Ding Dong.....the US Politics Thread (Part 2)

To be fair, there are a lot of good people in the States and I have encountered great generosity and hospitality.
If you keep your wits about you, you will be ok, same as anywhere else.

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The reaction to the failures that resulted in the 2008 crash, and the response to a black man with a funny name becoming president are both common issues cited as the inflection point that made them lose control of the monster they were controlling, but my thesis would focus on Palin. Sure, it is all temporally intertwined, but I think the incentives she accidentally revealed for what adoration someone could get from the right with a no apologies form of idiocy opened the floodgates.

There probably isnt much difference between Newt and someone like Ted Cruz. The difference is Newt would have been mortified at someone not thinking he was exceptionally smart. Cruz needs you to believe he’s an idiot.

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Pelosi has been doing a book tour recently and is treating it as a victory lap for her role in getting Biden out of the race, but after hearing two detailed interviews with her I took two things from it:

  1. There was a theory that AOC in particular was refusing to join the Biden out movement because she was concerned the party leaders pushing this were also interested in bypassing Harris, an outcome AOC thought would tear the party apart. So for her the continued support for Biden was the least worst option. She never straight out said it, but she is savvy in what she says and the insinuation was clear that she was speaking of things she knew were afoot. Everything Pelosi has said on this tour seems to back up what AOC was flagging to people. That then seem that the Biden team played her by giving Kamala enough time to round up support in the background and then overtly threw his support behind her as soon as he announced his decision

  2. She has lost it also. There was one interview with Ezra Klein in particular where probably as much as 25% of what she said was unintelligible. She either couldn’t sustain her volume enough to be heard or had difficulty in enunciating, but also demonstrated a real disconnect between what she was saying and what she had just said that supposedly lead to it.

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I think this guy is probably the textbook example of how badly the media fail us

https://x.com/glennbeck/status/1823436898968227910

Through the Bush and Obama years he was probably as responsible as anyone, probably even more than Fox, for poisoning the discourse on the right. As soon as Trump won he did a mea culpa tour and apologizing for what he had done to the country and promising to make right, and the MSM ate it up. But it was also clear from that coverage that the things he seeded into their coverage of issues through that era they knew were bullshit but they covered them earnestly anyway. And now he’s right back to where he was in the 00s and 10s having made even more of a fool of the serious opinion havers who still try to shape our discourse on current events.

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Wow, he’s still around? Remember him as this crazy fake persona who was always crying because the flag or some founding father made him all emotional.

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Weird, right?

Just fucking weird…

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At least he didn’t get near the White House like the other one…

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Total farce of a network

https://x.com/MattGertz/status/1825970259683053875

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https://x.com/WildcatKing22/status/1827486560033407118?t=OIcZpuvbSLlnC1V9BVeOoQ&s=19

Known as a wristy where I’m from, but the point stands.

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#6 … and feign an epileptic fit.

Or the pilots seat. Can do the world a favour and crash the plane :wink:

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Leave us alone, you cunts :rage:

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This story is pathetically predictible.

Ben Sasse was one of the new generation of conservatives that came to congress after Obama’s election with a supposed focus of restoring small government principles and getting the debt in check. He was always one of those opposing voices the main stream media lifted up.

He left the Senate half way through his last term to take the gig of president of the University of Florida. For all the “Florida man” jokes, UF is a prestigious institution, among the best regarded in the south and with Law and Medical schools that are competitive against the very best state funded universities in the country. He recently announced he was leaving after only 18 months in the job. While they havent directly linked his exit to it, the news came at the same time as a spending scandal was broken by the student paper identifying a massive expansion of spending from his office. He increased total spending from 7 million to 17 million a year on the back of a bunch of consulting contracts to friends and creating a large number of well paid roles with opaque job descriptions in his office for friends, most of whom have never had to step foot on campus to perform those duties.

https://x.com/Brendan_Duke/status/1828460594799738893

We’re now hearing that he is going to continue to getting his $1m a year salary through the length of his original contract.

The RW is primarily just a massive grift machine. Get in office only so you can break it and then milk the resources for personal gain, all the while complaining that government is the problem.

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Funny you should say that; there was an article on that very subject in today’s Grauniad:

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I know there are some others here who value what Nancy Wheeler (Emptywheel) has to say, but find her writing a confused mess, so thought it might be of interest to see she has started a podcast series that attempts to summarize the last 8 years of her reporting

Unfortunately it suffers a lot of the same lack of focus and clarity as her writing, often seemingly presenting a conversation between two people but not telling you who the other person is or why audio of them is being used, but by being forced to take a step back from the day to day developments she is a bit more coherent in this medium. A bit.

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I don’t know about that, she was pretty badass I thought…

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Ha fuck sake…Marcy Wheeler.

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Meanwhile the school shootings continue. Such a shameful disgrace.

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