Ralph Waldo in the Borough midfield, underrated player!
I’m torn on what needs to happen with Trump. He’s not going away, and he has a large base that will be a significant political force. But will the Republicans turn on him in any great number? So far the sycophancy from the politicians is sickening, but will that hold? Once he is well out of office, and say a few more scandals have erupted around him, will they be as keen to suck up to him? Or will their own ambitions come to the fore? If any of them want a shot at the Presidency in 2024 for example, they are going to have to get past Trump, and it will be interesting to see what sort of fight they put up.
As for his legal jeopardy, I hope he gets slapped down in a long overdue reckoning. I also hope the plain truth on Russia comes out, and more on Ukraine too… enough that Biden has him by the balls, but chooses not to take it further in the interests of peace.
Ideally the Dems win the Georgia runoff and take control of the Senate, if only so Biden can get some work done. There are significant issues facing the country but if the GOP continues to hold the Senate they will block and spoil anything Biden wants to do as there just isn’t any goodwill.
The check and balance system is a nice idea, assuming you have good people with good will in politics. But the shitshow we’ve had for years is more UFC, while the Constitution is Marquess of Queensbury.
Still, once Trump is out of office there are courts with State jurisdiction who are far along in various prosecutions, and New York, for example, is coming for you Donny, ya big crook!
Absolutely hysterical proposed chess move I read this morning for Biden to get his cabinet picks approved by a Mitch run senate - appoint Hillary in an acting capacity for any position you think they will partisanly block and force them them to approve them over having to deal with Clinton.
He’s been burning his bridges in NYC, and the well heeled set in FL - proper people, old money, don’t need favors from a conman - just want some peace in the sunshine to see out their days.
Seems to me that a very high percentage of the guys admiring him, dreams of being an asshole that elbows himself to great riches (ignoring that he inherited the basis for the fortune) and daydreams about being able to fuck Melania or a similar trophy wife.
I really do think that’s part of it.
General Flynn is now doing stuff openly that he previous did in the shade (I say shade, because he was still very visible to many, so not exactly shrouded, unless you think the Russian Salisbury hit-men were in some sort of Deep Cover, in which case Flynn would certainly then qualify as having been shrouded in the shadows).
We’ve got this awful situation here where it’s become really unclear which is the dog and which is the tail.
We do have a constituency that wants politicians to focus on things that are absurd. The politicians then respond by saying they have to take it seriously because their constituents want them to. But why does this constituency exist? How much of it is because the politicians pander to them with known falsehoods? If you go back to 2008 you saw some small attempt to stand up to the birtherism, burn it all down attitude of the tea party, but because Fox didn’t go along every GOP politician who went that way got chewed up and spat out.
What I think has happened is that after years of Fox and GOP working together to push made up controversies, they have pushed the situation passed two different thresholds. The first is that they’ve generated such momentum among the faithful that they’re now powerless to stop it, and so men who are smart enough to know differently like Ted Cruz find themselves having to a play an idiot on TV. Many of those in congress with the most folksy personas, reflecting the the blue collar, Busch light drinking, medicaid recipients are actually ivy league educated lawyers and Rhodes Scholars. But then the extension of that is genuine dumb arses play that role far more authentically (think Palin and why she is so much more popular than the likes of Cruz and Rubio who are just imitations of her folksy stupidty). That has created an avenue for people like Palin who genuinely dont know better to get elected. I am not sure whether its the cynical ones like ted Cruz or the genuinely thick ones like Tuberville and Gaetz who are more dangerous.
So there are two sorts of idiot… those who are clever, but knowingly playing a role, like say Cruz and Rubio; and those who are genuinely stupid, and not playing a role, like a Palin, but to the undiscerning masses it’s hard to see the difference? Fascinating.
There’s a weird cultural phenomenon going on with that. Back in the day it was laudable to be well read, well educated, traveled, reasonable, etc. I wonder if we are hurtling toward the Dark Ages again!
There has long been a requirement to pander to certain groups with overt displays of normallness. See the requirement of any politician who wants to win the presidency having to go to the Iowa state fair and publicly be seen to eat disgusting food they would never eat in private. But hey, it shows they’re “like us.” But also think about two Obama scandals - at his whitehouse beer summit (after Obama ate shot for daring to criticize the Boston police force for needlessly arresting Henry Gates, a black Harvard professor, for trying to get into his own Cambridge home) he drank Guinness (because he thinks he’s better than us and not a real american), and the time he asked for Dijon mustard he got shit for the same reason.
I think a lot of that was down to just how a section of the country responded to Obama specifically, but I think a big part of it is due to this multigenerational attack on the “elites” of the country from the GOP. It has reached a point where education is considered a negative among people. It used to be that people only responded like this to people who wielded that education to act better than someone who didnt have one. But now its the education per se that these grups react negatively to, and any signal that someone may give off that identifies them as being educated…like reading books, getting news from the NYT, or eating fancy food/drink. The irony of course being that it is people like Cruz, with degrees from two different Ivy league schools, and who has spent his entire post university career working in or around government, who is carrying on that fight.
It goes beyond that though otherwise Dems would be immune from having to eat fried shit on a stick in Iowa to win votes from their voters. There have been several books written about in the last few years, probably most notably Tom Nichols’ The Death of Expertise, in which he puts a lot of blame on the internet and the false sense of understanding people can obtain from “doing their own research”.
I also think there’s an argument that Dems have made it worse from their side as well with their turn towards neolibralism pulling their interests further away from their base. That has resulted in a justified frustration at the “elites” who claim to be on your side.
I dont know how we get out of this other than an extended run of success of pre-clinton style Deomcratic control of Washington that can actually bring some improvement to the working class such that their justified frustration is eased. But that isn’t happening, for a variety of reasons.
