Politics 2025

[Trenacker]

People want money, but they want it to come from magic.

One of the most powerful Republican lies is the tax cut, which succeeds in large part because of motivated reasoning on the part of the Republican voter.

Republican voters preach and demand austerity mostly based on a simple model of household finance that applies only poorly to national economics, but they don't actually enforce it at the ballot box. A Republican like [Sleezebag] can spend like a drunken sailor as long as his spending also includes "tax cuts" and doesn't involve social programs that help groups that Republicans disfavor.

If those tax cuts have to be financed with future debt, or even (as in the case of tariffs), higher prices for goods and services, that's not obvious enough to matter. Republicans are flattered to be assured that, yes, they are surely more knowledgeable about how to spend their money than the government.

Republicans tend to be self-focused, like their leader. They don't resent [Sleezebag] the way liberals do because they share many of what liberals have come to see as his greatest failings: an obsession with his own circumstances, including how he is regarded by others, and a tendency to be unhappy when he sees others receiving attention (since, in his zero-sum view, it could be better spent on himself instead).

[Sleezebag] is popular with the working class because he feeds their ego, not because he is filling their pockets. And a huge part of that equation is Fox News, which reassures its viewers everyday with the Puritan's Great Fear™: that someone, somewhere, is laughing at them.

[Buster's Uncle]

Complete agreement.

And not a single word of that disagrees w/ anything I said last page, aside from just who's a sucker.  I'd submit that your whole latest set of true assertions clearly points at who.

[Buster's Uncle]

I'd like to share this from five years ago, when I was still resenting Biden hard over being forced down our throats in the primaries:

-And back to the senile talk about Joe ALL OVER the nets allasudden-

-My two next-door grandparents and my dad all died with several years of dementia under their belts - I was there and an important part of their care.  I think I can claim a little expertise.

The schedule Biden's working, traveling and speaking?  You couldn't do it and speak so sensibly and well after a few days, let alone over a year now.  He's healthier than I am, just tired and suppressing a stutter.  I rather think if he was only a teeny bit senile, right now he couldn't hold up his end of a breakfast conversation.

I have hopes for the next debate, but don't kid yourselves; Joe's good at that.  It ain't going to be a Warren v. Bloomberg knockout.

In fact, I find I was in better form articulating some truths still at issue than I have been lately, for the early half of that thread, if anyone wants to back up and skim...

[Buster's Uncle]

I saw someone say on Twitter -I've been following some liberals screaming on Twitter lately, of which I have a lot to say soon if I can work up the energy- Thursday, that it felt a lot like the day after The Pig was 'elected'.

-^That^, yes, if only one tenth as intense.  I did not, because it hurt so much, talk about politics to a single soul for about six months.  Some of us, Bernie got our hopes up that the rightward drift in the Democratic Party, decades old, might finally be arrested.  It's not about Sanders/Warren, though the latter is FANTASTIC and the former quite good - it's not about Joe being a mediocre hack; it's about the people trying to steer the party back into proper opposition being bulldozed by the Republican Lite wing on behalf of the mediocre hack.

And Lori's right; even Dr. Warren is too old.  This country has drifted into a very bad place, Obama gets called a socialist when he's barely even a Democrat, we still openly torture, and a geriatric who will. not. FIX. things is not an acceptable alternative to the Pig wallowing in his own [poop] and lying about an epidemic, killing people among endless other outrages.

I'm turning out to vote for the rat sorbet -featuring LESS rat- in November, the fix being in, make no mistake.

But not as bad isn't good enough.  We can do better.  We MUST.

Turns out he did fix some things.  He was actually a pleasant surprise.

So, I've been intensely following some Liberals Screaming On Twitter since the actual primaries began and the democratic field had winnowed down to few enough people to keep track of.  As is my wont, I've naturally fallen into thought and study about --- and here I need your help, Rusty, 'cause you're so brilliant at generating pithy tags --- I started out calling it Liberals Eat Their Young, but that's not quite right; Liberal Cannibalism is the best I've come up with.

There's a set of jokes about democrats so old that I recall hearing them on TV in my childhood in the 70s.  "The Democratic Party is like cats you hear squalling in the night; they sound like they're fighting, but they're making more cats."  -An old democratic congressman told that one to CBS.  Just in the last week I heard Joe say something about not forming circles, a reference to the old chestnut about the shape of Democratic Firing Squads.

And like, I've noticed it being the liberals doing that -all day, every day, bitterly- not so much the centrists I rail against.  There seems little doubt of a causal connection between that factor and the Republican Lite wing stomping the Liberal wing last week for the million-and-first time since 1975 - they can shut up and pull together briefly when they have to and it won't annoy the Republicans too much.

And I do have some thoughts about why the Left is so exhaustingly, eternally Internecine, but I'd love to have a better label to slap on it, if you can coin something short and awesome, please, Rusty...

[Buster's Uncle]

Mylochka was shouting at me yesterday -she's not shouty- about her frustration of late with Jon Stewart and way too many others both-sides-ing.  I pointed out in my own defense that I take a whiz on Senator Charles Schumer for there being a quorum present when the bad guys stole a Supreme Court seat - which is complaining about collaboration with evil, NOT both sidesing.

The Democratic leadership have consistently failed this century to swing when presented w/ Ku Klux Klan chins, and thus failed America and the world.

[Buster's Uncle]

*Ku Klux Klan Republikkkan chins.  -Actually punching Nazis is a Very Bad Idea, but it's a metaphor...

[Buster's Uncle]

Speaking of quorums, denying of in extremis, I see democrats in the Texas legislature doing exactly that this week over outrageous gerrymandering.

   

THAT'S fight.

[Buster's Uncle]

Texas redistricting fight goes national as GOP, Dems prepare for more battles over future House maps

[Geo]

dPutin is due to visit the state of Alaska...
[Sleezebag]: Welcome to America!
Putin:  This Russian Empire is!!!

[Buster's Uncle]

Not any stupider than the Pig has said on foreign policy stuff...

[Buster's Uncle]

...The National Guard is not a toy.  The police are not toys.  Playing with them is hitleriffic...

[Elok]

I've never known Jon Stewart to bothsides anything.  It's more that he's quick to mock anything worth mocking, and if Democrats do something contemptible he will cheerfully mock them too.  Which, in a satirist, only builds credibility.  Now, he will tend to mock Rs more, both because of his own predilections and because Rs in actual power tend to be more frequently and obviously contemptible.  When Ds are contemptible it's either ridiculous prog internet warriors who can't do anything, or nasty little bureaucrats, or occasionally a representative being economically illiterate in a way that isn't easily broken down into soundbites.

There's also the problem that [Sleezebag] is often too facially absurd to satirize in a way that really satisfies as comedy (as opposed to satisfying one's vindictive impulses in a form that happens to involve laughter).  This pretty well killed political humor for a couple of years, while JS was absent--he picked a good time to bail!  You'd have [Sleezebag] saying or doing something asinine, cowardly, or brutal, usually in a way that's not very different from the ways he's been asinine, cowardly, or brutal before, and then some comedian saying, "haha, look, the thing [Sleezebag] said or did is asinine/cowardly/brutal!"  Which isn't really joking so much as explaining a joke, which is never funny, especially when it's a joke we've all heard too many times before.

[Buster's Uncle]

How much Daily Show you catching these days?  She talked like it was something a bit new...

[Elok]

Every now and then I go on YouTube and check Stewart's highlights (I avoid his new crew as I find most of them annoying and unfunny most of the time).  So, sometime within the last month?  I don't check religiously or anything.  The most recent thing I recall was his (hysterical) bit on the Elmo social media hacking, where he video-interviews an excuse-slinging Elmo.

[Buster's Uncle]

I only see a little here and there myself - not enough to fight that hill...