The GOP: Not What It Used to Be

[NotQuiteMotY]

On 10/21/2022 at 8:14 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Sir, I suspect you were in Center City. Therefore, get over yourself.

On 10/23/2022 at 6:37 PM, Audrey2 said:

I agree with you and it terrifies me. For the record I am a middle aged cis female who is not in a relationship and does not see a relationship in my future. I know they're starting with abortion and homosexuality (which because I am not into make up and my hair is usually not behaving I fear I could get caught up in a sweep because what else would a middle-aged never married woman be?) But I can also see them moving on to contraception and when they have legislated that out of the market start looking at women in the workforce. I know it sounds completely crazy and dystopian (okay as crazy as a Herschel Walker speech), but I don't trust these Christian nationalists at all and it scares me how far they may go.

I'm closer to the same situation as @AlmostSavedAtTacoBell and it terrifies me, too. Even if I'd be safe, which would not be a guarantee especially once birth control is taken out of the equation, a whole hell of a lot of women wouldn't be, including potentially my own daughter and niece.

[GreyhoundFan]

2 hours ago, NotQuiteMotY said:

Sir, I suspect you were in Center City. Therefore, get over yourself

I was in Center City recently. There were a lot of homeless people. It didn’t freak me out. I didn’t go out late at night by myself because I’m a middle aged woman in a wheelchair, but I was fine during the day on my own and with a group of friends in the evening. Chaffetz  is a whiny jerk. 

[NotQuiteMotY]

23 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I was in Center City recently. There were a lot of homeless people. It didn’t freak me out. I didn’t go out late at night by myself because I’m a middle aged woman in a wheelchair, but I was fine during the day on my own and with a group of friends in the evening. Chaffetz  is a whiny jerk. 

Yeah, I wouldn't be out at night, either, but that's true of a lot of places. During the day? I've walked around by myself just fine. It's as safe as any other major city. He's just... *insert inarticulate gesture of exasperation here*

[GreyhoundFan]

The GQP likes to repeat itself  

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

2 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Oh dear, it appears things have gone awry. Who could have foreseen that letting the Trump Train go at crazy speed and run over the few people in the party who had the moral giver to try to stop it would end up being a problem when it ran off the tracks? Mitch got what he wanted- a packed SCOTUS- but did it really work out so well for the party overall? The guy he blocked is in charge of the DOJ, the Dobbs decision is not rolling out the way he and other misogynists wanted, and now there is serious party infighting. I really think if Trump & DeSantis both run in the primary it will be a glorious mess because people underestimate the cult members’ devotion. No matter who wins the R primary (probably DeSantis) there will likely be a repeat of the “stolen election” claims only this time it will be aimed at the R party and its POTUS candidate.  Every R who either actively promoted that narrative or failed to speak up against it will be at fault when things start happening. Maybe I am way off base but I predict it’s going to be a very bumpy road during the R primary for POTUS and afterwards if Trump isn’t the nominee. They created the monster but forget that the monster can get out of their control and turn on them too. 

[GreyhoundFan]

It’s sad how this is not just tolerated, but encouraged by the GQP:

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

It’s sad how this is not just tolerated, but encouraged by the GQP:

 

Uh oh- he said the quiet part out loud. 

[47of74]

On 10/25/2022 at 8:26 PM, NotQuiteMotY said:

Yeah, I wouldn't be out at night, either, but that's true of a lot of places. During the day? I've walked around by myself just fine. It's as safe as any other major city. He's just... *insert inarticulate gesture of exasperation here*

I may sound like a broken record but by and large Minneapolis is fine.  It's not the war zone the Branch Trumpvidians like to paint it as.

20 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Yeah when that happens it'll be time to raid the popcorn aisle at the local grocery stores...

[GreyhoundFan]

Gee, what a puzzler. 
 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The GOP prepares to tear itself apart"

Quote

The Republican Party has not had a moment’s rest since Donald Trump descended that escalator in Trump Tower in June 2015. And it might be about to enter its most tumultuous period in a long time.

In the wake of their surprisingly poor showing in the midterm elections, and with the former president apparently set to announce his 2024 bid for the White House, Republicans are preparing for a period of brutal intramural conflict. Suddenly, the party that remade itself in Trump’s image isn’t sure it likes what it sees in the mirror.

Or at least, some of them believe voters aren’t buying it. The GOP is chock-full of people who lined up behind Trump in 2016 not out of conviction but because they felt they had no alternative. His support among their constituents was undeniable, and he brought with him an intolerance for disloyalty and a petty vindictiveness. His win validated their decision, whatever moral compromise it entailed.

Yet each successive loss (the 2018 midterms, the 2020 presidential race and now 2022) has made it harder for them to believe that Trumpism is the only way to win — and that they can survive saying so. Which is why even some politicians considered Trumpy are now openly opposing him. Take Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who touted her support for Trump and put up posters of herself holding a military-style rifle when she ran in 2021. Two days after the midterms, she went on Fox Business to say she couldn’t support him in 2024. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, house organ of the conservative overclass, wrote an editorial titled “Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.”

It isn’t just Trump being questioned. A group of influential conservatives released an open letter calling on the party to delay its congressional leadership elections scheduled for this week. It’s less than clear what they’re after, but Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are both fending off doubts about their leadership.

One of the notable features of all this conflict is how disorganized it is. Some people have a beef with McCarthy or McConnell. Some are upset with Trump. Some want to put all their election denialism behind them. And many are just angling for their own advantage. Unlike in previous moments of tumult, it’s hard to draw a clear line between the establishment and the insurgents.

That’s partly because the person who still leads the party — Trump — always presented himself as a scourge of the old guard. Trump loyalists, no matter how high their position, fancy themselves rebels, iconoclasts or brave opponents of the stodgy and self-satisfied.

The truth is that Republicans always enjoyed a little rebellion, so long as it was contained. Even George W. Bush, son of a president and grandson of a senator, sold himself as “a different kind of Republican” — an outsider who could whip the capital into shape. In his 2000 convention speech he claimed to “lack the polish of Washington,” as though he were a dust-covered cowboy riding into town to give them varmints the what-for.

That was the kind of tame anti-establishment pose the party’s elite was comfortable with. But over the years, it became clear that many Republican voters really did regard the party’s leadership as a bunch of phonies and sellouts. It’s what the leadership struggled with all through the Obama years, and in 2016, Trump rode that discontent to the party’s nomination and then to the White House.

At the moment, it’s far less clear just what Republicans are fighting about. It certainly isn’t substantive issues; the party remains remarkably unified on policy, partly because outside of tax cuts and immigration, they don’t care much about policy at all. Instead, policy debates are increasingly about how radical Republicans should be to achieve their goals.

What is clear is that they now have a leader around whom all their political problems revolve. So some Republicans rush to Trump’s side while conservative commentators call the midterms “a blinking, blaring, screaming sign that reads ‘Republicans: Trump is your problem.’ ”

Trump himself will not stand by and watch, and that’s what will raise the stakes, and the intensity, of this iteration of the long-running intraparty debate. Trump has always believed that conflict and chaos work to his advantage, and he’ll demand that Republicans be maximally combative — even when doing so courts disaster for his party or the country. He could insist that they impeach President Biden, shut down the government, refuse to raise the debt ceiling and throw the United States into default. And who will stand up to him?

Some Republicans will, but which ones do and don’t matters a great deal. Will McCarthy and the extremists in his caucus force a debt ceiling crisis at Trump’s behest? If they think it serves the end of getting him back in the White House, there might be few limits to how far they’ll go, no matter who in their party objects. The more “responsible” Republicans oppose them, the more convinced Trump and his allies will be that they’re right.

One thing is for certain: This conflict will not be easily resolved. It will likely consume the Republican Party all the way to November 2024, and probably beyond. And we all may suffer the consequences.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[47of74]

Fucking ugh

Quote

In a signal Iowa Republicans will look to implement a school voucher system in Iowa, a new Iowa House committee will tackle “significant reforms to our educational system”.

Iowa Speaker of the House Pat Grassley included the committee in an annual announcement of chairs for legislative committees. In it, Rep. Grassley (R-New Hartford) appoints himself as chair of the brand new Education Reform Committee, saying it will deal “with bills containing significant reforms to our educational system”. House committees typically are the first stop for bills introduced in the legislature to face intimate discussions before going to a full chamber for debate and vote.

The new committee comes amid speculation Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds will push through her plan for a school voucher system for Iowa. The proposal would allow families to pull state tax dollars away from public schools to use instead on private school tuition. Reynolds says that would increase competition to improve Iowa’s education system by giving parents greater choice in where they send their children. Several superintendents spoke out against the plan, though, worried it would mean funding cuts for Iowa’s schools.

After Iowa Gov. Reynolds’ Republican Party won a sweeping victory in Iowa’s midterm elections, winning a supermajority in the Iowa Senate, growing its majority in the Iowa House and capturing all state executive offices except Auditor, the voucher plan is expected to be high on the priority list when the new session starts in January.

You couldn't pay me enough to move back.

[GreyhoundFan]

More:

Spoiler

 

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

More:

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Let’s see- children physically and sexually abused in “Christian” settings including supposedly “good Christian homes” and by religious leaders- yep, many documented cases. Children physically and sexually abused by supposedly “party of family values” GOP members and office holders- yep, easy to find many. Children physically or sexually abused by Fiona Fireworks and Zelda Zuzu Zazzle, the drag queens who volunteer their time to read to kids in libraries- well surely because all those people keep saying they are “grooming” there must be plenty of documented cases…..wait, why can’t I find a single incident? Not even a “my cousin heard from his friend that a kid in the next town” whiff of a problem. 
 

It’s almost like the drag queens aren’t the ones that are predatory…

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

What a damned snowflake. 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

On 11/22/2022 at 4:15 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

What a damned snowflake. 

I sincerely hope whoever runs against him in the next election cycle plays the 911 call in every campaign ad. Every single print as and mailer would have that guy’s picture with that quote on it. What a damn scaredy cat. A nine year old girl. I saw her picture- she is the size of a regular nine year old. What a big threat to a much bigger man. 🙄

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

On 12/1/2022 at 8:22 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

 

I ADORE Betty! My next pet will be named after her. I don’t care if the pet is a boy. He’ll be the second best Mrs. Betty Bowers!

And apparently Mitch hasn’t met 2/3rds of my relatives who are Republican, racist, xenophobic, intolerant of other faiths/religions, homophobic, and misogynistic (yes, the women too). Most are pro- forced birth even though I have explained over and over that in some states my angel baby’s loss would have meant that instead of the safe procedure that was indeed an abortion even thought she had according to the best medical estimates stopped living two weeks before the sonogram and three weeks before the surgery I would have been left to wait until I either began hemorrhaging or had developed sepsis but in either case would have to be in very serious danger of dying before I would have received medical intervention. So there is indeed plenty of room for white supremacy as well as other sickening views. The “n” word and other racial slurs were common in my childhood and only curtailed in my presence when I made it clear I would not allow any contact with the Taquitos if they couldn’t keep their hateful words to themselves around my kids. (The rule didn’t just apply to racial slurs but to any other slurs as well as snide insults and comments. I put it this way- “If you take what you are about to say and change your comment, slur, or insult to (her nationality background, her religion, etc) and find it offensive, then don’t say it.) Sorry for the wall of text but the HYPOCRISY! 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good op-ed:  "The GOP is stuck in a doom loop begun 30 years ago"

Quote

One cannot be surprised to find the Republican Party adrift. This is what happens to ships boarded by pirates, plundered and set aflame on the high seas.

Poor Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), leader of the House majority-to-be: How glum he looks as the Cuckoo Caucus binds his hands to walk the plank of a doomed speakership. He knows he will soon bob helplessly amid the same swarm of sharks that devoured predecessors Paul D. Ryan and John A. Boehner.

The pendulum of history suggests that something will eventually be salvaged of the GOP. But it won’t be a quick fix, because righting the ship is not simply a matter of striking the orange skull and crossbones and raising the standard of some better-behaved buccaneer. Deeper problems made the party vulnerable to raiding in the first place.

The problems go back 30 years. Republicans created in the 1970s and 1980s some of the strongest presidential mojo in American history. The five nationwide elections during that period — 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984 and 1988 — produced four GOP landslides, including some of the largest on record. Republicans lost only once, in 1976, in a squeaker, when the economy was mired in stagflation and the Republican incumbent had resigned in disgrace two years earlier.

The combined electoral college votes in those five elections was 2,200 for the Republican candidates to 487 for the Democrats. Republicans won more than 425 electoral votes four times; no Democrat won as many as 300 even once in those two decades.

Americans have voted in eight presidential elections in the three decades since. Only once, in 2004, has the Republican won a majority of the popular vote. Running as an incumbent in wartime, George W. Bush eked out 51 percent of the popular vote against a weak opponent named John F. Kerry.

What happened? Until the GOP faces the answer, it will continue to drift as a national party.

The landslides ended in 1992. Many Republicans remember it as the year Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot flew a suicide mission into George H.W. Bush’s reelection campaign. But the first fatal blow to Bush Sr. was dealt by hard-right pundit Patrick J. Buchanan. His angry populist campaign carried all the way to the convention, where he traded a grudging endorsement of Bush for influence over the opening-night program. Buchanan anchored an evening of hatreds and resentments that presaged the politics of today.

With Bush Sr. gone, de facto leadership of the GOP passed to Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who had risen from the backbenches of the House by perfecting a politics of personal destruction. Gingrich was the first speaker of the House to stir up a presidential impeachment that had no chance of success in the Senate — a bad idea on which the Democrats later doubled down.

One of the fathers of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., had Buchanan on his mind in the months leading up to that fateful 1992 campaign. In a 40,000-word essay published late in 1991, Buckley examined the pitchfork populist’s tendency to deal in antisemitic tropes and allusions. His conclusion: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it.”

George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign was a repudiation of the Buchanan movement. Bush promised to govern as a “compassionate conservative” — welcoming of immigrants, tolerant of difference, approving of compromise. But he did no more to vindicate this approach than his father had, leaving office amid a failing war and a crashed economy.

Buchananism, with its ugly undertones and shades of paranoid grievance, was the only energy remaining in the GOP. It expressed itself in the tea party movement of 2010. Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 campaign was the last gasp of the party elite, which was too exhausted to resist Donald Trump’s takeover four years later.

From Buchanan to Gingrich to Trump, the drivers of the Republican Party have pushed relentlessly toward anger, accusation, isolationism, pessimism and paranoia. In the guise of battling the left, they wage their most effective warfare against their fellow Republicans. Having purged proponents of the overwhelmingly popular ideas of the 1970s and 1980s — strong alliances and free markets, individual freedom and personal responsibility, the rule of law, faith in the future — they offer nothing positive. Literally: In 2020, the GOP did not offer any platform.

Trump’s supper with a Holocaust denier brings Buchanan’s assault on the GOP to its dismal conclusion — at a hateful dead end. Individual Republicans will continue to win races, if only because the Democrats have their own self-destructive elements. But the party will not be popular as long as the dark side’s in charge.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

So true:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is one party I’m thrilled to avoid.