate-change denial, COVID denial, and 2020 election denial, while the base declares faith in QAnon and ivermectin. Each dispiriting set of characters gives way to a yet more demoralizing array. Glenn Beck is followed by Tucker Carlson; Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin by Elise Stefanik; the Tea Party by the Oath Keepers. One moment Lou Dobbs is insisting that he’s “just asking questions” about Obama’s birth certificate; the next, he’s been thrown aside for being insufficiently anti-immigrant. Revolutions “devour their own children,” goes the truism (credited to a skeptic of the French Revolution)—but among conservatives today, the journey from hero to apostate seems to happen at warp speed. So, among almost all the Republicans in the legislative branch, did the journey from momentarily denouncing Trump, on January 6, to swearing fealty once again.

Will the Republican Party continue to move ever further to the right? And if so, what does this portend for American politics? Taking the longest view, Continetti sees the current struggles on the right as the latest manifestation of a 100-year battle between the “forces of extremism” and those who have sought mainstream acceptance for conservative ideas—the establishment wing to which he has devoted his life. One imagines that he is looking for models when he approvingly refers to Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s 1950 castigation of Joseph McCarthy, and her warning that “certain elements of the Republican Party” had chosen to manipulate their way to “victory through the selfish political exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance, and intolerance.”

But reading these books together does not inspire confidence. For one thing, as Continetti is honest enough to admit, the distinctions between the extremists and the respectable right have never been all that clear-cut. The postwar conservative movement was entwined with opposition to the civil-rights movement from the outset. Such luminaries as Buckley used National Review in its early days to argue against federal troops going to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black schoolchildren; he did so on the grounds not only that the “Southern dilemma” was a matter for local control but that white people remained the “advanced race” and thus should be able to discriminate. Given this history, which predates the 1990s by decades, resurrecting an American conservatism free of the taint of racism—and deeply committed to democratic political engagement—is a formidable challenge.

Nor is it so easy to absolve “classical liberalism” and Reagan’s free-market policies of responsibility for our current travails. What you won’t find in these accounts, focusing as they do on the ideas and programs of conservatives in positions of power in politics and the media, is much sense of the social history of the United States over the past three decades, as the legacies of the Reagan years became clear. The radical tax cuts, hostility toward labor, and deregulation that marked the 1980s facilitated the rapid deindustrialization of American cities and the rise of finance and services as the motors of economic life in the United States. The unionized jobs that had provided meaningful upward mobility for many in the postwar years all but disappeared.

Reagan promoted these shifts, even if they did not originate with him. And as Clinton’s presidency went on to demonstrate, the laissez-faire economic agenda of the 1980s and ’90s became a largely bipartisan one: It promised a vision of a newly dynamic, globally plugged-in America rescued from boom-and-bust economics by low tax rates and the light hand of regulation. Pursued with a blithe insistence that all would be better in this best of all possible worlds, that agenda helped seed the social chaos and despair that have been such fertile ground for the right.

It has also helped create an economic elite with little connection to the rest of American society. Having benefited from low taxes and tax evasion, this elite has also been well served by the weakening of the public sector and the labor movement, and has every interest in the continued erosion of both. Tracing the history that illuminates Trump’s success in commanding popular attention and support is important, even if evidence of a wholesale shift of working-class voters to the Republican Party is far from conclusive. Yet more surprising, in certain ways, is watching those factions of the political and economic elite that have thrown in their lot with Trump and the broader agenda he represents. They have been willing to do more than back candidates who are openly skeptical of democracy, and to continue funding election deniers after promising to cut off support. Abandoning traditional corporate imperatives, especially the desire for stability, some in these circles have relied on the least democratic features of our system (the Supreme Court, the filibuster, the Electoral College) to advance their ends, and made this reactionary politics far more dangerous in so doing.

How best to counter the politics of a Republican Party in thrall to Trump is not obvious. Milbank pleads with the republic to vote (presumably for Democrats), suggesting that the Republican project is an antidemocratic one that speaks for a declining rural white minority and will inevitably be defeated. Continetti rallies conservatives not to flee the scene but to stay and fight for the principles of classical liberalism. Only Hemmer proposes that the Democratic Party might also bear some culpability for the transformation of the partisan landscape—which implies that an overhaul of moral and political vision is crucial.

One of the challenges of our moment is that so many forces seem poised to drive people out of what remains of public life. At some point, arguing with opponents galvanized by a completely different political calculus becomes enervating. It feels like shadowboxing, at a time when the issues our society confronts—the pandemic, climate change, the international role of the United States, stark economic inequality—have never been more pressing. The way forward is daunting because it calls for a new kind of politics that can generate the courage and strength to push back against a politics of fear and demonization. With all due respect to Margaret Chase Smith, the path doesn’t lie in trying to reconstruct the old order that helped open the door to our current crisis.

 

 

 

Edited September 14, 2023 by bolverk

[bolverk 29708]

39 minutes ago, animaltobacco11 said:

I think you posted these as examples of negative things about the guy, but he was and is essentially the Mayor Pete of the Republican party. Too smart and logical and articulate for his own good, I guess. These videos are why Mitt was cool and he was right.

You could probably learn from reading the article I just posted, too. His brand of conservatism made an unholy alliance with the beast that has now devoured him and the old GOP. All for political power at the expense of our country. Based on the long Romney article, I think he now regrets it and would probably think that was "uncool."

[cactusflinthead 27601]

I remember the 47% comments. I certainly haven't forgotten about Bain. His dog in a carrier on the roof going across country. Maybe he's a good example of the country club Republican of the last century. 

The article is an impeachment of his own party. Now that he is ready to get out he can tell all the tales, well maybe not name names because he still wants to get invited to the club parties. 

I like the concept of having competing ideas about policy. Unless your policy is "fuck you, I got mine." That's the sum total of the R platform on domestic issues. Pull up the ladder, shoot the survivors, and render no quarter unto any that oppose us. 

The unnamed Senators are still too scared of the base they created. I've likened it to Tolkien's description of the beast the Witch King flew, "fed on fell meats in the dark until it could tolerate the presence of the wraiths". Bain fed the base. Newt nurtured it. Alex Jones poisoned them. Trump is the natural outcome of this program of systematic misinformation and feeding the baser instincts of mankind.

The article is important because it shows just how afraid they are of the beast they rode to victories. It's willing to storm the capital and kill them. It earnestly desires to destroy. 

Charlie Sykes and the rest of the Never Trumpers have at least one thing right. Do not vote for Republicans. Not now. There's no one in the party willing to stop feeding the beast.

[bolverk 29708]

Very well said, Cactus.

[Biff Tannen 45710]

God damn!  With the tolkien quote and everything. 

[tokamak 6433]

He’s delusional if he thinks all those Senators really hate Trump. They had an easy opportunity to disqualify him from ever holding office again during the 2nd impeachment and didn’t do it. A total layup.

They were just telling Mitt what he wanted to hear in private so they could get his vote for whatever, or some campaign contributions. 

[Bozo_Casanova 26522]

Mitt Romney: less terrible than Susan Collins. 

[Biff Tannen 45710]

8 minutes ago, tokamak said:

He’s delusional if he thinks all those Senators really hate Trump. They had an easy opportunity to disqualify him from ever holding office again during the 2nd impeachment and didn’t do it. A total layup.

They were just telling Mitt what he wanted to hear in private so they could get his vote for whatever, or some campaign contributions. 

I’m sure they do hate him, but they need his base to get re-elected. Convicting dear leader isn’t a good look for that. 

[cactusflinthead 27601]

Goddamn it's all over the timeline

 

[WhatTheBuck 28797]

14 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I’m sure they do hate him, but they need his base to get re-elected. Convicting dear leader isn’t a good look for that. 

Yeah, I’ve heard countless Washington reporters say the same thing. Lots of Republicans in Congress will speak their minds about Trump but only off the record. They admit that it would be political suicide to say publicly what we can all see. They know he’s a moron and a compulsive liar and totally unfit to be president. But they want to keep their jobs and are afraid of uis followers.

[SydneyCarton 48149]

15 hours ago, Longhorn94 said:

And that's exactly how the other side believes as well. Its also how they justify ending democracy as we know it. I am as progressive as they come. But we need both sides. We need to work together. We need the far right and far left to be outliers rather than the norm.

A competition of ideas is completely indepentant from a multiple party system. That's why there are progressive and more conservative wings of the democratic party. At some point, the competition of ideas will proliferate on things like, say, a 30 trillion dollar national debt, when one party can move on from the SOLE ASPECT OF HAVING TO DEFEND DEMOCRACY OR DIE as literally the only thing they can accomplish. When you remove the threat of freedom, then the proliferation of ideas can actually begin again.

I'd argue we'd have more freedom of ideas if we elimiinated political parties entirely, or made everything ranked choice voting, etc. 

[Skipper 6192]

11 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

I’m sure they do hate him, but they need his base to get re-elected. Convicting dear leader isn’t a good look for that. 

This. If you read the article he literally said he was advised that the first thing he should consider with every decision he makes in office is does it help his chances of reelection.  And don't kid yourself that that part is unique to R politicians.  That's all of them.   Trump just happens to be evil so it's a bit more of a problem on that side.

[Longhornfan1024 1707]

11 hours ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Yeah, I’ve heard countless Washington reporters say the same thing. Lots of Republicans in Congress will speak their minds about Trump but only off the record. They admit that it would be political suicide to say publicly what we can all see. They know he’s a moron and a compulsive liar and totally unfit to be president. But they want to keep their jobs and are afraid of uis followers.

We call them cowards.  

[Celery Man 20994]

Everyone has to do it, on both sides. Sure on one side you have to do it explicitly for evil because of who you have chosen to serve, but everyone must frame their decisions in political reality so don’t kid yourself that it’s a GOP problem.

Edited September 14, 2023 by Celery Man

[Brisketexan 105264]

2 hours ago, SydneyCarton said:

A competition of ideas is completely indepentant from a multiple party system. That's why there are progressive and more conservative wings of the democratic party. At some point, the competition of ideas will proliferate on things like, say, a 30 trillion dollar national debt, when one party can move on from the SOLE ASPECT OF HAVING TO DEFEND DEMOCRACY OR DIE as literally the only thing they can accomplish. When you remove the threat of freedom, then the proliferation of ideas can actually begin again.

I'd argue we'd have more freedom of ideas if we elimiinated political parties entirely, or made everything ranked choice voting, etc. 

Wish I could rep this twice.  Great post.

Right now, the only job is to keep the patient alive - and to keep the GQP from killing the patient.  That must get the full focus.  Once the patient has been stabilized, then we can deal with all of the other systemic and major issues: the broken leg, the busted eardrums, the malnutrition, all that stuff.  But right now, it's just an existential fight: continue with a living Republic, or extinguish the Republic and create an authoritarian extra-constitutional state.  Ideas and policy debates can be had later...once that fight is over (oh, and we only have those debates if the "keep the Republic" side wins).

[Biff Tannen 45710]

3 hours ago, SydneyCarton said:

When you remove the threat of freedom, then the proliferation of ideas can actually begin again.

This should be flown on a banner over R states daily.

[High Plains Drifter 11050]

2 hours ago, Longhornfan1024 said:

We call them cowards.  

 

and traitors.

 

[SydneyCarton 48149]

19 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

This should be flown on a banner over R states daily.

They'd literally read that as "See, they want to remove our Freedom!"

[Biff Tannen 45710]

1 minute ago, SydneyCarton said:

They'd literally read that as "See, they want to remove our Freedom!"

Even if you changed it to:

"When you remove the threat TO freedom, then the proliferation of ideas can actually begin again"

they would still think that the DEMS are the threat to THEIR freedom.  I guess if they mean their freedom to be pieces of shit and violent/murderous to their fellow countrymen, they are correct. The point is they will never admit or understand that THEY are the threat.  THEY are the problem.

[Sawbonz 27583]

17 hours ago, Longhorn94 said:

Agreed. My point is we will eventually fuck it up too if we don't have the competition of ideas. But for now, they are a lost cause and need to completely reinvent their party.

The fact that no one around here can fathom a leftist personality cult and authoritarian regime is mind bottling. Of course right now we have to kill the Republican Party. But you are absolutely correct the left cannot rule alone

 

eta those arguing that anything could be accomplished in this country without opposing parties is very naive. You would have to throw out the constitution and start over

Edited September 14, 2023 by Sawbonz

[Biff Tannen 45710]

2 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

The fact that no one around here can fathom a leftist personality cult and authoritarian regime is mind bottling. Of course right now we have to kill the Republican Party. But you are absolutely correct the left cannot rule alone

The left basically IS ruling alone right now.  The moderate wing keeps the far left in check enough.  The Rs literally do nothing.  They were talking about it all morning with the McCarthy drama.  The Rs don't know how/don't want to actually DO any governing at all.

[Sawbonz 27583]

1 minute ago, Biff Tannen said:

The left basically IS ruling alone right now.  The moderate wing keeps the far left in check enough.  The Rs literally do nothing.  They were talking about it all morning with the McCarthy drama.  The Rs don't know how/don't want to actually DO any governing at all.

And that is not sustainable. Hence Brisket et al on the ledge

[TwiceHorn 31528]

2 hours ago, Skipper said:

This. If you read the article he literally said he was advised that the first thing he should consider with every decision he makes in office is does it help his chances of reelection.  And don't kid yourself that that part is unique to R politicians.  That's all of them.   Trump just happens to be evil so it's a bit more of a problem on that side.

Well, the biggest thing is that Republicans don't have m/any policy ideas that would actually appeal to voters.  So, until Trump's brand of fasci-populism came along, they had no idea how to get elected in sufficient numbers to achieve anything at the federal level. 

[TwiceHorn 31528]

11 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

The fact that no one around here can fathom a leftist personality cult and authoritarian regime is mind bottling. Of course right now we have to kill the Republican Party. But you are absolutely correct the left cannot rule alone

 

eta those arguing that anything could be accomplished in this country without opposing parties is very naive. You would have to throw out the constitution and start over

The posters noting that there is enough diversity/dissent among Democrats are correct, at least for now.  But it's kind of a fine line to walk depending on who seizes control of the party.  

[Sawbonz 27583]

5 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

Well, the biggest thing is that Republicans don't have m/any policy ideas that would actually appeal to voters.  So, until Trump's brand of fasci-populism came along, they had no idea how to get elected in sufficient numbers to achieve anything at the federal level. 

And this is why the Republican Party has to die. Moderates can start another party and pick up moderate dems, or they can join moderate dems and there can be a schism in the Dem party between moderate and progressive, but the Republican Party is irredeemable 

 

the Democratic Party cannot be a big enough tent to be the only tent

Edited September 14, 2023 by Sawbonz

[elfenix 34331]

The fact that no one around here can fathom a leftist personality cult and authoritarian regime is mind bottling.

I, too, love logical fallaces

[MC Fresh Breath 4074]

It would really suck to be under a leftist cult of universal health care, women's rights, proper taxation on billionaires, and moves to reduce man's impact on climate change.  Then again, free college is also probably a looney left idea.   I keep waiting for one of those 'crazy leftist' ideas that actually makes me say 'nope, sounds bad.'  

[Brisketexan 105264]

27 minutes ago, MC Fresh Breath said:

It would really suck to be under a leftist cult of universal health care, women's rights, proper taxation on billionaires, and moves to reduce man's impact on climate change.  Then again, free college is also probably a looney left idea.   I keep waiting for one of those 'crazy leftist' ideas that actually makes me say 'nope, sounds bad.'  

Pol Pot's agrarian collectivist dream would like a word with you.

Authoritarianism isn't just a right wing affliction.  Granted, the versions popping up in OUR orbit these days all are, but some of us are old enough to remember "the dictatorship of the proletariat" bullshit.

[MC Fresh Breath 4074]

7 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Pol Pot's agrarian collectivist dream would like a word with you.

Authoritarianism isn't just a right wing affliction.  Granted, the versions popping up in OUR orbit these days all are, but some of us are old enough to remember "the dictatorship of the proletariat" bullshit.

Yeah, I was conflating some things there, but admittedly badly made point is that there is no real threat anywhere of some kind of leftist dictatorship in this country.   Not only that, but we've so skewed the ideas of left and right over these past 20 years that even things that seem relatively common sense are only opposed due to the corporate brainwashing from our real overlords.  Anything deemed remotely progressive has to be 'kept in check' and it seems we're pretty good at doing that.

['stache 21836]

17 hours ago, cactusflinthead said:

I remember the 47% comments. I certainly haven't forgotten about Bain. His dog in a carrier on the roof going across country. Maybe he's a good example of the country club Republican of the last century. 

The article is an impeachment of his own party. Now that he is ready to get out he can tell all the tales, well maybe not name names because he still wants to get invited to the club parties. 

I like the concept of having competing ideas about policy. Unless your policy is "fuck you, I got mine." That's the sum total of the R platform on domestic issues. Pull up the ladder, shoot the survivors, and render no quarter unto any that oppose us. 

The unnamed Senators are still too scared of the base they created. I've likened it to Tolkien's description of the beast the Witch King flew, "fed on fell meats in the dark until it could tolerate the presence of the wraiths". Bain fed the base. Newt nurtured it. Alex Jones poisoned them. Trump is the natural outcome of this program of systematic misinformation and feeding the baser instincts of mankind.

The article is important because it shows just how afraid they are of the beast they rode to victories. It's willing to storm the capital and kill them. It earnestly desires to destroy. 

Charlie Sykes and the rest of the Never Trumpers have at least one thing right. Do not vote for Republicans. Not now. There's no one in the party willing to stop feeding the beast.

Name names or shut the fuck up. Without names it's meaningless and he's continuing to be complicit in the downfall of the gop as a serious party.

I guess he now has time to pursue an answer to one of life's great mysteries.

 

[wildcat09 29376]

20 hours ago, Sawbonz said:

The fact that no one around here can fathom a leftist personality cult and authoritarian regime is mind bottling. Of course right now we have to kill the Republican Party. But you are absolutely correct the left cannot rule alone

 

eta those arguing that anything could be accomplished in this country without opposing parties is very naive. You would have to throw out the constitution and start over

I'm not saying it can't happen, but recent history has shown that all of the most authoritarian leftist regimes around the world arose out of and in response to (1) an extremely repressive and conservative monarchical/feudal system, or (2) an extremely repressive and conservative colonial system. I don't think any have arisen out of a liberal democracy. That doesn't mean it can't happen, but I think the fact that it hasn't so far is pretty important.

As another matter, the Constitution didn't even imagine political parties. So I'm not sure what you mean when you say we'd have to throw out the Constitution.

I agree however, at least in the long-term, that to flourish any organized society can't be controlled by one faction or party. People disagree about shit, so they need a system that enough of them recognize as legitimate to mediate their disagreements. Even if (like now) one side is clearly right about just about everything and the other side is a serious threat to the very system itself, that doesn't mean the side that is right will always be right. A one-party system ossifies and after awhile is unable to address the needs of most people.

But that's a long-term issue and shouldn't be confused as indicating that we need two competitive political parties right now. Right now, the political will of the American right needs to be splintered and destroyed.

[WhatTheBuck 28797]

19 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

Pol Pot's agrarian collectivist dream would like a word with you.

Authoritarianism isn't just a right wing affliction.  Granted, the versions popping up in OUR orbit these days all are, but some of us are old enough to remember "the dictatorship of the proletariat" bullshit.

If anyone suggests we nationalize GM then I’m gonna say I can’t go for that. No can do. 

[Sawbonz 27583]

2 hours ago, WhatTheBuck said:

If anyone suggests we nationalize GM then I’m gonna say I can’t go for that. No can do. 

I want to go pol pot on you for getting that song stuck in my head

[WhatTheBuck 28797]

8 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

I want to go pol pot on you for getting that song stuck in my head

Aw, dude, come on. That’s a great song.

It’s the weekend. Everybody get down.

 

[Sawbonz 27583]

of course it’s a great song. But I’m going to have it stuck in my head until a another song displaces it. And that song may or may not be a great song

maybe this will do it

 

 

[Bozo_Casanova 26522]

23 hours ago, MC Fresh Breath said:

It would really suck to be under a leftist cult of universal health care, women's rights, proper taxation on billionaires, and moves to reduce man's impact on climate change.  Then again, free college is also probably a looney left idea.   I keep waiting for one of those 'crazy leftist' ideas that actually makes me say 'nope, sounds bad.'  

 

[WhatTheBuck 28797]

2 hours ago, Sawbonz said:

of course it’s a great song. But I’m going to have it stuck in my head until a another song displaces it. And that song may or may not be a great song

maybe this will do it

 

 

Let me help you with that ear worm.