OP and the link therein are very good and I have nothing to add, except a contrast with the writing of that worthless prick John F. Harris, who comforts us by saying that Trump is exactly like McCarthy who faded from the scene without being replaced by anybody like him, except Wallace, whose post '72 political success isn't worth mentioning and who, in any event, faded from the scene without being replaced by anyone like him, except Trump, and what did Trump ever accomplish? Nothing important, if being elected president isn't important.
Seriously:
Trump ... is singular in one sense only: No politician of his stripe has ever achieved the presidency.
What exactly is the niche of The Bulwark? NeverTrumpers? (Bill Kristol is on its masthead...)
2: Republicans who still want to get invited to their neighbors' houses for dinner.
If one wants to be optimistic, I think there's still a possibility that Trump damages the Republican Party. But regardless, he owns the Republican Party for the foreseeable future.
I do think the mainstream media is wising up to him in some important ways, but it might well be too late for that. He's got his own captive media now.
The Republican Party is like underwear. Once you try it one, you have to buy it, especially if you stretch out the leg holes.
Trump leaving office without tweeting the US is aware of alien visitors will probably be the best proof of their nonexistence we'll ever get.
This:
Consider: It is the Democrats--who won a large victory!--who are engaged in recriminations and the re-thinking of their electoral pitch. There has been absolutely none of this--zero--on the Republican side.
Have there been many recriminations? I went from being ecstatic but afraid to show it for fear that Trump would try to retain power by extra-constitutional means to being terrified because Trump is trying to retain power by extra-constitutional means.
Consider: It is the Democrats--who won a large victory!--who are engaged in recriminations and the re-thinking of their electoral pitch.
Is either part of this true?
Which Democrats are engaged in recriminations? About Biden and the presidential campaign specifically. I've seen people worried about other things, see below, and of course what I've personally noticed isn't all that meaningful, but as far as I can tell everyone's happy with how things went for Biden. On the other hand, the victory wasn't all that large. The popular vote went well but that never matters. The Electoral College vote was an exact flip of 2016. Down ballot, Democrats lost ground in the House and it's too early to tell but probably didn't do well enough in the Senate.
If the 2022 Congressional elections go like these did, Democrats are in trouble. I think it's fair to try to figure out some kind of approach to that.
10: Biden didn't really have coattails and Dems did not get state legislatures that would allow them to control the redistributing process. Biden showed that people wanted Trump out. It was not enough to get more Dems in. Figuring out how to turn that around is important.
I think the last sentence of the pull-quote from 8 is interesting, too:
Consider: It is the Democrats--who won a large victory!--who are engaged in recriminations and the re-thinking of their electoral pitch. There has been absolutely none of this--zero--on the Republican side. You can't ask "what went wrong" when you're not allowed to admit that you lost.
Nonsense. Plenty of them asked "what went wrong" and decided the answer was "not enough death threats to people who don't support Trump.
The only mechanism for consequence is shame or embarrassment, and that disintegrated for them long ago
Would you be liable to shaming by, say, Ted Cruz? No, right? You'd assume anything he was saying was in bad faith to advance his evil agenda (you'd be right, of course). But the thing to realize is that these people are true believers. If there was any doubt, the speech by Alito a few weeks ago, which could have been written by any dumbshit blogger at RedState, should have disabused us all.
On the McCarthy comparison, an actually smart thing written a few days ago pointed out that while McCarthy was personally sidelined (and then died), he was a martyr to the right, and his descent was spun into a narrative that fueled far-right movement building.
Well, we got shellacked here. We would have been totally dominant in any electorate we've ever had, but a huge influx of new voters going Trump all the way, and Republicans in every race just killed us. So, we got really hurt by the conflation of our brand with socialism, anarchy, caring about other people. I wouldn't say exactly that we're having recriminations, but lots of stupid people are saying that if only X, then we would have won. X is proposed socialism, or denounced socialism, or talked more about monopolistic meat packing, or talked more about jobs -- when all of it is beside the point that these new voters had a definite idea of what the other side's brand is, and they really wanted that thing.
The idea that you can get some sort of message through to people who are primarily motivated to Own the Libs, that there's some kind of pitch or offer you can make, is just beyond delusional imo.
Our outgoing AG joined the amicus filing in favor of Texas. He's probably going to run either for governor (if fundamentalist austerity visibly fails) or against Tester in 2024 -- and either race requires, at this point, a full embrace of Trumpism. My friend who emailed me urging The Democrats to call out this sedition -- lots of individuals said stuff on Twitter, but The Democrats hasn't gotten media attention-- is, imo, missing the point: it's a sine qua non for their brand because it's a plus.
My friend thinks it's The Democrats' fault that our right-leaning media isn't doing a better job carrying their message.
Per CCarp in th eother thread, it really is incredible how many "guardrails" the Texas would destroy. Just to start all the elections have been certified and it is after the Safe harbor date. Much less everything else wrong and corrupt about it. *Anything* the SC does with it is fraught. An kind of acceptance is would be judicially-mandated autogolpe. Almost certainly* not going to happen but I am guessing Alito and Thomas (at least) are wishing there were a way to make it so but not going to burn cred at this point.
I think the bigger point--and form a tweet last bight I think Mark elias agrees--looking ahead is that18 State AGs and 106 Rep members of the house (will there be a similar thing with Senators?). And the suit may be serving a function similar to purposefully wildly illogical grift emails, setting out a shibboleth for the truly deranged and corrupt.
inig it is *However, I mnno longer have that much faith in my "never going to happen" radar.
I except signalling crap and stuff all the way to January 20th. Most notably in Congress in early January. They will be creative and unexpected. It's "guardrails" all the way down.
I know I am too alarmist, but I am pretty convince the US will devolve into a much more explicit autocratic semi-democracy in the next 10 years.
And although it is hard to imagine the mechanism, I am not sure it will remain intact through the remainder of my life.
Cut and paste lossage in 18.*
Example failure of my imagination:
Living during a raging epidemic while the leader of my country is solely* focused on conspiring to overturn election results inspiring threats of violence against election and public health officials.
Meant to say above that I do wonder if any SC Justices are taking his phone calls.
*To be fair there is a fair bit of "fucking things up the incoming administration" as an insurance policy.
3 USC Section 15 will become the shiny object after the EC vote on the 14th.
It turns out that relying on institutions while at the same time populating those institutions with the biggest shitheads the middle part of a continent can produce has problems. I have no idea what's going to happen, but there's no way I'm going to be calm about the future again.
Our gov filed a brief that's a pretty good read: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163482/20201210234950524_22O155%20Bullock.pdf
23 Trump's from NYC, Alito is from Trenton NJ, Kavanaugh the DC suburbs, etc etc. There are shitheads everywhere, but people like these guys don't even have the excuse of not having been exposed to the reality they live to deny.
It is maddening not being able to blame Trump on anyplace but my hometown. Gross as he is, he's ours.
28: I think Florida has legal custody now.
If you try really hard you can say he's not from New York, he's from Queens...
So are my parents. Queens is NYC. If it was Staten Island I'd be waffling, but Queens is still home.
Have I told you the story of my friend who grew up in Manhattan when I asked what her favorite cities in the US were she said "New York, of course. Then San Francisco" then then there was a very long pause "and I guess third is Brooklyn?"
See, if you guys had followed my suggestion from like a decade ago and carved off Long Island (including Queens and Brooklyn, of course) as a separate state, you'd be able to slip out of this one.
Are Staten Islanders more into Springsteen or Billy Joel? That could determine their placement in NJ vs. LI.
Any rational redrawing of lines would have Staten Island not in the city and Hudson County NJ in the city.
Actually, you don't even have to go through the separation/admission process to call yourself a separate state for purposes of filing in the Supreme Court.
My question: are these whackos in earnest, or are they pranksters underlining the foolishness of the endeavor?
I've doubted that bars are going to sanction anyone in this whole thing, but the guy who filed on behalf of a made up state ought to get suspended.
Do not fucking dis Queens. We knew he was a POD decades ago
Right, but I still hate those giant things they park in the street. A day or two isn't bad, but some people just leave it there for weeks.
Still, better aesthetic than Trump Tower.
I checked and this New California concept is one of the funniest. Going by the map on the CNN article about it, it envisions taking on so much of California that it would be a solid blue state. (Basically leaving behind only SF, LA, Sac, Alameda, and a handful of smaller counties to make those areas contiguous.)
33: I think I remember seeing the sign "Welcome to Brooklyn, Fourth Largest City in America" ( https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-welcome-to-brooklyn-sign-41551069.html ) when we used to visit my grandmother in Brooklyn.
But maybe I'm just remembering the opening credits to "Welcome Back, Kotter".
Jesus Christ, though, the Christian crazy element of this stuff is frightening. This, eg, linked through Andrew Sullivan. And there is _so much_ of it.
At a certain point, it becomes necessary to have demonstrations large enough that nobody can think Trump won in a landslide.
I hope you feel bad for making me look at a "substack" for the first time.
47: how large would such DEMONstrations have to be? You're trying to convince people who know from God's word that Trump has won. It really is like Seventh Day Adventism. They know (and I've seen this somewhere) that Trump has won in heaven and they just need to bring the earth into harmony with that state.
Anyway, we're going to have a fantastically disastrous January and February even if Johnson surrenders this weekend, which I don't think he will do.
We saw Nicola Sturgeon on Amanpour last night, and she was pretty compelling. I can't imagine the disruption that would be involved in reversing the Act of Union, or whatever is that would have to happen.
Re: the link in 46: The mix of Founding Fathers kitsch and crazy Christian millenarianism might almost be comical, were it not so downright terrifying.
The NYT is reporting that SCOTUS has rejected the Texas lawsuit. But in their best traditions, they're calling it "an audacious lawsuit by Texas" rather than "a bullshit attempt to steal the election".
The editiorial does a bit better, though.
From nutball Twitter, it appears that the SC has dismissed this case to clear the way for the Kraken appeals.
Although there's some trouble there too: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/sidney-powell-spider-spyder-witness/2020/12/11/0cd567e6-3b2a-11eb-98c4-25dc9f4987e8_story.html
52: Since you've seen Sturgeon on TV now you can appreciate this: https://twitter.com/NicolaSturgeon/status/1322100066639925248?s=20
The thing reminds me of "When Prophecy Fails," except when a higher likelihood of terrorism.
Leaving aside the calls for treason and the following fat-shaming, I think this guy illustrates the marketing problem the shoutier type of white people have created for the rest of us.
I feel like I need to wear my Motorhead shirts to work just to avoid looking anything like that.
That fucker managed to make the vaccine approval look sketchy! By insisting on approval (which was AFAICT a foregone conclusion) by the end of the day today, he's undermining confidence in its safety. His nutjob supporters thought this was his achievement already. Whyyyyyyyy?
It could probably help the people of New York.
Anyway, Diamond and Silk are calling for a military coup.
How else can they be safe from the extreme socialism of the leftist Biden-Harris administration?
I guess I reluctantly agree that supporting the Paxton lawsuit isn't technically insurrection as it has the veneer of legal procedure, but Flynn calling for martial law definitely is. Anyone with a platform like him now talking about use of force should be prosecuted.
Sinn Féin also kept up a veneer of legal procedure. That's now not-technical insurrection works.
I don't think the queen was a member either.
It would be different if there were actual organized violence to connect them to.
I think a Facebook group sending armed assholes into a protest and one of those assholes shoots people count as "organized violence."
Rod Dreher's twitter coverage of the rally in Washington is hilarious, but also really frightening.
"You got your blasphemous death cult in my antidemocratic coup."
"You got your antidemocratic coup in my blasphemous death cult."
It's really weird that the Q-cult doesn't seem to involve, you know, the second coming of Jesus Christ as a key part.
75: I agree the emotional arc is pretty similar, but I think that market is saturated.
I think they picked an random, slightly swarthy guy, and said he was JFK, Jr.
I suppose it's not random, but it's pretty clear that "looking like JFK, Jr." was not a criteria.
It just occurred to me that to be a Republican during the next four years, you'll have to avow that (a) Trump was duly elected and is still legally the president no matter what anyone says, and (b) Trump has the right to run for a "second" term in 2024.
That doesn't seem like a specifically hard circle to square.
They would just say he was never sworn in, so he can still have his second term.
I guess that works. Not they really need it consistent, but it would have been funny for us.
Although maybe he'll insist on swearing himself in from Mar-a-Lago...
63: His name appears to have dropped out of the list.
It's just Overton marketing to make people realize that there could be a reallllly shitty cabinet. AG Cuomo, Transportation secretary Emanuel, HUD secretary Garcetti, Education secretary Rhee.
I mean, shit, I'm surprised they didn't float Richie Neal for HHS.
Although in the case of Emanuel most people think he was anonymously putting out rumors about himself.