We Lost the Battle for the Republican Party’s Soul Long Ago

[Overlander]

And Donny Jr is either a speed freak, coke head, or both.

What exactly is the point?

[DeletedUser]

And Donny Jr is either a speed freak, coke head, or both.

What exactly is the point?

Coke and Adderall seem like they'd be right up his alley.

[Shirley]

those JAMA estimates are truly shocking

No shit. I had to read it twice, and it's still hard to believe.

Forcing girls and women to carry their rapist's baby is the kind of cruelty you'd think we would have transcended as a routine matter over time, as we became more "civilized". But, religion. Fucking, weaponized religion.

"The truth is that male religious leaders have had — and still have — an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women," Carter said. "They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.” Jimmy Carter

[jfish26]

https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/my-a ... uch-rising

Listening to Trump’s mind-blowing rants […] got me thinking about how much of a bubble the American right lives in now. Fortified and protected by an enormous propaganda machine, the right lives a world of profound untruth and invention. My friend Greg Sargent once referred to this fictional world as Foxlandia. It’s a place they go where Trump is a strong leader, the economy is in recession, eggs cost $27 a piece, inflation is still raging, Putin is an ally and the West is sinister, antifa is ISIS, dozens of American cities burned to the ground in 2020, vaccines give you COVID, insurrectionists are hostages, children carrying their rapist’s babies is a blessing, assault weapons bring freedom, etc. It is, to borrow from one of my favorite TV shows, Stranger Things, the upside down.

I was a regular, unpaid guest on Fox News for 17 years, logging thousands of appearances, mostly in the days when Fox still aspired to be “Fair and Balanced.” I went on for up until the end I was able to say my piece without interruption. It was a tough environment, but “fair” and I thought it important Fox viewers got to hear from us. All that changed after Trump won and Roger Ailes died. The network stopped aspiring to be “Fair and Balanced” and Democrats became not players on the other team but enemies, to be treated with contempt. Part of that contempt was that I could feel Fox and MAGA leaving the world of facts and understandings I inhabited, retreating deeper and deeper into this imaginary world. In this final days of my time there I had a few segments where the host brought up something for me to comment on that I literally had no idea what they were talking about and had to bluff through it on air. It was is if MAGA had become a dialect of American English, using “alternative facts” and often obscure cultural references, which required translation.

In thinking about it today what I am describing perhaps should be understood as a form of secession from the United States and our democratic heritage. MAGA may still be physically here in the US, but many of its followers have left our shared information space, and now live in their heads some place else - Foxlandia, the upside down, MAGA - a place of untruth, of strongmen, of Trumpian ding-ding, of danger for the rest of us.

That place of untruth is evident in the MeidasTouch clip above. Trump is no longer it appears even trying to make sense when he speaks. He is so far gone, and the movement is far gone, that you can’t even follow what he is talking about any longer. But this alternative world of untruth is not just a place where Trump lives, most of the Republican Party is there with him now. He is going to be their nominee, their leader, and consider what they are asking us to believe and accept as reasonable right now:

* that the border is a crisis, an invasion is underway, but they will not negotiate a solution to it, are disregarding a Supreme Court decision which would put the Federal government back in charge of the border, and seemingly want it to remain a crisis through the election and ensure millions of “terrorists and criminals” continue to pour into the country; and yes, then it will all be Biden’s fault, and yes we are Impeaching the guy in charge of the border while it is in crisis because he “doesn’t enforce” immigration laws - whatever the fuck that means - something by the way the state of Texas and MAGA are preventing him from doing right now (there may no greater place of right wing lunacy and untruth than on border and immigration issues)

* that their holding up of aid to Ukraine and Israel, their months of degrading both the Defense and State Departments, haven’t emboldened our enemies and caused our troops - somehow Biden’s “weakness” did that

* that we shouldn’t be spending money on Ukraine, but spending it here at home; and then of course they come out for massive cuts of spending here at home

* that Democrats are the party of debt and fiscal recklessness when the last 3 Democratic Presidents saw deficits plummet on their watch, and the last Rs saw them skyrocket

* that the country is being gripped by a crime wave when murder and violent crime rates are plummeting and are a fraction of what they were 30 years ago

* that Biden’s imaginary “war on energy” drove up gas prices/inflation and left us more dependent on foreign sources of energy when in fact oil and renewable production set records in 2023, leaving us more energy independent than in decades; and that high gas prices were actually caused by COVID and disrupted supply chains, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and OPEC’s repeated price hikes, and were of course not somehow caused by anything Biden did for he was doing the exact opposite of what they’ve claimed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

* that Taylor Swift’s rise is somehow a plot by the deep state; that Hillary Clinton ran a “pedo” mill in the basement of a pizza place not too far from my house; that Biden somehow cheated and stole the 2020 election; that Russia never launched a massive campaign to get Trump elected in 2016;

I could go on for days on all this stuff. Lies. Invention. Untruth. Foxlandia. When you put it altogether it is truly shocking. How in the world did all of this happen? How did the GOP become so idiotic, so far gone, so full of cowards that they couldn’t stop this dramatic and ongoing betrayal of our democracy? How could they embrace Trump, the most unfit man we’ve all ever seen, and this insane agenda:

Republicans want Putin to win, the West to lose. The border to stay open. The economy to crash. Women, people of color to lose more freedoms and rights. The planet to warm faster. 10 year olds to carry their rapist's baby to term, and for more women to die on an operating room table. Tens of millions to lose their health insurance. More dead kids in schools. A restoration of pre-Civil Rights era white supremacy. Big tax cuts for their donors, higher deficits and less for everyone else. Books banned across the US. Teenagers to work night shifts in meat packing plants and not go to school. The minimum wage to stay at $7.25. Mass arrests and mass deportations of immigrants long settled in the US. Insurrectionists to get pardoned. To end American democracy for all time…..

Watch this clip of a Republican Congresswoman Elvira Salazar being confronted about this world of make believe and invention by a serious journalist, Jim DeFede:

[video of a Florida R congresswoman taking credit at home for federal spending she voted against in DC, and claiming to “not remember” voting against things like the CHIPS and Science Act]

The good news in all this, if there is any good news here, is that this flight from truth, as dangerous as it is for all of us, is also a central reason why Republicans keep losing - because they are growing more and more distant from the typical voter, and more and more distant even from more traditional Republican voters. There has been a political price to pay for Republicans for their embrace of MAGA. We have to ensure by doing the work they pay that price again this year, and not forget, not for one minute, how ridiculous and idiotic they’ve become. They are ding-ding, weak, not a serious political party and we cannot, not for one minute, give them power they do not have.

[twocoach]

Hopefully ten years from now we will see that the pure ignorance and absurdity of all of this led to a faster decline of the Republican Party as we know it. Nothing will change in the GOP until they bottom out and it'll be too late to recover.

In basketball terms, they are responding to making one bad play by kicking an opponent in the balls, calling the refs child rapists, dismantling the scoreboard and taking a shit at center court while flipping off everyone in the crowd. The epitome of letting one bad play turn into a series of bad plays. The GOP is late career Draymond Green/Antonio Brown.

[jfish26]

Hopefully ten years from now we will see that the pure ignorance and absurdity of all of this led to a faster decline of the Republican Party as we know it. Nothing will change in the GOP until they bottom out and it'll be too late to recover.

In basketball terms, they are responding to making one bad play by kicking an opponent in the balls, calling the refs child rapists, dismantling the scoreboard and taking a shit at center court while flipping off everyone in the crowd. The epitome of letting one bad play turn into a series of bad plays. The GOP is late career Draymond Green/Antonio Brown.

You can only live on adrenaline for so long. What we are seeing is the inevitable fracturing of an opposition coalition that has only hate, grievance and fear at its center.

[DeletedUser]

Hopefully ten years from now we will see that the pure ignorance and absurdity of all of this led to a faster decline of the Republican Party as we know it. Nothing will change in the GOP until they bottom out and it'll be too late to recover.

Then maybe we can start on dismantling the other party too?

[KUTradition]

cuz…both sides?

[DeletedUser]

cuz…both sides?

Basically.

I find it hard to imagine with as diverse of a population as we have that everyone can fit comfortably into Team R or Team D. I know I can't.

[zsn]

cuz…both sides?

Basically.

I find it hard to imagine with as diverse of a population as we have that everyone can fit comfortably into Team R or Team D. I know I can't.

Yep. Aspirin has side effects; potassium cyanide has side effects. Both sides.

[DeletedUser]

cuz…both sides?

Basically.

I find it hard to imagine with as diverse of a population as we have that everyone can fit comfortably into Team R or Team D. I know I can't.

Yep. Aspirin has side effects; potassium cyanide has side effects. Both sides.

That's what "they" say too. "They" think your team is the potassium cyanide though.

[KUTradition]

i love the overt normalizatiom

[DeletedUser]

i love the overt normalizatiom

If directed at me, it's not normalization. It's just my honest assessment of the current political environment.

None of what's going on should be normal.

The 2 team system sucks.

[MICHHAWK]

join the movement. vote 3rd party. like so many millions of your fellow Americans are going to do this nov.

tell them we don't approve.

[jfish26]

join the movement. vote 3rd party. like so many millions of your fellow Americans are going to do this nov.

tell them we don't approve.

Lead the way.

[MICHHAWK]

i always do.

[KUTradition]

i love the overt normalizatiom

If directed at me, it's not normalization. It's just my honest assessment of the current political environment.

None of what's going on should be normal.

The 2 team system sucks.

sorry, but at a time when one party is acting wholly undemocratic, trying to bothesides the situation because you don’t like the two-party system is absolutely normalizing

[Sparko]

Would that the one-team democrats could get enough of a majority to do the things some blame them for not doing.

[jfish26]

I personally think the single most likely medium-term outcome here is that the GOP will split (or dissolve) into two groups, with some meaningful portion aligning (for common-enemy purposes) with the Dems.

And then you may see, effectively, a new system emerge out of a split on the left resulting in something like:

10-30% MAGA opposition party
35-45% center-left
35-45% left-left

[Shirley]

Ranked choice voting is worth a try.

Then, get rid of the electoral college.