The GQP: Trumpist Death Cult

[Hugo Stiglitz 23,367]

 

[27-25 2,047]

 

On 1/14/2021 at 6:06 AM, Beantown Express 2.0 said:

Maybe some of you smart folks on here can answer this question for me.  Just flipped to Fox News and some Republican congress woman was talking about the evils of big tech and how they silenced Trump on Twitter.  She then said that we need to make the tech companies (Twitter, Amazon, Google, etc...) a utility and take national control over them.  All the hosts were nodding along.  Maybe I am missing something but nationalizing industries is not something Capitalist countries do, right?  Isn’t that what countries like Venezuela do and what the Republicans (and Dems for that matter) have always railed against.  Maybe we can regulate the tech industries better via laws but taking them over seems like maybe the Republican Party does want to be the Nazi party long term.

<Chinatown>Forget it BE, they're Republicans.</Chinatown>

On 1/13/2021 at 3:59 PM, Pancho said:

I just don’t see how some of y’all are going to continue to be republicans post trump.

 

Did all of the Illinois Nazis move north and run for office?  I hate them both regardless.

Edited January 16, 2021 by 27-25

[HenryJames 66,044]

 

[Neonmoon 38,129]

Yes it is a cult, if not worse. If you choose party over country time and time again. That’s not a political party 

[Brisketexan 105,097]

 

Fantasy piece. Several of those bullets are VASTLY overstated. The GOP has some temporary wounds. It will recover, quickly.

[TeeDubya 3,362]

12 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Fantasy piece. Several of those bullets are VASTLY overstated. The GOP has some temporary wounds. It will recover, quickly.

Sadly agree.  Donor and corporate money will slowly filter back in to pre-coup levels.  These companies are good at reading the public, their balance sheets depend on it.  Once the collective outrage has moved on to the next travesty, they'll start sneaking their money back in.

[JimmyJames 12,271]

You guys predicting the survival of the Republican Party with trump as a factor must also bet heavily on who is gonna win the super bowl.

We don’t know what is gonna happen next. 

[DigDug 1,669]

3 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

 

 

[WhatTheBuck 28,777]

3 hours ago, DigDug said:

 

Username doesn’t check out. But it’s the next machine over. 

[Mrs Whiggins 13,050]

8 hours ago, TeeDubya said:

Sadly agree.  Donor and corporate money will slowly filter back in to pre-coup levels.  These companies are good at reading the public, their balance sheets depend on it.  Once the collective outrage has moved on to the next travesty, they'll start sneaking their money back in.

Add my name to that list. Op-ed page in our local paper was by one of the Heritage fellows who's still there and he was on board with 'the South conservatives shall rise again' mantra and urging opposition to progressive policies and taxes that would drive us into the abyss of ....SoCIaLiSm.

 

I didn't see this posted elsewhere, and rather than put it in the identifying terrorists thread (since he's identified obviously) I put it here. Could be nothing and he just caught the COVID, but more likely has lawyered up and is working on his Freedom Caucus talking points. Perhaps there's something in that Rocky Mountain spring water that Colorado should be investigating....

Article is spoilered below the tweet because it's paywalled.

Spoiler

 

 

A newly elected Colorado Republican lawmaker who attended the president’s Jan. 6 rally has been absent for the majority of the three-day legislative session that started Wednesday.

Rep. Ron Hanks, who is from Penrose, arrived at the state Capitol on Wednesday morning and was sworn in. He left after the vote for the new House speaker and did not participate in the remainder of that day’s session in person or remotely. He also was not in attendance Thursday or Friday.

Hanks has not returned multiple requests for comment by phone, email and text message. Although his campaign website is still up, his Facebook page has been removed. He was elected in November to the House District 60 seat, representing parts of Fremont, Custer, Chaffee and Park counties — all south and west of Colorado Springs.

House leaders excused Hanks, but it is unusual not to attend the first days of session as a new lawmaker, particularly since the first part of the 2021 session is only three days.

House Minority Whip Rod Pelton, a Cheyenne Wells Republican, said Hanks informed him he had a “prior commitment” Wednesday. Members are expected to inform the whip of any absences.

House Minority Leader Hugh McKean, R-Loveland, said he reached out to Hanks on Thursday. On Friday morning, Hanks texted him and told him he was feeling “under the weather.” McKean did not ask for further details.

Prior to the start of the session, House GOP staff had contacted Hanks to prepare social media profiles for caucus members. McKean said that he heard Hanks was concerned about whether he would be able to get sworn in because of the negative attention he was receiving for attending the rally, so he contacted him.

Last week, Hanks told a radio station he had attended the president’s rally outside the White House and marched to the Capitol. Hanks also wrote a letter, posted to the Fremont Republican Party’s website, about his experience.

In the letter, he asserted that the people who attacked the Capitol were different than the group that had marched from the Trump rally, and that by the time those at the rally marched to the Capitol, people already there were “wearing bandanas, like the Antifa bandits of the summertime riots.”

Since then, McKean said he has heard the new lawmaker has been inundated with calls for his resignation. McKean called Hanks on Tuesday night before the session started to reassure him, telling him that unless voters recall him, he is a member of the House of Representatives after he gets sworn in.

“I said, ‘from my perspective, you are duly elected,'” McKean said. “‘The credentials of your election have been certified by the secretary of state, will be certified by the House, and so you will be sworn in.'”

 

 

 

[Nice Guy Eddie 13,511]

If a CO politician is afraid to be seen after the Capitol riots, I wonder if he’s sporting a black eye or some other damage to his face.

[Biff Tannen 45,676]

This is the end of a long article about how to deal with Rs going forward, but this is the most favorable outcome, IMO.

https://www.crooked.com/articles/republicans-bad-faith/

Quote

In California, Democrats managed over the course of many years to fully marginalize the state Republican Party after it descended into similar nihilism. Instead of competing, the California GOP has contented itself with the margins. If anything, it has grown crazier. 

National Republicans may go the same way. They view the prospect of offering the rights of statehood to the citizens of Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico not as an opportunity to compete for more power, but as a plot to dilute the power they have. The prospect of gaining legitimate power in a modern, humane world strikes them as impossible, because they can’t imagine reconciling themselves to such a world and the desires of its free people. Confronted with fair House maps, automatic voter registration, a representative judiciary, and an adversarial press, they may recede further into the fringes.

But the choice should be theirs. Their recalcitrance brought the country to the brink of destruction and it should not now compel the rest of us to let bygones be bygones. If in the name of unearned and unreciprocated comity we grant Republicans a seat at the table and a voice in governing, they’ll learn only one thing: that cheaters prosper. If we do nothing but elect Joe Biden and close the book on the past, things will only get better until the pendulum inevitably swings back again, and Republicans come roaring back to power unchastened. 

 

[J.R. Juniors Junior Jr. 1,084]

Rick Scott, ladies and gentlemen:

 

[Chooky 13,307]

22 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

 

We are so fucked.

Forecast: dumb to slightly dumber. chance of heavy anger/fear mix. isolated clear skies followed by 100% chance of severe dumb.

[MaybeACoordinator 8,349]

34 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

This is the end of a long article about how to deal with Rs going forward, but this is the most favorable outcome, IMO.

https://www.crooked.com/articles/republicans-bad-faith/

 

Biden is already on the record, post-Insurrection, as saying that America "needs a strong and principled Republican party."

Why on earth would you say that, Joe? Are you naive, stupid or what?

[Gourmand 7,774]

11 minutes ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

Biden is already on the record, post-Insurrection, as saying that America "needs a strong and principled Republican party."

Why on earth would you say that, Joe? Are you naive, stupid or what?

He's playing to the BothSides dolts like my self-described "progressive" friend who thinks 1) AOC is a partisan hack hurting the Democrats, 2) we ought not out all 74mm Trump voters because they're not all bad people and 3) we have to reach out to these people and understand them.

I not-so-politely corrected my friend on that "progressive" bullshit and let him know he's really a neoliberal or straight up Republican, the kind of person Biden is referring to when he says we need a functioning Republican party. 

/csb

[Underdog 28,614]

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. 

[Francisco 2.0 32,389]

Ben Sasse with an article in The Atlantic

QAnon Is Destroying the GOP From Within

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/conspiracy-theories-will-doom-republican-party/617707/?utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social&utm_term=2021-01-16T23%3A34%3A00

 

Quote

Eugene goodman is an American hero. At a pivotal moment on January 6, the veteran United States Capitol Police officer single-handedly prevented untold bloodshed. Staring down an angry, advancing mob, he retreated up a marble staircase, calmly wielding his baton to delay his pursuers while calling out their position to his fellow officers. At the top of the steps, still alone and standing just a few yards from the chamber where senators and Vice President Mike Pence had been certifying the Electoral College’s vote, Goodman strategically lured dozens of the mayhem-minded away from an unguarded door to the Senate floor.

 

 

Quote

The leader of that flank of the mob, later identified by the FBI as Douglas Jensen, wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a red-white-and-blue Q—the insignia of the delusional QAnon conspiracy theory. Its supporters believe that a righteous Donald Trump is leading them in a historic quest to expose the U.S. government’s capture by a global network of cannibalistic pedophiles: not just “deep state” actors in the intelligence community, but Chief Justice John Roberts and a dozen-plus senators, including me. Now Trump’s own vice president is supposedly in on it, too. According to the FBI, Jensen “wanted to have his T-shirt seen on video so that ‘Q’ could ‘get the credit.’”

 

Quote

January 6 is a new red-letter day in U.S. history, not just because it was the first time that the Capitol had been ransacked since the War of 1812, but because a subset of the invaders apparently were attempting to disrupt a constitutionally mandated meeting of the Congress, kidnap the vice president, and somehow force him to declare Trump the victor in an election he lost. En route, the mob ultimately injured scores of law-enforcement officers. The attack led to the deaths of two officers and four other Americans. But the toll could have been much worse: Police located pipe bombs at the headquarters of both the Republican and Democratic National Committees. Investigators discovered a vehicle fully loaded with weaponry and what prosecutors are calling “homemade napalm bombs.”

 

Spoiler

The violence that Americans witnessed—and that might recur in the coming days—is not a protest gone awry or the work of “a few bad apples.” It is the blossoming of a rotten seed that took root in the Republican Party some time ago and has been nourished by treachery, poor political judgment, and cowardice. When Trump leaves office, my party faces a choice: We can dedicate ourselves to defending the Constitution and perpetuating our best American institutions and traditions, or we can be a party of conspiracy theories, cable-news fantasies, and the ruin that comes with them. We can be the party of Eisenhower, or the party of the conspiracist Alex Jones. We can applaud Officer Goodman or side with the mob he outwitted. We cannot do both.

If and when the House sends its article of impeachment against Trump to the Senate, I will be a juror in his trial, and thus what I can say in advance is limited. But no matter what happens in that trial, the Republican Party faces a separate reckoning. Until last week, many party leaders and consultants thought they could preach the Constitution while winking at QAnon. They can’t. The GOP must reject conspiracy theories or be consumed by them. Now is the time to decide what this party is about.

The newly elected Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. She once ranted that “there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it.” During her campaign, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had a choice: disavow her campaign and potentially lose a Republican seat, or welcome her into his caucus and try to keep a lid on her ludicrous ideas. McCarthy failed the leadership test and sat on the sidelines. Now in Congress, Greene isn’t going to just back McCarthy as leader and stay quiet. She’s already announced plans to try to impeach Joe Biden on his first full day as president. She’ll keep making fools out of herself, her constituents, and the Republican Party.

If the GOP is to have a future outside the fever dreams of internet trolls, we have to call out falsehoods and conspiracy theories unequivocally. We have to repudiate people who peddle those lies.

We also have to show a healthier path forward. The frustrations that caused so many people to turn in desperate directions for a political voice are not going away when Trump leaves the White House for Mar-a-Lago, because deception and demagoguery are the inevitable consequences of a politics that is profoundly, systemically dysfunctional. We must begin by asking how we got to such a discontented place, where we are mired in lies, rage, and now violence. In this essay, I am focusing on the maladies of the right, but Americans across the political spectrum are falling prey to the siren song of conspiracism. Here are three reasons.

America’s junk-food media diet
The way Americans are consuming and producing news—or what passes for it these days—is driving us mad. This has been said many times, but the problem has worsened in the past five years. On the supply side, media outlets have discovered that dialing up the rhetoric increases clicks, eyeballs, and revenue. On the demand side, readers and viewers like to see their opinions affirmed, rather than challenged. When everybody’s outraged, everybody wins—at least in the short term.

This is not a problem only on the right or only on obscure blogs. The underlying economics that drive Fox News and upstarts such as One America News to cultivate and serve ideologically distinct audiences also drive MSNBC, CNN, and The New York Times. More and more fiercely, media outlets rally their audience behind the latest cause du jour, whether it’s battling supposed election fraud or abolishing local police departments.

The conservative swaths of this media landscape were primed for Trump’s “Stop the steal” lie, which lit the fuse for the January 6 riot. For nine weeks, the president consistently lied that he had “won in a landslide.” Despite the fact that his lawyers and allies were laughed out of court more than 60 times, he spread one conspiracy theory after another across television, radio, and the web. For anyone who wanted to hear that Trump won, a machine of grifters was turning clicks into cash by telling their audiences what they wanted to hear. The liars got rich, their marks got angry, and things got out of control.

America’s institutional collapse

Traditional media outlets are only some of the longstanding institutions collapsing as the digital revolution erodes geographic communities in favor of placeless ones. Many people who yell at strangers on Twitter don’t know their own local officials or even their neighbors across the street. The loss of rootedness and institutional authority has created an opening for populists on the right and the left. It’s not a coincidence that in 2016, millions of Republicans threw in their lot behind a man who for almost all of his life had been a Democratic voter and donor, and millions of Democrats wanted as their nominee a senator who staunchly refused to join their party. On both sides, conventional politicians were being told they had lost the thread.

The anger being directed today at major internet platforms—Twitter, Facebook, and Google, especially—is, in part, a consequence of the fading of traditional political authority. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes inadvertently, Americans have outsourced key parts of political life to Silicon Valley behemoths that were not designed to, and are not competent to, execute functions traditionally in the province of the government. The failure of our traditional political institutions and our traditional media to function as spaces for genuine political conversation has created a vacuum now filled by the social-media giants—who are even worse at the job.

Civic authority has ebbed in other ways. Political incompetence and malpractice around the COVID-19 pandemic has only deepened suspicions that some politicians will never let a crisis go to waste. The decisions in California to keep churches closed but to keep open strip clubs and marijuana dispensaries baffle Main Street. Similarly, the jolting juxtaposition of a media-addict mayor breaking up Hasidic funerals while marching in Black Lives Matter protests not only deepens the cynicism of many Americans, but it indisputably undermined institutions of public health that should have been cautiously protecting their standing.

America’s loss of meaning

Our political sickness has a third cause. At least since World War II, sociologists and political scientists have been tracing the erosion of the institutions and habits that joined neighbors together in bonds of friendship and mutual responsibility. Little Leagues were not just pastimes; soup kitchens were not just service organizations; they were also venues in which people found shared purpose. Today, in many places, those bonds have been severed.

In 1922, G. K. Chesterton called America “a nation with the soul of a church.” But according to a recent study of dozens of countries, none has ditched religious belief faster since 2007 than the U.S. Without going into the causes, we can at least acknowledge one cost: For generations, most Americans understood themselves as children of a loving God, and all had a role to play in loving their neighbors. But today, many Americans have no role in any common story.

Conspiracy theories are a substitute. Support Donald Trump and you are not merely participating in a mundane political process—that’s boring. Rather, you are waging war on a global sex-trafficking conspiracy! No one should be surprised that QAnon has found a partner in the empty, hypocritical, made-for-TV deviant strain of evangelicalism that runs on dopey apocalypse-mongering. (I still consider myself an evangelical, even though so many of my nominal co-religionists have emptied the term of all historic and theological meaning.) A conspiracy theory offers its devotees a way of inserting themselves into a cosmic battle pitting good against evil. This sense of vocation that makes it dangerous is also precisely what makes it attractive in our era of isolated, alienated consumerism.

Whatever the republican Party does, it faces an ugly fight. The fracture that so many politicians on the right have been trying desperately to avoid may soon happen. But if the party has any hope of playing a constructive, rather than destructive, part in America’s future, it must do two things.

First, Republicans must repudiate the nonsense that has set our party on fire. Putting it out will take courage—and I don’t mean merely political courage. This week, after realizing that some Capitol insurrectionists wanted to capture the vice president, several Republican House members said privately that they believed a vote to impeach the president would put their lives, or the lives of their families, at risk. That is not the “constituent engagement” that elected officials are duty-bound to deal with on a daily basis. That is simply tyranny, just from the bottom up, instead of the top down. When arsonists are inside our house, can we just stand by and hope that they’ll depart quietly?

Second, the party has to rebuild itself. It must offer a genuine answer to the frustrations of the past decade. Other than by indulging Trump’s fantasies about building iPhones in America, Republicans have not figured out how to address Americans’ anger about community erosion, massive dislocations in the labor force, or Big Tech’s historically unprecedented role in governing de facto public squares.

Sensing a chance at tribal expansion, some on the left are thrilled by the chaos on the right, and they’re eager to seize the moment to banish from polite society not just those who participated and encouraged violence, but anyone with an R next to his or her name. Already on Twitter, a conservative position as longstanding as opposition to abortion has been recast as “domestic terrorism.” An MSNBC host talked about the “de-Baathification” of the GOP, comparing rank-and-file Republicans to supporters of Saddam Hussein. In an exchange on CNN, a host accused Republican voters of making common cause with Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Yet the exploitative overreaction by the left should not allow an underreaction by the right.

The past four years have wounded our country in grievous, long-lasting ways. The mob that rushed the Capitol had been fed a steady diet of lies and conspiracy theories. It is very possible that the QAnon devotee Douglas Jensen believed the junk he’d been sold—that he was a valued foot soldier in Trump’s war against shadowy forces of darkness. So, according to the FBI, he put on his Q T-shirt and acted like a foot soldier. Right up until he ran into Officer Goodman.

In a standoff between the Constitution and madness, both men picked a side. It’s the GOP’s turn to do the same.

 

[Js1 85,313]

Your party got in bed with the dog and this shit started 12 years ago. Deal with the fleas. 

[Horn Under a Bad Sign 20,395]

Warlike imagery beginning to take hold in the Republican party:

https://www.pilotonline.com/nation-world/ct-civil-war-imagery-far-right-talk-20210116-kmeckbauyrdwph6prkpslsoepe-story.html#rt=chartbeat-flt

 

[Horn Under a Bad Sign 20,395]

Are Republicans themselves headed for a pro-Trump, anti-Trump Civil war?  "Hell yes"  says Adam Kinzinger:

https://www.pilotonline.com/nation-world/ct-nw-nyt-trump-republicans-adam-kinzinger-20210116-gns2nfnjpfbdhc2xljwb34hnee-story.html#nt=latestnews&rt=chartbeat-flt

[MaybeACoordinator 8,349]

9 hours ago, Underdog said:

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. 

Yeah, but don't let them walk all over you for 30 straight years. 

[Horn Under a Bad Sign 20,395]

Trump blows up the Arizona GOP on his way out:

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/16/arizona-gop-trump-459772

You hate to see it.

[StassneyHorn 6,575]

This is my 4th or 5th time saying this on the board, but Allen West will be to the Texas GOP what Kelli Ward has been. And I love it.

 

[Js1 85,313]

18 minutes ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

Trump blows up the Arizona GOP on his way out:

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/16/arizona-gop-trump-459772

You hate to see it.

Watching AZ and GA become the new CO and VA is a thing of beauty. 

[Biff Tannen 45,676]

37 minutes ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

Trump blows up the Arizona GOP on his way out:

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/16/arizona-gop-trump-459772

You hate to see it.

This should be the standard Karen meme going forward.  Good god.

[TheStoicPaisano 9,922]

 

[JimmyJames 12,271]

13 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

This is the end of a long article about how to deal with Rs going forward, but this is the most favorable outcome, IMO.

https://www.crooked.com/articles/republicans-bad-faith/

 

After January 20. No quarter. Must wait until that date.

[JimmyJames 12,271]

On January 20 at noon this madness will start to end. the clock will determine all. I can’t wait. The storm is coming trumpkins. 

[Gatorubet 30,218]

 
It's been said a million times on this board, but there is no bottom. 

[atomheartbevo 89,654]

On 1/14/2021 at 7:38 PM, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

Just because I don't know where else to put this.

Curt Schilling believes his insurance company dropped him over his pro-Trump politics (msn.com)

Curt Schilling fucked around and found out.  It sucks supporting the right of private business to do business with whomever they want when the decide they don't want to do business with you. I hope he can't get insured. 

I'm impressed people are still willing to do business with him after his little video game debacle.

[Mdhorn 5,948]

6 hours ago, Js1 said:

Your party got in bed with the dog and this shit started 12 years ago. Deal with the fleas. 

Who knew a steady diet of gunpowder and venom would make the dog crazy?  Completely blindsided.  The real kick in the pants comes from it being supported by the church--guess we got a quick reminder of why there's a separation of church and state. 

[tx 3 putt 76,908]

TX will soon go the way of GA and AZ

sooooooon 

[burntorangebongos 10,710]

Nails it to the fucking wall, this guy does.

[Degenerate Gardner 4,085]

On 1/15/2021 at 8:16 PM, Brisketexan said:

Fantasy piece. Several of those bullets are VASTLY overstated. The GOP has some temporary wounds. It will recover, quickly.

Indeed. The GOP has spent decades vertically integrating themselves in the stupid supply chain. They're not sitting anxiously downstream waiting for another basket of deplorable to float down to them like Moses. They own the factory! As long as words like liberal, progressive and anti-fascist are curse words to half of America they'll be just fine.

Edited January 17, 2021 by Degenerate Gardner

[JFKFC 4,878]

This made my Sunday:

 

 

[LABEVO 928]

On 1/15/2021 at 8:30 PM, HenryJames said:

 

Is this true though? Sounds like a nice article but Dems barely won. Qanon keep dominating the Republican party and districts are so gerrymandered that unlikely to face real competition so I don't think we are near Republicans becoming reasonable again. We have multiple sitting politicians trying to take over the Trump cult so I don't think this is going away and Republican craziness is hear to stay unless they decide to reform but why would they....?

[Biff Tannen 45,676]

3 minutes ago, LABEVO said:

Is this true though? Sounds like a nice article but Dems barely won. Qanon keep dominating the Republican party and districts are so gerrymandered that unlikely to face real competition so I don't think we are near Republicans becoming reasonable again. We have multiple sitting politicians trying to take over the Trump cult so I don't think this is going away and Republican craziness is hear to stay unless they decide to reform but why would they....?

And this is why they must be destroyed. There are WAY too many people that think Dotard was an anomaly. An unfortunate weirdo that briefly came in and now it’s over. They don’t understand how government works and barely pay attention. 
 

I think we are going back to less than 50% voting in 2024.  We don’t learn. We are overall a dumb shit society that has benefited from a lucky geopolitical circumstance the past 100 years. 

[StassneyHorn 6,575]

58 minutes ago, LABEVO said:

Is this true though? Sounds like a nice article but Dems barely won. Qanon keep dominating the Republican party and districts are so gerrymandered that unlikely to face real competition so I don't think we are near Republicans becoming reasonable again. We have multiple sitting politicians trying to take over the Trump cult so I don't think this is going away and Republican craziness is hear to stay unless they decide to reform but why would they....?

I think what many people like me are hoping is the Dem voters who became active in 2018 and 2020 stay active, while the Trump only supporters in 2020 fade without him on the ticket. 

This board loves shit talking on Dem organizing in Texas, but from 2016 to 2020 there was a 33 percent increase in Dem votes. 2016 Republican voting to 2020 voting went up 25% though, so the massive windfall we all hoped for did not materialize in the state. However participation in the 2018 midterm fell off a cliff for Republicans when he wasn’t on the ballot. I don’t think anyone can really tell the future for upcoming elections with data now. There’s still more Republican voters, but if they’re not motivated they can definitely lose compared to previous cycles, especially with Allan West on his crusade against Abbott. Republicans have shown 52%,51%, and 52% shares of the vote in 2016, 2018, and 2020.

Edited January 18, 2021 by StassneyHorn

[Biff Tannen 45,676]

7 minutes ago, StassneyHorn said:

There’s still more Republican voters, but if they’re not motivated they can definitely lose compared to previous cycles, especially with Allan West on his crusade against Abbott. Republicans have shown 52%,51%, and 52% shares of the vote in 2016, 2018, and 2020.

They are motivated by fear. Dems are motivated by Rs being too insane. I think Dems lose because fear is everlasting. 

[Guest Lobo]

4 hours ago, JFKFC said:

This made my Sunday:

 

 

Yes, but Q always suspends his transmissions in the top half of the hour, so this just plays into his hand.  It'll be port-side at the bottom half when she's reinstated/we quit playing fucking idiot platform with national security.  How the fuck is shit like even a thing? 

[thepop 4,409]

I don't think she'll make it to a second term. Maybe that's wishful thinking.

[Hagbard Celine 10,853]

marjorie is totally a georgia name

[Hagbard Celine 10,853]

35 minutes ago, thepop said:

I don't think she'll make it to a second term. Maybe that's wishful thinking.

taylor greene and guntits boebert have to be the 2 competing for first expulsion/recall.   aoc is trying to out guntits for giving magatt capital tours.  we're about to find out who the other critters were that gave the pre-riot tours.

[Bama Chick 28,596]

They are motivated by fear. Dems are motivated by Rs being too insane. I think Dems lose because fear is everlasting. 

Um, I’m pretty fearful of that insanity.

[Horn Under a Bad Sign 20,395]

More Republican on Republican violence. You hate love to see it. 
 

 

[Francisco 2.0 32,389]

And it will work.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/republicans-are-already-rewriting-trump-years/617715/

 

Quote

As Donald Trump lurches through the disastrous final days of his presidency, Republicans are just beginning to survey the wreckage of his reign. Their party has been gutted, their leader is reviled, and after four years of excusing every presidential affront to “conservative values,” their credibility is shot. How will the GOP recover from the complicity and corruption of the Trump era? To many Republicans, the answer is simple: Pretend it never happened.

“We’re about to see a whole political party do a large-scale version of ‘New phone, who dis?’” says Sarah Isgur, a former top spokesperson for the Trump Justice Department. “It will be like that boyfriend you should never have dated—the mistake that shall not be mentioned.”

 

Quote

The plan might seem implausible, but I’ve heard it floated repeatedly in recent days by Republican strategists who are counting down the minutes of the Trump presidency. The hardcore MAGA crowd will stay loyal, of course, and those few who have consistently opposed Trump will escape with their reputations intact. But for the majority of GOP officials, apparatchiks, and commentators who sacrificed their dignity at the altar of Trump, a collective case of amnesia seems destined to set in the moment he leaves office.

People who spent years coddling the president will recast themselves as voices of conscience, or whitewash their relationship with Trump altogether. Policy makers who abandoned their dedication to “fiscal responsibility” and “limited government” will rediscover a passion for these timeless conservative principles. Some may dress up their revisionism in the rhetoric of “healing” and “moving forward,” but the strategy will be clear—to escape accountability by taking advantage of America’s notoriously short political memory.

 

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When I asked Doug Heye, a longtime GOP strategist, how his party will remember the Trump years, he responded with a litany of episodes to memory-hole. “Republicans will want to forget the constant chaos, the lies, the double-dealing, the hiring of family, and the escalating rhetoric that incited hate for four years [and] directly led to what happened at the Capitol,” he told me. “Basically, any of those things that we never would have let an Obama or Clinton get away with, but constantly justified to ourselves in the name of judges.”

But while some Republicans might be eager to “walk away from Trump,” Heye added, “many will continue talking about the things in the administration they supported”—from tax cuts and deregulation to flooding the judiciary with conservatives.

 

Spoiler

Indeed, the narrative now forming in some GOP circles presents Trump as a secondary figure who presided over an array of important accomplishments thanks to the wisdom and guidance of the Republicans in his orbit. In these accounts, Trump’s race-baiting, corruption, and cruel immigration policies—not to mention his attempts to overturn an election—are treated as minor subplots, rather than defining features.

Alyssa Farah, who worked for more than three years in the Trump White House as a communications adviser, resigned last month after the president refused to concede the election. She’s spent the past couple of weeks condemning Trump’s conspiracy theories and distancing herself from the havoc they’ve wrought. Still, when we spoke, Farah was eager to highlight America’s booming pre-coronavirus economy as proof of concept for traditional conservative policies. She lamented that Trump’s legacy might be defined by “the final days of it”—that is, the violent insurrection he incited and the re-impeachment it provoked—but she told me that Republicans shouldn’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Hoping to provoke a slightly more introspective assessment of the president she served, I asked Farah how she thought the Trump era would be written about in history books. After thinking for a moment, she suggested that this period might not be remembered for Trump at all, but rather for the “once-in-a-hundred-years pandemic” that happened to occur on his watch.

Other Trump allies hoping to reclaim the mantle of “respectable Republican” might choose to follow the Lindsey Graham model. The senator’s turn from truth-telling Trump critic to loyal acolyte—timed for his reelection bid last year in South Carolina—earned him a rash of savage headlines in the political press. But he’s already begun his post-Trump rebrand, starting with a speech on the Senate floor after the Capitol riot earlier this month.

“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey,” Graham said in the characteristically cheerful drawl that scans to so many inside the Beltway as candor. “I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president. But today … all I can say is, count me out. Enough is enough. I’ve tried to be helpful.”

Graham’s implication was that he’d cozied up to Trump only to advise him on issues of grave national import—and that he was now breaking with the outgoing president on moral grounds. This version of events conveniently ignores the senator’s hyper-partisan defenses of Trump (he called the first impeachment a “lynching in every sense”), or his sycophantic sucking up (“He beat me like a dog” in 2016), or any number of dignity-sapping acrobatics he’s performed to stay on the president’s good side. By deciding to denounce Trump after the riot, Graham—like many of his colleagues—could try to claim that he put country before party (even if it wasn’t until the final days of Trump’s term).

Terry Sullivan, who ran Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016, told me he was unimpressed by this sudden rush to righteous indignation. “The newfound outrage from former Trump supporters rings a bit hollow, given how quiet most were during Charlottesville and countless other escapades,” he said. “Forty-seven months of blind loyalty followed by one month of conscience doesn’t earn you much more than the Mick Mulvaney profile-in-courage award.”

Sullivan was less certain, though, about whether the revisionism would work. “I don’t expect the voters will treat them any more kindly than the historians—but I’ve been wrong before.” After all, some predicted that the Republicans who worked for George W. Bush, especially the architects of the Iraq War, would be shunned once he left office. Instead, many of them have settled into respectable—and lucrative—perches as commentators, lobbyists, and elder statesmen. As long as the cable-news bookers keep calling, redemption is always available.  

Like many of the more high-profile figures who worked for the Trump administration, Isgur, the former Justice Department spokesperson, has spent the years since she resigned publicly repenting. She regularly criticizes the president on CNN and in The Dispatch, a publication founded by Never Trump conservatives. Last month, she published an essay in The Washington Post grappling with how she and her colleagues had “obscured the reality of a Trump presidency from the public.”

But Isgur also recognizes that these avenues aren’t available to every Republican tainted by the Trump era. Indeed, those with the least power may end up being the ones who find it hardest to recover.

“I’m thinking about those 22-year-old kids who took a very junior job for very little money to answer phones in the White House press shop,” Isgur told me. “They leave with that on their resume but without the ability to explain themselves. They don’t get to write an op-ed in The Washington Post, or go on cable news every day to stake out new territory.

“I think,” she added, “it’s yet to be seen where those folks land.”

 

 

[Js1 85,313]

1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

And it will work.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/01/republicans-are-already-rewriting-trump-years/617715/

 

 

 

 

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Indeed, the narrative now forming in some GOP circles presents Trump as a secondary figure who presided over an array of important accomplishments thanks to the wisdom and guidance of the Republicans in his orbit. In these accounts, Trump’s race-baiting, corruption, and cruel immigration policies—not to mention his attempts to overturn an election—are treated as minor subplots, rather than defining features.

Alyssa Farah, who worked for more than three years in the Trump White House as a communications adviser, resigned last month after the president refused to concede the election. She’s spent the past couple of weeks condemning Trump’s conspiracy theories and distancing herself from the havoc they’ve wrought. Still, when we spoke, Farah was eager to highlight America’s booming pre-coronavirus economy as proof of concept for traditional conservative policies. She lamented that Trump’s legacy might be defined by “the final days of it”—that is, the violent insurrection he incited and the re-impeachment it provoked—but she told me that Republicans shouldn’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

Hoping to provoke a slightly more introspective assessment of the president she served, I asked Farah how she thought the Trump era would be written about in history books. After thinking for a moment, she suggested that this period might not be remembered for Trump at all, but rather for the “once-in-a-hundred-years pandemic” that happened to occur on his watch.

Other Trump allies hoping to reclaim the mantle of “respectable Republican” might choose to follow the Lindsey Graham model. The senator’s turn from truth-telling Trump critic to loyal acolyte—timed for his reelection bid last year in South Carolina—earned him a rash of savage headlines in the political press. But he’s already begun his post-Trump rebrand, starting with a speech on the Senate floor after the Capitol riot earlier this month.

“Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey,” Graham said in the characteristically cheerful drawl that scans to so many inside the Beltway as candor. “I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president. But today … all I can say is, count me out. Enough is enough. I’ve tried to be helpful.”

Graham’s implication was that he’d cozied up to Trump only to advise him on issues of grave national import—and that he was now breaking with the outgoing president on moral grounds. This version of events conveniently ignores the senator’s hyper-partisan defenses of Trump (he called the first impeachment a “lynching in every sense”), or his sycophantic sucking up (“He beat me like a dog” in 2016), or any number of dignity-sapping acrobatics he’s performed to stay on the president’s good side. By deciding to denounce Trump after the riot, Graham—like many of his colleagues—could try to claim that he put country before party (even if it wasn’t until the final days of Trump’s term).

Terry Sullivan, who ran Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016, told me he was unimpressed by this sudden rush to righteous indignation. “The newfound outrage from former Trump supporters rings a bit hollow, given how quiet most were during Charlottesville and countless other escapades,” he said. “Forty-seven months of blind loyalty followed by one month of conscience doesn’t earn you much more than the Mick Mulvaney profile-in-courage award.”

Sullivan was less certain, though, about whether the revisionism would work. “I don’t expect the voters will treat them any more kindly than the historians—but I’ve been wrong before.” After all, some predicted that the Republicans who worked for George W. Bush, especially the architects of the Iraq War, would be shunned once he left office. Instead, many of them have settled into respectable—and lucrative—perches as commentators, lobbyists, and elder statesmen. As long as the cable-news bookers keep calling, redemption is always available.  

Like many of the more high-profile figures who worked for the Trump administration, Isgur, the former Justice Department spokesperson, has spent the years since she resigned publicly repenting. She regularly criticizes the president on CNN and in The Dispatch, a publication founded by Never Trump conservatives. Last month, she published an essay in The Washington Post grappling with how she and her colleagues had “obscured the reality of a Trump presidency from the public.”

But Isgur also recognizes that these avenues aren’t available to every Republican tainted by the Trump era. Indeed, those with the least power may end up being the ones who find it hardest to recover.

“I’m thinking about those 22-year-old kids who took a very junior job for very little money to answer phones in the White House press shop,” Isgur told me. “They leave with that on their resume but without the ability to explain themselves. They don’t get to write an op-ed in The Washington Post, or go on cable news every day to stake out new territory.

“I think,” she added, “it’s yet to be seen where those folks land.”

 

 

Yep. Give it 6-8 months and even Gaetz will be like “who is Trump?”

[Biff Tannen 45,676]

4 minutes ago, Js1 said:

Yep. Give it 6-8 months and even Gaetz will be like “who is Trump?”

And then they should be forcefully reminded.  They don't ever get the dotard stink off them.  Ever.

[Brisketexan 105,097]

Yep. Give it 6-8 months and even Gaetz will be like “who is Trump?”

No, he won’t. Trumpism will remain the heart and soul of much of the GOP. It’s too popular in a shitload of districts, so they’ll keep riding it. Which will be odd, as some Repubs will simultaneously be trying to distance themselves. But there’s a cure for that....

And then they should be forcefully reminded.  They don't ever get the dotard stink off them.  Ever.

....and it’s this. I’m dead serious about a nationwide billboard campaign. For the next 2-4 years, we need billboards up on large thoroughfares etc, “Cruz: accessory to Trump’s Treason,” shit like that, for Rubio, Graham, Mitch, all of them. The GOP communication strategy proved that relentless, simple repetition works. So let’s do it. We have to 1) relentless repeat that Trump committed treason, and 2) multiple elected officials helped him do it. Gloves off. No apologies. No unity without full accountability.