If you think about it, Trump is really a sort of simple and easily understood person.
He has no firm foundation for his ego, but since he’s been pampered and coddled all his life, it’s never faced any significant challenges either. So he’s ended up with this grossly overinflated and terribly fragile ego, and it’s basically a full-time job just keeping it inflated and protecting it from harm.
Yes.
The goal - and this was already obvious long before the election to anyone with a functioning brain and a speck of intellectual integrity - was and is to destroy the last vestiges of American representative democracy and institute a kleptocratic oligarchy.
Is NBC News actually just now catching on?
At every level.
And even just a cursory examination of the history of civilizations would reveal that that’s par for the course, and that the US is only really notable for the speed with which it’s reached this point.
The DNC and the rest of the Dem establishment would rather lose than adopt any meaningful progressivism or allow for a progressive candidate.
Their primary motivation, and quite possibly their only motivation, is collecting as much soft money as possible.
And that interest is actually well served by losing, and in fact, that appears to be their preference. If they lose, then they don’t need to run in the next election on any platform other than stopping the Republicans from causing even more harm, which saves them having to promise their supporters things that they’ll then have to arrange to somehow fail to deliver even if they have a majority. It’s easier just to lose, then to run merely on being “not Republicans.”
And the one thing that would upset that gravy train is ending up with an actual progressive in a powerful position. A progressive would not only promise things the establishment democrats would prefer to not even mention, but would mean it. And even worse yet, they’d then try to actually deliver on their promises. And that would alienate the big money, which pays for policies that favor themselves, and most assuredly NOT policies that favor the common people.
So yes - if the Democrats want to win, they self-evidently need to appeal to progressives. But that’s been the case since 2016, and it’s made zero difference and it’s going to continue to make zero difference, because they’d rather lose than adopt any meaningful progressivism.
We’re really speedrunning this whole autocracy thing, aren’t we?
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” - Frank Zappa
One would think they’d at least wait until the planned concentration camps are built.
This isn’t analysis - it’s craven blame-shifting.
Trump already has a blank check to issue pardons and already intends to abuse the power in ways never before seen, and it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference what Biden or anyone else does or doesn’t do.
Hmm…
I actually hadn’t thought about it that way - to the degree that I thought about it at all, I guess I pretty much assumed that opportunistic sycophancy was just his nature.
But yeah - now that I am thinking about it, it is quite likely that to the degree that it’s not his own nature, it’s a role he has to play at the behest of and on the behalf of his patrons.
And the only other thing I’ve really noticed about Graham is that pretty much no matter what he’s doing or saying, there’s this ongoing low level sense of sleaze that just sort of emanates from him. He just seems like the sort of “conservative” with a sex dungeon in his basement and a bunch of highly specialized escort services on speed-dial.
Which ties in neatly.
Sorry - I edited that because I could just see some tight-assed mod getting all twisted up over it, and I wanted the underlying message to not get deleted, and only saw your response after the fact.
But now that you mention it…
Lindsey Graham can always be counted on to suck up to whichever Republican is currently getting the most headlines.
Not “now” - I have been for years. Ever since I figured out that the US has no future - that the ruling class is already preparing to put down any opposition (that’s why we have a militarized police force and the largest prison system in the world, and that already, before Trump’s proposed detainment camps that are supposedly going to be built to hold undocumented immigrants, except that the undocumented immigrants are going to be deported, so self-evidently they’re going to hold someone else).
There is no way to make any lasting change in the US. The ruling class is too firmly entrenched and too out of touch, and frankly too fucking insane. They will, and already intend to, go to war to protect their grotesquely destructive privilege, and the nation will not survive that.
So the only hope is that our descendants will build something better out of the rubble we’re going to leave behind.
And again - that was already the case. Trump is just accelerating the process.
We’re in a timeline now in which truth is entirely irrelevant.
Trump supporters are necessarily one of two things - deluded or dishonest. Either they’ve been manipulated into not seeing the plain fact that he’s a corrupt and self-serving autocrat and an existential threat to the US, or they know exactly what he is and just don’t admit it publicly.
In either case, truth and reality count for nothing.
That’s the deal.
Literally.
The next year or two is just going to be an orgy of face-eating leopards eating faces.
While the decision to stop publishing the six books was made by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, right-wing outlets like Fox News mischaracterized it as a book ban.
Unsurprisingly, it has actually been Republican-backed laws like Tennessee’s that have resulted in the banning of Dr. Seuss books from schools.
And that’s the way it works pretty much without exception - private individuals and businesses and such make independent decisions and the Republicans scream that they’re being oppressed, then they pass laws in the name of freedom.
Even with as insane as the Republican agenda is, and as deluded as their supporters necessarily must be, that particular aspect of it really stands out to me. It’s just so perfectly Orwellian.
Setting aside the anti-health and anti-sanity aspects of this, the thing that gets me is that Republicans somehow continue to believe that they’re the party of freedom when everything they do involves ever more regulation.
They frame things as if the Democrats are oppressing people and the Republicans are fighting for their freedom, but the exact opposite is actually true - the way that things actually work, consistently, is that Democrats want to give people the freedom to do things and Republicans are fighting to destroy those freedoms. Their reaction to every single thing they encounter is to pass a law against it, which is literally the exact opposite of freedom.
Now granted - most of their positions are insane, so it’s not as if rationality should be expected, but this just seems to be something so simple and so obvious that they can’t possibly miss it. Yet somehow they do.
Gee whiz - who’d’ve thought that the woman who married a rich guy who looks (and notoriously smells) like a gigantic ambulatory drain clog would be so mercenary.
There actually is a statistical correlation between conservative, anti-trans political affiliation and a preference for transgender porn, and Texas leads the nation in searches for transgender porn.
Seriously, WHAT is THE DEAL with conservative disinformationists scattering ALL-CAPS WORDS throughout EVERYTHING they WRITE?
My THEORY is that it’s MEANT as a SUBSTITUTE for LOGIC and REASON - that in LIEU of saying things that are ACTUALLY logical, reasonable or true, they JUST say things really LOUDLY.
It MUST be TRUE because it’s so EMPHATIC, right?
And it PROBABLY triggers a PAVLOVIAN response in the DUNDERHEADS who READ it. “LOOK at all the CAPS! This is MY kind of TRUTHINESS!”
It’s just… WEIRD. And sort of PATHETIC.
Even in an era in which Republicans have come to be defined by psychological projection and unintentional irony, Tommy Tuberville calling someone else an imbecile stands out.