US Politics XVIII: the illegitimate partisan sham thread

[Moonlit_Angel]

Which is perfectly equivalent to Trump having 25 (or more now, I can't keep track) sexual assault accusations, 3 of which are for rape. (Bonus! one of a 13 year old girl!, check of your Trump bingo card folks!)

And let's not forget all the super creepy comments Trump's made about his own daughter. Hell, even Bill Clinton, with all his sleazy, shady past, never said stuff like that about Chelsea.

 

[Headache in a Suitcase]

18% of Republicans support Trump being removed from office.

 

[Headache in a Suitcase]

https://twitter.com/DarrenLethem/status/1220327690563194880

lol

 

[womanfish]

18% of Republicans support Trump being removed from office.

That's pretty significant. Trump has held about a 88-93% approval among Repubs. Seeing that 18% think he should be removed. means that his number is getting closer to 80% of solid Repub support. That is not a good number heading into reelection.

 

[Headache in a Suitcase]

Schiff is doing a phenomenal job. Shame it doesn't matter.

 

[BEAL]

the nation is very lucky to have him.

 

[mikal]

If he threw his hat in for Democratic Nominee at this point, I wonder how he’d poll.

 

[Irvine511]

It’s great that 70%+ of the American public wants witnesses.

But like 85%+ want much more gun control and the Republicans won’t give us that either.

 

[Headache in a Suitcase]

https://twitter.com/SinaToossi/status/1220070442389688320?s=19

Hail to the Moron

Dumb dumb da-dumb dumb, da-dumb da-dumb da-dumb-dumb

 

[dazzledbylight]

If he threw his hat in for Democratic Nominee at this point, I wonder how he’d poll.

My (American) Uncle who moved to Europe (specialized work) just commented on a fb post about how great Rep Schiff was doing and my Uncle posted "he should run for President".

https://twitter.com/SinaToossi/status/1220070442389688320?s=19

Hail to the Moron

Dumb dumb da-dumb dumb, da-dumb da-dumb da-dumb-dumb

Uggghhhhhhhhh. Stupido!!! face in hand.

 

[dazzledbylight]

Schiffs closing remarks - knocked it out of the park. Fierce, passionate!

 

[Irvine511]

this op-ed says much more eloquently what i perceive to be our present political reality. while the US is absolutely more liberal than it seems, it's political system right now (unfairly, imho, and not by design) squashes that liberalism. the mind-bending diversity of the US has weirdly contributed to the dwindling majority's increased political power.

it's a bit long, so some highlights:

Put simply, Democrats can’t win running the kinds of campaigns and deploying the kinds of tactics that succeed for Republicans. They can move to the left — and they are — but they can’t abandon the center or, given the geography of American politics, the center-right, and still hold power. Democrats are modestly, but importantly, restrained by diversity and democracy. Republicans are not.

Let’s start with diversity. Over the past 50 years, the Democratic and Republican coalitions have sorted by ideology, race, religion, geography and psychology. Not all sorting is the same. Sorting has made Democrats more diverse and Republicans more homogeneous. This is often played as a political weakness for Democrats. They’re a collection of interest groups, a party of list makers, an endless roll call. But diversity has played a crucial role in moderating the party’s response to polarization.

Appealing to Democrats requires appealing to a lot of different kinds of people with different interests. Republicans are overwhelmingly dependent on white voters. Democrats are a coalition of liberal whites, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and mixed-race voters. Republicans are overwhelmingly dependent on Christian voters. Democrats are a coalition of liberal and nonwhite Christians, Jews, Muslims, New Agers, agnostics, Buddhists and so on. Three-quarters of Republicans identify as conservative, while only half of Democrats call themselves liberals — and for Democrats, that’s a historically high level.

As a result, winning the Democratic primary means winning liberal whites in New Hampshire and traditionalist blacks in South Carolina. It means talking to Irish Catholics in Boston and atheists in San Francisco. It means inspiring liberals without arousing the fears of moderates. It’s important preparation for the difficult, pluralistic work of governing, in which the needs and concerns of many different groups must be balanced against each other.

[...]

Republicans control the White House, the Senate, the Supreme Court and a majority of governorships. Only the House is under Democratic control. And yet Democrats haven’t just won more votes in the House elections. They won more votes over the last three Senate elections, too. They won more votes in both the 2016 and 2000 presidential elections. But America’s political system counts states and districts rather than people, and the GOP’s more rural coalition has a geographic advantage that offsets its popular disadvantage.

To win power, Democrats don’t just need to appeal to the voter in the middle. They need to appeal to voters to the right of the middle. When Democrats compete for the Senate, they are forced to appeal to an electorate that is far more conservative than the country as a whole. Similarly, gerrymandering and geography means that Democrats need to win a substantial majority in the House popular vote to take the gavel. And a recent study by Michael Geruso, Dean Spears and Ishaana Talesara calculates that the Republican Party’s Electoral College advantage means “Republicans should be expected to win 65 percent of presidential contests in which they narrowly lose the popular vote.”

[...]

Instead, Republicans are trapped in a dangerous place: they represent a shrinking constituency that holds vast political power. That has injected an almost manic urgency into their strategy. Behind the party’s tactical extremism lurks an apocalyptic sense of political stakes. This was popularized in the infamous “Flight 93 Election” essay arguing that conservatives needed to embrace Trump, because if he failed, “death is certain.” You could hear its echoes in Attorney General William P. Barr’s recent speech, in which he argued that “the force, fervor, and comprehensiveness of the assault on religion” poses a threat unlike any America has faced in the past. “This is not decay,” he warned, “it is organized destruction.”

[...]

The alternative to democratizing America is scarier than mere polarization: it is, eventually, a legitimacy crisis that could threaten the very foundation of our political system. By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in the 15 largest states. That means 70 percent of America will be represented by only thirty senators, while the other 30 percent of America will be represented by seventy senators.

It is not difficult to envision an America where Republicans consistently win the presidency despite rarely winning the popular vote, where they typically control both the House and the Senate despite rarely winning more votes than the Democrats, where their dominance of the Supreme Court is unquestioned and where all this power is used to buttress a system of partisan gerrymandering, pro-corporate campaign finance laws, strict voter identification requirements and anti-union legislation that further weakens Democrats’ electoral performance. Down that road lies true political crisis.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/opinion/sunday/democrats-republicans-polarization.html

 

[anitram]

It's a very good article, and the premise is absolutely true.

It's not the first time that this has been written about and each time I read about it I am left with even more of an impression of just how broken US democracy is.

First you have the structural issues surrounding the medieval electoral college that grants the same voting influence at the Senate level to 35 million people in California as it does to like 700K people living in Wyoming.

But even beyond that, the two-party system is totally bankrupt and anti-democratic. Even the conclusion of this article is anti-democratic by its very nature, as it suggests that everyone left of centre (and some right of centre given just how extreme today's GOP is) MUST all find it within themselves to vote for one party, which must be all things to all people and by definition, nothing to anyone. It's maddening. The reason that the GOP gets their increasingly small base to show up is because that base is actually voting for what they believe, regardless of how offensive the rest of us find it. On the left, whoever ends up being the nominee will excite a small % of non-Trump voters and the rest will have to swallow what's being shoved down their throats by the system. Is it any wonder so many people stay home? And you can argue that this year is different because the presidency of Donald Trump has been such an unmitigated disaster - but this has been going on for a hell of a lot longer than this one election.

 

[Headache in a Suitcase]

Said it before, say it again...

Trumpism hasn't only killed the GOP... it's killed the Democratic party as well; making it too large and diverse in ideology to possibly please everyone.

Alas, coronavirus is going to kill us all, so it doesn't really matter.

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

Pompeo is a pompous ass. How dare he treat Mary Louise Kelly that way?

Guaranteed that Trump can't find Ukraine on a blank map. Even USA and Canada would be questionable.

 

[Irvine511]

Pompeo is a pompous ass. How dare he treat Mary Louise Kelly that way?



Guaranteed that Trump can't find Ukraine on a blank map. Even USA and Canada would be questionable.

There really is a remarkable pattern with how these thugs respond to intelligent women who question or challenge them.

 

[BEAL]

We’re really watching democracy die with this aren’t we ?

As Schiff said, if right doesn’t matter we lose. There’s no piece of paper, no values or anything that matter if one party that rules won’t play by the rules.

 

[Bluer White]

the nation is very lucky to have him.

If he threw his hat in for Democratic Nominee at this point, I wonder how he’d poll.

Schiffs closing remarks - knocked it out of the park. Fierce, passionate!

We're on the right track with Rep. Schiff.

Schiff should forget about a future senate seat and go for the big job now.

Still a wide open race.

 

[anitram]

There really is a remarkable pattern with how these thugs respond to intelligent women who question or challenge them.

It's no wonder that they chose to follow a man who oozes misogyny from every pore of his massive body.

 

[Irvine511]

Do purity tests apply to the embrace of Joe Rogan?

Or would any other candidate be greeted with “this is disqualifying, cancel your campaign right now”?

 

[LuckyNumber7]

Do purity tests apply to the embrace of Joe Rogan?

Or would any other candidate be greeted with “this is disqualifying, cancel your campaign right now”?

Dude, who gives a shit about Joe Rogan?

Oh I’ll tell you who. Dumb white men who are about to vote for Donald Trump.

But Joe Rogan isn’t a Republican. He’s firmly a libertarian, and not the fake Rand Paul type.

Joe Rogan is a gross POS frat bro. Tell me why I’m supposed to care if he endorses Bernie Sanders? If the Society for Capitalism went out and endorsed Sanders, he’s literally the last candidate I would worry about if he accepted such an endorsement. What, do you think that Bernie Sanders is going to suddenly uptake some of Rogan’s shittiness? Isn’t the point of the election to attract voters, not turn them away?

Unless there’s an implied nature of reliance on someone’s message or money, telling someone not to vote for you is about the dumbest thing you can possibly do in an election. This all boils down to electability. I’m sorry, but all this ramble about electability and Sanders not having it, yet all the dumb white males are endorsing him despite him not running around with a sexist racist homophobic message a la Donald... what is the logic here? Is he electable or is he not? Furthermore, who are the voters that are making Biden electable but Sanders not? I’ll answer this one... the same dumb white men.

 

[DaveC]

bernie can't build the base but also he should disavow an endorsement from someone outside the base because reasons.

 

[Irvine511]

The double standard is well at work here.

 

[LuckyNumber7]

Explain.

 

[DaveC]

i can't recall anyone here complaining once about any other candidate's endorsements so yeah there could be a double standard here.

 

[Vlad n U 2]

Rogan is an absolute imbecile who I have very little time for personally but if his endorsement brings otherwise disaffected men to leftism (who are vulnerable to being courted by the far right) then that can only be a positive.

It's not necessarily the same thing but let's not act that an NYT endorsement, a publication happy to give large platforms to the likes of conservative idiots like Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss and has never seen a US intervention it didn't wholeheartedly back, is exactly above criticism either.

 

[BEAL]

I thought the Democratic Tent was too big ? I don’t think endorsements should matter anymore after the KKK endorsed Trump and it didn’t stop that campaign.

Anyone else concerned about the fact we don’t have a functional government. One that’s made millions of $$ in cuts to health, and there’s a world wide viral outbreak? Sounds like this virus is on same scale as SARS which isn’t end of the world

I just fear for those that don’t have proper access and ability to fight off what could be coming. This government (and trump) kills everything it touches

 

[MrsSpringsteen]

So sick of this thing on Instagram but I had to do it

 

[Irvine511]

i can't recall anyone here complaining once about any other candidate's endorsements so yeah there could be a double standard here.

Do you know who Joe Rogan is, and his history of birtherism and transphobia?

Progressive group MoveOn called on Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to renounce the presidential endorsement of popular podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan.

The group, which endorsed Sanders in 2016 and is fueled by many of the same progressive activists who have backed the Vermont senator's White House bid, called on Sanders to reject the endorsement over Rogan's past discriminatory comments.

"It's one thing for Joe Rogan to endorse a candidate. It's another for @BernieSanders' campaign to produce a video bolstering the endorsement of someone known for promoting transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism and misogyny," MoveOn tweeted Saturday.

"We urge Sen. Sanders and his campaign to apologize and stop elevating this endorsement. We stand in solidarity with folks hurt by this."

[...]

The comedian has come under fire for past comments insulting a range of groups, including the transgender community and African Americans.

"We get out. We're giggling, 'We're going to go see "Planet of the Apes." We walk into 'Planet of the Apes.' We walked into Africa," Rogan said in a 2013 podcast clip that was resurfaced after his endorsement before clarifying that there were "no white people in the theater."

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) also called on Sanders to renounce Rogan's endorsement, specifically citing Rogan's past comments.

[...]

"Bernie Sanders has run a campaign unabashedly supportive of the rights of LGBTQ people. Rogan, however, has attacked transgender people, gay men, women, people of color and countless marginalized groups at every opportunity," said HRC President Alphonso David. "Given Rogan's comments, it is disappointing that the Sanders campaign has accepted and promoted the endorsement."

https://thehill.com/homenews/campai...-on-sanders-to-renounce-joe-rogan-endorsement

Joe Rogan is the kind of person many would call to be “deplatformmed” ... until suddenly past offenses become forgivable.

I want a big tent party. But not big enough for bigots.

 

[Irvine511]

But, hey, now that Sanders is surging in Iowa and NH as Warren fades, maybe this is what we have to do. Play to the white guy assholes like Trump did — there are a lot of them.

If it wins him the election, I am fine with it.