The GOP: Not What It Used to Be

[Cartmann99]

 

[Audrey2]

Hmmm ...  sounds like going to one of the reddest of the red corners of the state and making anyone else who's slightly less conservative drive, which I'm guessing many won't, just to make sure that you have an ultra right winger in each of the positions as your candidate.

[ADoyle90815]

On 2/27/2021 at 11:57 AM, Howl said:

I'll see your golden Trump calf and raise you an Odal rune: 

This is truly horrifying: the floor plan of the CPAC stage is  the Odal rune, used by the SS, and adopted by neo-Nazis in place of a swastika.  (Note this correction: the subsequent tweet clarifies that the CPAC stage is in the Odal rune shape, NOT the AFPAC stage.)

 

They're not even hiding it anymore, as this is a bullhorn for white supremacists and other bigots. This is why New York State and Georgia need to convict Orange Fuckface before he can become successful in another coup, just like that failed Austrian art student.

Edited February 28, 2021 by ADoyle90815

[AmazonGrace]

Well I mean, lots of people are saying...

It's easier to fix an imaginary cannibal cabal than any of the real problems so why isn't it done yet? 

[fraurosena]

Oh Rufus, I hope there's a clip somewhere of this...

 

Not a clip of his entrance, but one with Trump showing off his cognitive dissonance.

Although, it was a successful journey out the door, so there's that.

 

[Black Aliss]

A member of a Japanese cult that believes its leader is an alien from Venus spoke at CPAC last Friday. If you thought the golden calf and the odin rune stage were weird, check out this guy, one Hiroaki “Jay” Aeba:

Quote

His speaker bio on the CPAC website notes that Aeba is the chairman of the Japanese Conservative Union (JCU), a right-wing political organization, and that he helped found CPAC Japan, which has been running for the last four years in Tokyo.  

What isn’t mentioned is the central role Aeba plays in a Japanese cult called Happy Science, whose leader believes he is the Messiah and sells “miracle cures” for COVID-19.

“Happy Science is a Japanese cult run by a man who claims to be the incarnation of multiple Gods while pretending to channel the psychic spirits of anyone from Quetzalcoatl to Bashar al-Assad to Natalie Portman,” Sarah Hightower, a researcher and expert on Japanese cults, told VICE News.

<snip>

Happy Science was founded in October 1986 by Ryuho Okawa, a former Wall Street trader who claims to be the reincarnated form of Buddha, who himself was the reincarnated form of El Cantare, a god from Venus who created life on earth millions of years ago. Happy Science was officially recognized as a religious group in Japan in 1991, quickly gained a huge following, and made Okawa a very rich man. One estimate from 1991 put the group’s annual revenues at around $45 million. 

Okawa claims that he can channel the spirits of famous people — both alive and dead. In 2019, the Happy Science branch in London hosted a séance to hear Margaret Thatcher’s thoughts on Brexit. Okawa has written over 500 books filled with outlandish claims about UFOs, demonic warfare, and most recently, coronavirus and how it originated on another planet.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3v9be/a-japanese-cult-that-believes-its-leader-is-an-alien-from-venus-is-speaking-at-cpac

[Ozlsn]

7 hours ago, Black Aliss said:

A member of a Japanese cult that believes its leader is an alien from Venus spoke at CPAC last Friday. If you thought the golden calf and the odin rune stage were weird, check out this guy, one Hiroaki “Jay” Aeba:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3v9be/a-japanese-cult-that-believes-its-leader-is-an-alien-from-venus-is-speaking-at-cpac

So the RNC have really abandoned all pretense of having policies and are just going with the batshit crazy?  

[Cartmann99]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Let me preface by saying I can't carry a tune in a bucket and that the Star Spangled Banner is a total bitch to sing, but they couldn't get someone who could actually sing?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I love how they misspelled DeSantis' name:

[Cartmann99]

Rumors have been flying about this for days:

 

[Xan]

4 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Let me preface by saying I can't carry a tune in a bucket and that the Star Spangled Banner is a total bitch to sing, but they couldn't get someone who could actually sing?

 

That was really bad.  I think she ought to sing every time Trump speaks.

[WiseGirl]

Repugs are at it still.  Can't actually have everyone vote. Assholes. This needs to stop. 

 

[WiseGirl]

Geez, he seems nice */sarcasm

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/02/27/gops-gosar-skipped-covid-19-aid-vote-to-speak-at-conference-with-ties-to-white-nationalism/?sh=571c844e6036

Some of my "favorites" from him,

"During his speech Friday, Fuentes warned "white people are done being bullied" and that if the U.S. "loses its white demographic core, then this is not America anymore." 

Fuentes went on to characterize the chaos in and around the Capitol on Jan. 6, which resulted in the deaths of five people, as "awesome," calling it "light-hearted mischief.""

-----------

"light-hearted" mischief. Unbelievable.  

[clueliss]

I found this interesting

[WiseGirl]

I agree 100%.  The hate was there (is?) but ... I just don't know what to write.  I keep starting and changing my mind. I'll go with I'm angry and sad.

 

[fraurosena]

Republicans blew the first major battle of Biden's presidency

Quote

Republicans in Washington are finally starting to realize they botched the first big political battle of Joe Biden's presidency, according to Politico. That belated revelation comes as a new poll from Politico/Morning Consult showed the American Rescue Plan garnering 72% support among voters (with just 21% opposing it) and Biden notching a 62% approval rating in the survey. Over the weekend, a CBS-YouGov survey also found that 71% of Americans think the $1.9 trillion plan will help the middle class more than wealthy Americans—which is true.

In retrospect, Republicans are now wondering whether their laser-like focus on the great Seuss-silencing and Potato Head scandals of 2021 really met the political moment. Hmm.

“Whenever there is something that goes into pop culture and now all this cancel culture stuff, it is catnip for the base and the media and Republicans are going to talk about that,” GOP strategist Doug Heye told Politico.

Shocker—Republicans got caught up in a useless round of conservative media-fueled demagoguery while the rest of America reeled from the greatest public health disaster in a century. Democrats simply blew right past Republicans to answer the national need. But what confounds GOP strategists is that the Republican party really mounted no concerted effort to oppose the Democratic legislation as it gained widespread traction and was broadly embraced by voters.

That's left people like Steve Bannon crying in his coffee. “It’s a fairly popular bill that polled well because it’s been sold as a COVID relief bill with direct cash payments to Americans—what’s not to like?” Bannon said. “However, that’s not what the bill is. That’s a huge problem because 2022 has already started and you don’t see the fight here.”

The Republican National Committee, for instance, issued a meager two statements about the bill. Conservative media went down the Seuss-Potato rabbit hole. And GOP lawmakers—who helped Donald Trump crank up the national debt by $7.8 trillion—apparently felt a little squeamish about suddenly attacking pandemic-related spending. 

“Republicans lost credibility on [the deficit] issue during the Trump years, especially the first couple years when we had the power to do something about it,” said Brendan Steinhauser, a GOP consultant. “There was no interest in doing anything about it. It was just, ‘let’s not even talk about spending or the debt or deficit or anything like that.’”

Even Democrats have been baffled by the Republican whiff on such a major battle. John Anzalone, an external Biden adviser and former Biden campaign pollster, was amazed that Republicans settled on framing the package as unrelated to COVID-19 when so many Americans who will get the relief money are specifically reeling from pandemic-related illness, joblessness, and financial struggles.

“This is just really mind-boggling,” Anzalone said. “At a time that we’re going through three or four crises at once, they have basically just punted. They've completely punted.”

But the lack of a coordinated GOP campaign with only helter-skelter attempts to mount an opposition is really emblematic of a much bigger problem for the Republican party—it no longer knows what it is or what it stands for. With no core values to operate on after they spent four years surrendering the party to a completely unmoored Donald Trump, Republicans don't have any go-to plays or even messengers for that matter.

And once again, their main messenger—Trump—was so consumed with his own pity party over the lost election and impeachment that it crippled the party's ability to settle on a line of attack and prosecute it in the media.

This will be a continual problem moving forward for Republicans. It's not only a question of, “what do they stand for?” but one of, “who can even carry that message”?

People like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina made feeble attempts at smearing the legislation, calling it "reparations" for Black farmers. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas skewered Democrats for not excluding inmates from getting relief. But Cotton had voted in favor of a COVID-19 package under Trump that also included payments for those very same inmates. 

The lack of both message and messenger has left Republicans hoping against hope the relief that has already started hitting bank accounts and will continue to target life-saving funds to the nation's neediest will somehow plummet in popularity.

“It’s at the peak of its popularity right now and the more it becomes unpopular we’ll pound against them,” said one GOP aide.

But who exactly will do the pounding and what in the heck will they say? No one even has a clue—least of all, Republicans.

 

[Ozlsn]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

It’s at the peak of its popularity right now and the more it becomes unpopular we’ll pound against them,” said one GOP aide.

This sounds like the new Republican sport of extreme wishful thinking.

[WiseGirl]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

problem for the Republican party—it no longer knows what it is or what it stands for. With no core values to operate on after they spent four years surrendering the party to a completely unmoored Donald Trump

They reap what they sow.  Years of kissing OFM ass and hitching their party to an unmoored OFM lead to this. May the rats continue to go down with the ship and may all their voting obstruction be ruled unconstitutional. In short may they get roasted, burned, and tossed out of office for what they did/do to this country.

[front hugs > duggs]

On 3/18/2021 at 6:01 AM, Ozlsn said:

This sounds like the new Republican sport of extreme wishful thinking.

lol yes it's going to become wildly unpopular when more and more people keep getting their stimmy checks

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good read: "How ‘Owning the Libs’ Became the GOP’s Core Belief"

Quote

For a political party whose membership skews older, it might be surprising that the spirit that most animates Republican politics today is best described with a phrase from the world of video games: “Owning the libs.”

Gamers borrowed the term from the nascent world of 1990s computer hacking, using it to describe their conquered opponents: “owned.” To “own the libs” does not require victory so much as a commitment to infuriating, flummoxing or otherwise distressing liberals with one’s awesomely uncompromising conservatism. And its pop-cultural roots and clipped snarkiness are perfectly aligned with a party that sees pouring fuel on the culture wars’ fire as its best shot at surviving an era of Democratic control.

In just the past month, Sen. Ted Cruz self-consciously joked at the Conservative Political Action Conference about his ill-timed jaunt to Cancun, decried mask-wearing as pro-statist virtue signaling, and closed his speech by screaming “Freedom,” a la William Wallace; House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted a video of himself reading a Dr. Seuss book in protest of the supposed censorship of the children’s author (whose estate decided to stop publishing six titles on account of stereotypes in their illustrations); Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene erected a sign outside her congressional office in Washington declaring “There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE” across the hallway from the office of Democratic Rep. Marie Newman, whose daughter is transgender; even Rush Limbaugh, the late talk radio giant and progenitor of liberal “ownage,” got in one last braggadocious slap from beyond the grave: the occupation listed on his death certificate is “greatest radio host of all time.”

In one sense, this is the natural outgrowth of the Trump era. Inasmuch as there was a coherent belief that explained his agenda, it was lib-owning — whether that meant hobbling NATO, declining to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory, floating the prospect of a fifth head on Mount Rushmore (his, naturally), or using federal resources to combat the New York Times’ “1619 Project.”

But in a post-Trump America, to “own the libs” is less an identifiable act or set of policy goals than an ethos, a way of life, even a civic religion.

“‘Owning the libs’ is a way of asserting dignity,” says Helen Andrews, senior editor of The American Conservative. “‘The libs,’ as currently constituted, spend a lot of time denigrating and devaluing the dignity of Middle America and conservatives, so fighting back against that is healthy self-assertion; any self-respecting human being would … Stunts, TikTok videos, they energize people, that’s what they’re intended to do.”

“I can envision a time where [pro-Trump Florida Rep.] Matt Gaetz could pin a picture of [Democratic New York Rep.] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to his own crotch, and smash it with a ball-peen hammer, and he’ll think it’s a huge success if 100,000 liberals attack him as an idiot,” says Jonah Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the anti-Trump conservative outlet The Dispatch. “It’s a way of taking what the other side criticizes about you and making it into a badge of honor.”

And in a world in which polarization driven by social media has equipped every smartphone-wielding American with a hammer, every political dispute looks like a nail. A year into the Covid-19 pandemic, viral videos of mask burnings and other forms of lockdown protest proliferate. The arch-conservative, troll-friendly webmagazine The Federalist more than doubles its traffic each year. Pro-Trump students are bending reformicon-minded College Republican groups to their will. In certain parts of the country, modified pickup trucks “roll coal,” spewing jet-black exhaust fumes into the air as a middle finger to environmentalists. Popular bootleg Trump campaign merchandise read simply: “Fuck your feelings.”

“It’s a spirit of rebellion against what people see as liberals who are overly sensitive, or are capable of being triggered, or hypocritical,” says Marshall Kosloff, co-host of the podcast “The Realignment,” which analyzes the shifting allegiances of and rise of populist politics. “It basically offers the party a way of resolving the contradictions within a realigning party, that increasingly is appealing to down-market white voters and certain working-class Black and Hispanic voters, but that also has a pretty plutocratic agenda at the policy level.” In other words: Owning the libs offers bread and circuses for the pro-Trump right while Republicans quietly pursue a traditional program of deregulation and tax cuts at the policy level.

To supercharge those distractions, however, was the great innovation of Donald Trump’s presidency: He used the highest platform in the land to play shock jock 24/7, trading the radio booth for his Twitter account — thrilling his supporters by dismaying his foes. And despite Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election — and the Republican Party’s loss of control of the House and Senate under Trump’s leadership — the GOP has largely chosen to take his strategy and run with it, betting on a hard-charging, antagonistic rhetorical approach to deliver it back into power in Washington.

That’s led to predictable tensions, as the party’s diminishing cadre of wonky reformists lament a form of politics that seems more focused on racking up retweets and YouTube views than achieving policy goals. Even so, Trump-inspired stunt work is, for the moment, the Republican Party’s go-to political tool. “Owning the libs” is no longer the domain of its rowdy, ragged edges, it’s the party line, with the insufficiently combative seen as inherently suspect and outside the 45th president’s trusted circle of “fighters.”

But despite its hypermodern verbiage and social media-assisted dominance, the rhetorical approach deployed by Trump and his allies has roots that go back to the beginning of the conservative movement, with a party, much as it is now, fearful of a liberal status quo it saw as hellbent on making it obsolete.

In 1952, the political mainstream was inflamed by the boorishness and recklessness of another conservative demagogue: Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy, then at the height of his infamous communist “witch hunt” within the federal government. McCarthy would eventually overreach to the extent that he was overwhelmingly censured by the Senate, including roughly half of its members from his own party.

One prominent conservative willing to defend McCarthy, much to the chagrin of nearly everybody to the left of the John Birch Society, was Irving Kristol. The godfather of neoconservatism wrote contemporaneously in Commentary that “there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: He, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesman for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.”

To Kristol, the certainty McCarthy signaled was worth commending, despite his argument’s lack of substance or his corrosive rhetorical style. McCarthy was a staunch anti-communist, but that was almost secondary to how thoroughly he infuriated his opponents, leaving no question as to where he stood. And given the incentives presented by social media toward ever more extreme political positions, it’s no wonder such stark, if reductive, contrasts are even more appealing today, to the extent that a spiritual heir of McCarthy’s could even win the White House.

“Irving [Kristol] wasn’t a McCarthyite, but the point is a good one,” says Goldberg. “When both sides are encouraged to take evermore extreme positions, I think for the average voter that sort of moves the Overton window a little bit where they say, ‘Look, I think Trump’s a jerk, and I don’t like what he says about immigrants, and blah, blah, blah, but at least he’s not for defunding the police, or at least he likes the American flag.’”

Kristol’s willingness to walk on the wire for such a reviled figure as McCarthy reveals another crucial element of lib-owning, beyond just its galvanizing moral clarity: its place as a tool of redoubt for those in the political and cultural minority. Take, for example, Kristol’s contemporary who perfected the art for the conservative movement’s long, dark years in the post-Goldwater wilderness — William F. Buckley, the National Review founder who relished making his foes look foolish on his long-running program “Firing Line,” and who, when asked why Robert F. Kennedy refused to appear on the program, famously responded with an impeccably troll-ish query of his own: “Why does bologna refuse the grinder?”

“Buckley had his version of ‘owning the libs,’ which was being more erudite and articulate than his interlocutors,” Goldberg says. “You take a certain satisfaction, sort of the ‘your tears are delicious’ kind of satisfaction.”

Buckley’s program lost some of its countercultural punch as the Reagan Revolution took hold in Washington, and almost inevitably, his successor George H.W. Bush’s “kinder, gentler” conservatism created an opening for those who craved redder meat.

Enter, if you will, the John the Baptist to former President Trump’s all-ownage-all-the-time messianic leadership: Rush Limbaugh.

When Limbaugh died in February after a lengthy battle with cancer, his transgressions against liberal good manners, to put it mildly, were widely noted. Limbaugh regularly filled the three daily hours of his program with invective against women, people of color, LGBTQ people and any number of other groups that didn’t include Limbaugh, to the point where even he, the quintessentially self-confident blowhard, occasionally felt the need to admit he’d gone too far and apologize. But to his millions of devoted listeners, no remark was too inflammatory to be brushed aside in light of his peerless talent for owning the libs.

After Limbaugh’s death, libertarian writer Conor Friedersdorf teed off on the late radio host in the pages of The Atlantic, not least as a wanting successor to Buckley: “Limbaugh advanced the smug hatred of liberals and feminists, took pleasure in mocking the left, fueled the ugliest impulses of his audience more often than he sought to elevate national discourse. … He will likely be remembered more for the worst things he said than the best things he said, because unlike Buckley, who said his share of awful things, no Limbaugh quote stands out as especially witty or brilliant.”

Maybe to readers of The Atlantic. On the right, it was far more common to laud Limbaugh, as the “happy warrior” who validated the act of sticking one’s thumb in the liberals’ eye to a cadre of once-timid Chamber of Commerce rats.

“Liberals who didn’t listen to Rush, and just read the Media Matters accounts, never understood how *funny* he was,” National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry—himself a Buckley protégé (and POLITICO Magazine contributing editor)—wrote on Twitter. “What set him off from his many imitators was how wildly entertaining he was, and the absolutely unbreakable bond he formed with his listeners.”

Goldberg—who, by his own account, is no fan of Limbaugh—noted that despite the radio host’s self-confident bluster, his appeal was ultimately in providing a form of aggro-catharsis for listeners who felt embattled by the media’s pre-internet status quo.

“There really was a much more monolithic mainstream media, and what Limbaugh was doing back then was sort of giving equal time, as it were, to the other perspective,” Goldberg says. “As the country’s become more polarized, and we reward the outrageous beyond its worst, you get this race-to-the-bottom competitiveness, where people want to get noticed and have to be even more outrageous than the next person.”

And where, of course, for things to get more outrageous than social media?

“My entire life right now is about owning the libs.”

Thus the zeitgeist was spoke into existence in 2018 by Dan Bongino, on the National Rifle Association's now-defunct web video channel. Bongino — a successful right-wing podcast host, who was tapped this week by radio giant Westwood One to fill Limbaugh’s now-vacant airtime in some markets — was ostensibly incensed by the treatment of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation hearings. But the subject of his outrage was hardly a material issue.

Take the man at his word: Bongino’s preoccupation, then and now, is owning the libs more than securing any kind of policy outcome or vote in the Senate. He’s continued to do so even despite quitting Twitter in protest after his account was restricted amid the January 6 riot; his content is consistently among the most shared on all of Facebook.

But in October 2018, Bongino’s declaration was revealing. Until then, the phrase “owning the libs” was mostly deployed by those seeking to mock conservatives for quixotically pursuing cheap applause from their base at the expense of a true political win (or, simply, their dignity). The phrase is barely apparent in the public record before 2015, when its usage on Twitter began to slowly ramp up; the “Own The Libs Bot,” a popular account which affixes the phrase “own the libs” as a non-sequitur to various random clauses, seemingly to highlight the perceived absurdity and desperation of Bongino-like figures, wasn’t even launched until November 2017. Perhaps the best example of this original, ironic deployment of the phrase just a month earlier described one particularly ill-conceived stunt by a campus Republican group: “owning the libs by wearing diapers in public.”

In those early days, even some name-brand Republicans got in on the fun, albeit with more of the tone of a concerned parent. Then-United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley made headlines when in the summer of 2018 she addressed a group of high schoolers attending a youth leadership summit at George Washington University. “Raise your hand if you’ve ever posted anything online to quote-unquote ‘own the libs,’” Haley requested, leading many students to do so and burst into applause.

With the patience of a Nancy Reagan “just say no” speech, the ambassador admonished them that owning the libs is “fun and that it can feel good, but step back and think about what you’re accomplishing when you do this — are you persuading anyone? Who are you persuading? … We’ve all been guilty of it at some point or another, but this kind of speech isn’t leadership — it’s the exact opposite.”

Unfortunately for Haley, a fairly prominent figure in the conservative world happened to disagree: her boss, the president of the United States. And while Haley has had her own very public reckoning with the tension between her ideal of leadership and Trump’s, it’s clear which has won out in the Republican Party.

Conservative social media is dominated by controversy-chasing attack dogs like Bongino. Donald Trump Jr. — a social media star in his own right who titled his first book simply “Triggered” — is considered a formidable candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination should he choose to run, based on little more than his dynastic pedigree and talent for lib-owning. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s embraced Trump’s thirst for conflict more than maybe any other viable Republican presidential candidate, handily topped the 2021 CPAC straw poll of ’24 contenders — the one, of course, that didn’t include Trump himself.

Despite both the invited scorn of liberals and the quieter resentment of conservatives who worry their policy dreams might be tanked by a movement that turns off the moderate suburbanites who elected President Joe Biden, “owning the libs” is at the center of today’s Republican Party because, well, it works. Behind Bongino’s astronomical Facebook engagement numbers are millions of real people, ready to show up at voting booths in GOP primaries. In 2020, after four years of nonstop ownage, more people voted for Trump than any other presidential candidate in history — save for, of course, Joe Biden.

“I can’t even count the number of times that people on the realignment side of conservatism, populist-minded conservatives, have said to me, ‘If only we had a candidate who believed all the right things and didn’t have Trump’s baggage,’” says Andrews, senior editor at The American Conservative. “I think that point of view is idiotic. Trump’s attitude had a lot to do with his success. You can’t have unapologetic populism without Trump’s personality. … ‘Owning the libs’ is something you do when you feel insecure in your social position, and Trump is the opposite of that. He’s confident, he owned the libs like a winner, and that’s what made him so special.”

Still, even many conservatives are skeptical that Trump’s particular genius at infuriating liberals and thereby rallying new voters to his side is transferable to an heir. He might be one of one: the arch-conservative Sen. Tom Cotton notably stumbled in his own Trump-like attempt to whip up the base at this year’s CPAC, and his peers did little better, a few notable exceptions aside. Sen. Josh Hawley has a unique talent for infuriating liberals through his support of Trump’s conspiracy-mongering around voter fraud, but he’s a famously uncharismatic speaker. And, by now, Ted Cruz’s act is quite simply stale, lacking any real capacity for transgression.

“Ron DeSantis was incredibly aggressive towards the media, and a lot of people on the right that I know cite him as an example of someone knowing how to play to the base,” says Kosloff, co-host of the "The Realignment" podcast. “But how much is ‘own the libs’ just then a commodity product which all GOP politicians are expected to produce? Unless there are large levels of Trumpian ability, I doubt it’s going to be a breakout feature.”

Trump occupied a sui generis place in popular culture—he wasn’t just a lib-owner par excellence, but was seen as a businessman-outsider in the mold of Ross Perot; one of the first reality television stars; a cultural fixture referenced by everybody from Robert Zemeckis to Redman. “Owning the libs” might be a necessary condition for those who would seek to claim his mantle, but it alone is insufficient for general election success.

Even so, it’s difficult to imagine any serious Republican presidential contender, at least in the near future, winning a primary with a conciliatory platform akin to Jeb Bush or John Kasich’s from 2016. Trump has repeatedly professed his desire for a party of “fighters”—that is to say, inveterate lib-owners—and the fact that he’s still the most popular Republican politician of the past decade ensures he’ll have his way. It may be on a foundation laid by McCarthy, Buckley, Limbaugh and their followers, but today’s ownage-obsessed Republican Party is ultimately the house that Trump built.

I think this is the best sentence: '“I can envision a time where [pro-Trump Florida Rep.] Matt Gaetz could pin a picture of [Democratic New York Rep.] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to his own crotch, and smash it with a ball-peen hammer, and he’ll think it’s a huge success if 100,000 liberals attack him as an idiot,”

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good op-ed: "What Are Republicans So Afraid Of?"

Quote

There was a time, in recent memory, when the Republican Party both believed it could win a national majority and actively worked to build one.

Take the last Republican president before Donald Trump, George W. Bush. His chief political adviser, Karl Rove, envisioned a durable Republican majority, if not a permanent one. And Bush would try to make this a reality.

To appeal to moderate suburban voters, Bush would make education a priority and promise a “compassionate conservatism.” To strengthen the party’s hold on white evangelicals, Bush emphasized his Christianity and worked to polarize the country over abortion, same-sex marriage and other questions of sexual ethics and morality. Bush courted Black and Hispanic voters with the promise of homeownership and signed a giveaway to seniors in the form of the Medicare prescription drug benefit. He also made it a point to have a diverse cabinet, elevating figures like Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Alberto Gonzales.

Whether shrewd or misguided, cynical or sincere — or outright cruel and divisive — these gambits were each part of an effort to expand the Republican coalition as far as it could go without abandoning Reaganite conservatism itself. It was the work of a self-assured political movement, confident that it could secure a position as the nation’s de facto governing party.

There is no such ambition, or confidence, in today’s Republican Party.

Convinced, after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, that there is no way to win the White House in a diverse electorate with high turnout, Republicans have made it their mission to restrict the vote as much as possible.

Conservative grass-roots and political action groups are joining the crusade, according to reporting by my newsroom colleague Jeremy Peters, galvanized into action by the former president, who blames nonexistent fraud and illegal voting for his defeat. “We’ve got 106 election-related bills that are in 28 states right now,” Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, told an online town hall of supporters. “So here’s the good news: There is action taking place to go back and correct what was uncovered in this last election.”

Other organizations, like the Heritage Foundation, have pledged to spend millions in support of policies that would limit access to the ballot and keep voters from the polls.

As Peters notes,

Those include laws that would require identification for voters and limit the availability of absentee ballots, as well as other policies that Heritage said would “secure and strengthen state election systems.”

The other side of this effort to restrict the vote is a full-court press against the “For the People Act,” which would pre-empt most Republican voter-suppression bills. “It kind of feels like an all-hands-on-deck moment for the conservative movement, when the movement writ large realizes the sanctity of our elections is paramount and voter distrust is at an all-time high,” Jessica Anderson of Heritage Action for America told The Associated Press.

And in a recording of an address to Republican state legislators obtained by the A.P., Senator Ted Cruz of Texas warned that a voter-protection bill would spell the end of the Republican Party as a viable national party. “H.R. 1’s only objective is to ensure that Democrats can never again lose another election, that they will win and maintain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate and of the state legislatures for the next century,” he said.

Some of this is undoubtedly cynical, a brazen attempt to capitalize on the conspiratorial rhetoric of the former president. But some of it is sincere, a genuine belief that the Republican Party will cease to exist if it cannot secure “election integrity.”

What’s striking about all this is that, far from evidence of Republican decline, the 2020 election is proof of Republican resilience, even strength. Trump won more than 74 million votes last year. He made substantial gains with Hispanic voters — reversing more than a decade of Republican decline — and improved with Black voters too. He lost, yes, but he left his party in better-than-expected shape in both the House and the Senate.

If Republicans could break themselves of Trump and look at last November with clear eyes, they would see that their fears of demographic eclipse are overblown and that they can compete — even thrive — in the kinds of high-turnout elections envisioned by voting rights activists.

Indeed, the great irony of the Republican Party’s drive to restrict the vote in the name of Trump is that it burdens the exact voters he brought to the polls. Under Trump, the Republican Party swapped some of the most likely voters — white college-educated moderates — for some of the least likely — blue-collar men.

In other words, by killing measures that make voting more open to everyone, Republicans might make their fears of terminal decline a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Ron Johnson isn’t a Republican outlier"

Quote

A political movement will either police its extremes or be defined by them.

Disapproval from opponents is easy to dismiss as mere partisanship. It is through self-criticism that a political party defines and patrols the boundaries of its ideological sanity.

This is the reason the case of Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.) remains so instructive and disturbing. Johnson is a Republican who prefers his racism raw. He recently described the majority-White crowd protesting on Jan. 6 (some of whom stormed the Capitol and assaulted police officers) as “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law.” Meanwhile, he would have been “concerned” by an approaching crowd of “tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters.” So: Whites who propagate a destructive lie, attack the democratic process and commit violence are Johnson’s kind of people; African Americans who protest a history of injustice are a scary horde.

There have always been bigots with access to a microphone. But in this case, Johnson did not face the hygienic repudiation of his party. Republican leaders preferred a different strategy: putting their fingers in their ears and humming loudly. Republicans have abolished their ideological police.

The reason is simple. After four years of Donald Trump, Johnson’s sentiments are not out of the Republican mainstream. They are an application of the prevailing Republican ideology — that the “real” America is under assault by the dangerous other: Violent immigrants. Angry Blacks. Antifa terrorists. Suspicious Muslims. And don’t forget “the China virus.”

Trump did not create such views. But he normalized them in an unprecedented fashion. Under Trump’s cover, this has been revealed as the majority position of Republicans, or at least engaged, activist Republicans. A recent New York Times poll found 65 percent of people who identify with the GOP to still be Trump “die-hards,” Trump “boosters” or captive to conspiracy theories. And most of the rest find nothing disqualifying in Trump’s pathologically divisive performance as president.

Our country faces many crises. But our nation’s politics has a single, overriding challenge: One of the United States’ venerable, powerful political parties has been overtaken by people who make resentment against outsiders the central element of their appeal. Inciting fear is not an excess of their zeal; it is the substance of their cause.

This has left some of us politically disoriented. I am pro-life. For me, this has always been the natural application of a humane historical trend: The United States’ gradually expanding circle of legal inclusion and protection. You may disagree with me, but I believe there is a logical moral progression that leads from abolitionism to the civil rights movement to the protection of the disabled and unborn.

Yet it is precisely this progression that’s being denied in today’s GOP. Claiming that discrimination is an illusion, that White people are the true victims, that diversity is a threat and that the American way of life is really identical to the good old days of White dominance — these are not just mistaken policy views, like being wrong on entitlement reform or tax policy. They are the fundamental failure of empathy, the triumph of dangerous historical lies and the violation of the highest objectives of politics: the advance of equal justice and human dignity.

It is one thing to be involved in policing the excesses of an ideological movement. It is another task entirely to persuade the large majority of an ideological movement to adopt the basic rules of morality and humanity. In the first case, the Republican Party is a flawed instrument of good. In the second case, it is a source of dangerous dehumanization that gets a few important things right.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Politics does not directly determine the morality of citizens. But it helps shape the system of social cues and stigmas in which citizens operate. It matters whether leaders delegitimize hatred or fertilize it; if they isolate prejudice or mainstream it. If political figures base their appeal on the cultivation of resentment for some group or groups, they are releasing deadly toxins into our society without any idea who might be harmed or killed. Such elected leaders might not have blood on their hands directly, but they are creating a society with more bloody hands.

I am still finding it difficult to fully embrace the Democratic Party, which denies the American progression toward justice and inclusion in other ways. But I could not advise an idealistic and ambitious young person to join today’s GOP because her ambition would be likely to destroy her idealism. Most Republican leaders can no longer be trusted with the moral education of the young on the central moral challenge of our history. Elected Republicans who are not bigots are generally cowards in the face of bigotry. And that is a shocking, horrible thing.

 

[47of74]

The latest MTG dumb fuckery 

Quote

In an interview with right-wing outlet Newsmax TV, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) compared Twitter's recent suspension of her account to being wrongfully convicted and sent to prison for a crime.

Greene's account was suspended last week in an apparent accident. In a statement on Friday, the company said the lock had been put in place "in error" because its automated systems erroneously flagged the account.

Greene lashed out at the suspension, alleging that "Twitter lied" and that she lost access for "no reason."

"My account was suspended for 12 hours and served the full 12 hours," Greene added. "So that's like being convicted and serving prison time when you never did anything wrong and serving the full sentence."

Well I hope she’s rightfully convicted and has to serve actual time in prison. 

[Alisamer]

21 hours ago, 47of74 said:

The latest MTG dumb fuckery 

Well I hope she’s rightfully convicted and has to serve actual time in prison. 

Does she realize how much of a child she sounds like? "I had to stay off Twitter for a WHOLE TWELVE HOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUURRRRRS!!!!1!! WAHHHHH!"

Yes, we know, "Help, Help! I'm being oppressed!"