Republicans: continued

[L'Emmerdeur]

They're going to wreak as much as possible before they go aren't they?

Of course.

---

---

These fucking blockheads. They recognise an obvious pattern, but somehow manage to avoid drawing a reasonable conclusion. From another looney-tunes Trumpist* lawyer:

Have you noticed that no Democratic leader has suffered Covid-19 but Republicans leaders have had more than their fair share?

Or is it just me?

Or is Covid-19 partisan?

- Lin Wood · Nov 25, 2020

What is a 'fair share' among a demographic that stoutly ignores recommended precautions?

*Among other things he won a settlement for the little MAGA boy who so bravely stood up to the nasty American Indian terrorist. He's also been involved in the failed attempt to subvert the US election through the courts.

[JimC]

Après moi, le déluge...

[Brian Peacock]

Tais-toi et bois ton gin.

[Seabass]

Republicans are right: democracy is rigged. But they are the beneficiaries


The Republican establishment, despite being unfairly advantaged by the skewed composition of the electoral college, by over-representation in the House due to partisan gerrymandering and in the Senate due to equal State suffrage, has been in no hurry to reject Donald Trump’s ludicrous allegation that the American electoral system is rigged to favor Democrats. Sweating the make-or-break Georgia runoffs, the party’s leaders are apparently frightened to cross the mad king, who owns their voters, lest he cause their ratings to plummet as he is doing with Fox News. But Republican complicity with this unprecedented attack on American democracy is not a matter of short-term expediency or fear of reprisals. It is much worse than that. Mitch McConnell and the others are not merely humoring the president until his mania subsides. Trump’s voters are the Republicans’ voters and the Republican party cannot easily cut them, and their deranged conspiracy theories, loose even after 20 January.

This has important implications for how Biden should respond to the incalculable damage Trump has inflicted on the country, including how his Department of Justice approaches the restoration of the rule of law.

The Republican party is deeply committed to the outrageously tilted playing field that allows a minority of voters to choose a majority of senators and, indirectly, a majority of supreme court justices, not to mention the occasional president as in 2000 and 2016. They are an unabashedly anti-democratic party in that sense alone, even if we set aside their brazen efforts at voter suppression and voter intimidation. This is perhaps the main reason why its leaders have proved so reluctant to dissociate themselves from Trump’s specious allegation that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”. They know that the system is rigged. It is rigged to favor Republicans. And they relish not only the irony of Trump’s audacious reversal of the truth, but also the way it distracts attention from the genuinely unconscionable rigging that gives an American minority the power to impose its will on the American majority.

Republican officials are slowly distancing themselves from the embarrassingly delusional president’s refusal to accept the reality of his defeat. But the fact that it is taking them so long reflects a deep truth about the country’s politics, namely that Americans are still fighting the civil war. When Trump and his madcap surrogates cry “voter fraud”, they do not mean fraud in the technical sense of ballot stuffing or the miscounting of legal votes. What they mean is that Democrats have debased the composition of the electorate by making it easier for African Americans in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, the most reliably Democratic voters in the country, to register and vote. Trump would have been elected in a landslide, they imply, if only “real Americans”, meaning exactly who you think, had been allowed to vote.

Nixon’s famous “southern strategy”, crafted with the support of Strom Thurmond, the infamous South Carolina segregationist, suffices to remind us that Republican pandering to white fears of demographic inundation did not begin, and will not end, with Donald Trump. Key to the historical origins of Republican acquiescence in Trump’s efforts to wreck American democracy is his last-ditch and doomed gambit to convince Republican controlled state legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to replace the pro-Biden delegates to their state’s electoral college with a pro-Trump slate of electors.

Trump’s advisers evidently believe that this anti-democratic maneuver is perfectly constitutional since article II, section 1, clause 2 of the US constitution declares that “each state shall appoint” presidential electors “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct”. That clause seems straightforward enough until we recall, as Republicans are apparently loath to do, that the framers’ constitution was radically revised by the civil war amendments. In particular, section 2 of the 14th amendment of 1868 was designed to penalize any state that attempted to deny any American citizen “the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for president and vice-president of the United States”. Allowing Republican-controlled state legislatures to appoint the electors would run grievously afoul of this all-important clause. It was bitterly contested in the states of the former Confederacy for the same reason that Trump’s diehard supporters are refusing to accept his defeat. Section 2 of the 14th amendment was seen at the time, and is apparently still seen today, as a betrayal of the racial solidarity of the white majority because crafted to reshape the American electorate by enfranchising African Americans. Shamelessly echoing the South’s post-civil war howls of betrayal, Trump shows why he should forever be remembered as the second president of the Confederacy.

continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... rump-biden

[Sean Hayden]

by publicly disgracing Trump

uh, where's this guy been?

[Sean Hayden]

I can't imagine how we recover. None of these men seem capable of getting better.

[Seabass]

I would love to have five minutes alone in a room with Tucker. Just five minutes, that's all I need. There is so much that I could do with five minutes.

What the hell is wrong with him? He is the heir to a frozen dinner corporation for god's sake. He doesn't need to work. A sane, emotionally healthy person with his fortune would be sipping mai tais on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean, but no, not Tucker. No, he chooses to devote all his time and energy to doing everything in his power to make life harder for poor people and minorities. He doesn't need the money, he just does it for the fun of it. He's a fucking sadist. He's sick. Seriously. How do people who have been given so much in life end up so fucked up?

[Brian Peacock]

Perhaps he married a cold-hearted woman, or he was bullied at school, or ignored by his father, or separated from the breast too soon, or even an undiagnosed narcissistic sociopath with borderline psychopathic traits.

Or maybe he's just a cunt and a corporate shill who enjoys the satus that having opinions for money brings him.

[Scot Dutchy]

Just like Trump. Birds of a feather and all that.

[Brian Peacock]

As I used to say about my mother-in-law: it's not that she's a bad person - it's just that her personality isn't very nice.

[Scot Dutchy]

I said the same about my own mother.

[L'Emmerdeur]

In June there was some harrumphing on right wing sites about antifa paying for demonstrators. I don't remember whether it was noted here, but it probably was, in some garbled form with no usable reference or source. The source has been identified.

'Registered Republican Behind Hoax Antifa "Protesters Needed" Craigslist Ad'

Officials in Nebraska managed to track down a person responsible for creating a hoax Craigslist ad which claimed antifa were offering people money to protest in two cities in the state.

The listing went viral in June after screenshots of it were widely shared on social media even after the original advert was taken down after just a few hours.

The advert read "protesters needed" before claiming that the far-left movement were offering to pay "up to 1,000 people $25 per hour for protesters in Lincoln, NE and Omaha, NE."

"Basically we want to cause as much chaos and destruction as possible," the ad said.

"This will take place every night through the BLM protest on June 13. You will be paid nightly, and can come and go as you please.

"We want chaos to help further our agenda."

The Lincoln Journal Star reports that a 33-year-old man from Lincoln has been confirmed to have created the hoax ad following an investigation by the Lancaster County Sheriff's Office.

The man was visited by the sheriff's office and the FBI in October. The 33-year-old, a registered Republican, confirmed he never paid anyone to take part in a protest or cause disorder and that he "didn't want to cause any violence or unrest," Chief Deputy Ben Houchin said.

In lieu of being charged, the 'prankster' was apparently told that he was 'not very funny' by the authorities. Jobs done.

[pErvinalia]

I said the same about my own mother.

I shouldn't be surprised that Scot hates even his own mother. Is there anything that you don't hate, Scot?

[Tero]

I forgot if he has a cat. But with the lung thing, probably not.

[Scot Dutchy]

I forgot if he has a cat. But with the lung thing, probably not.

I would never have a cat and that has nothing to do with my illness.